Best Of

Yeah, I certainly agree about the borderline spammy nature of these posts. That said, just going through one of them made me discover how far some studios are down the rabbit hole of "current thing" activism as seen in the Veilguard scene. The fact that a studio head or game director didn't have the will to get rid of it (perhaps by fear of being called a "-ist" or a "-phobe" ?) indirectly shows how toxic things can get in creative places. I have no idea if the rest of the game is good, but I don't think it's a stretch to assume that scenes like this can lead to people straight up not buying the game.

The walk cycle of the character is awful too (even though it probably relies on some layered animation/rigging tech negatively affecting a solid base animation) ; and even though the highres sculpts and the final ingame models for these characters probably looked good in art meetings screenshots, the end product just doesn't work. The whole thing looks like a parody despite all the skill that went into it.

Now looping back to the topic of studios closures, shrinkages and layoffs : I am 100% convinced that the absurd visual fidelity (in terms of amount of detail) that many studios are chasing is partly to blame. Even a run-of-the-mill attempt at emulating the Fortnite look takes an absurd amount of time and ressources per character, with something as simple as a character skin that used to take a few days in the 2000s/2010s now taking north of a month of studio man-hours and even requiring some outsourcing. This is simply not sustainable.

But, weren't a string of previous disparate threads he derailed with his views of industry diversity....proof enough?  

I honestly don't think these flags are warranted. Sure, @NikhilR has a fixation on these topics, and assumptions being made on what a studio head or a company CEO should care about are weak at best and borderline nonsense ; but there is absolutely something to be said about activists pushing political topics through all available channels, even in our industry. At least it leads to some funny moments, like when the (american) person doing PR video chats with game devs for Epic has "pRoNoUnS" in her name card ... yet none of the (european) developpers being interviewed do. Or companies Alphabet-baiting every time that can, even though this trend is clearly over now and racist and sexist DEI hiring practices are getting cancelled everywhere. Did this weird state of affairs during the last 5 to 10 years cause layoffs and studio closures ? Probably not, but it is indeed a sign of an unhealthy industry lacking direction and focus.