I still can't get over how nobody sees the absurdness of DEI incentives, encouraging companies to discriminate by gender and race in order to receive more money. CDPR themselves has developer roles exclusive to women...for some reason. I wonder how much they receive in funding for having that program.

Lords of the Fallen CEO came out recently to announce they're dropping their DEI programs because it was taking focus away from hiring good talent for development. Did nobody foresee this? It turns out when you put "must be X race and X gender" to apply for a job, you are no longer searching for the best talent available.

The second sentence contradicts the first one. Nice. LOL.

The only absurd thing is that people freak out over it and flood all places with pointless outrage. Muh woke this! Muh woke that! Muh DEI. Muh ESG. Muh commie! Muh comrade that! This is the insane and absurd thing about it. LOL.

The slow death of Bioware started before people whined about 'wokeness', DEI, ESG and the rest of this 4chan nonsense.

It is actually a reflection of the state of the world..... this started with the celestine prophecy and ended with growing awareness of how much abuse actually takes place every second worldwide

(don't take anything what i'm saying as truth though it might be real)

My comment was Bioware aside. I don't support systematic discrimination just because it targets a "privileged" group. Even if you're tired of people complaining about it, it IS absurd.

You're right there, nothing spells trouble for a typical publicly-traded company quite like an activist investor or a hedge fund getting involved and demanding changes that will ultimately improve profitability, but often at the expense of long-term health of said company. I've seen it in the last few years in another field that is of interest to me; railroads.

A number of years back, activist investors in some of the Class I US Railroads started demanding that they run a leaner operation to make more profits when shipping demand decined. Well, the railroads did, and what ended up happening is that when the freight market picked back up the railroads lost market share to the trucking companies, because the railroads were no longer capable of scaling their operations back up quickly to meet surges in demand. It takes a lot less time to get new truckers on the roads than it does to get more trains running, unless you have a pool of operators you can call up in a crunch. The first, or sometimes second. In the case of my Maxis example above, the best entries in their two flagship series were both the second major iterations released after EA acquired them. SimCity 4 is the best in the series, and was the second released under EA. The Sims 2 is widely regarded as the best in that series, and was also the second released under EA. The Sims has fared better than SimCity though; nothing released in the SimCity series since 4 has been anything but trash, and it has ALL been because of meddling by the EA corporate overlords, ignoring the fans and trying to make SimCity something it's not.

And I can't get over how many people deny that there are reasons DEI practices came into being in the first place. I agree that it's probably been overdone, but history - including recent history - is littered with examples of racism and sexism that DEI policies were intended to prevent. It cannot be denied by anyone who actually bothers to look at the data that there has been systemic discrimination against people of color and women.

There are so many cases where people with identical experience and qualifications applied for the same job, and it consistently went to the white male applicant instead of the woman or black man. I say this as a white male who has probably had DEI work against me at least once. But instead of DEI policies as they are now, a better reform at least in regards to hiring practices might be to find a way to remove race or gender from consideration entirely. Maybe strip all identifying information from job applications so the person making the hiring decision has no choice but to base it solely on qualifications.

I don't know what the best option is, but the system we've had for decades where white males get chosen simply because they're white males is unfair, and it's not surprising to me that the effort to fix that went too far, and went too far in too many areas of society. That's a frequent problem when we're trying to fix historical wrongs; we go too far in the other direction, causing an even worse backlash. That's what seems to be happening now with DEI, and it makes me sad that we're undoing some of the progress that has been made because certain aspects of it went too far. Just as one example, I have gay friends who are absolutely terrified that the backlash against trans people we're seeing in the US right now will be expanded to them next, undoing all the progress that has been made in the last 20 or so years.

It's a huge problem in our society, and I don't know what the right answer is. It's obvious DEI went too far too fast, but taking us back to the bad old days of the civil rights movement and discrimination against people different than ourselves doesn't seem to me to be the best answer.

This is a gaming forum. It is a highly politicized topic. It doesn't belong here. I don't care what you have read on social media about DEI or ESG. I don't care what you think about it. Trends come. Trends go. If the companies see these programs don't have the desired effect then they will stop them. If they see that these programs work they will continue having them.

This is a topic about Bioware. It is absurd that gaming topics are constantly derailed with politicized garbage from social media. EA slowly killed Bioware. People already complained about this when Dragon Age: Inquisition was released. This was long before the outrage about 'wokeness'.

There's nothing I'd disagree with here. DEI meant well, but has remained and over-extended past its purpose. Education systems still grant women specialised benefits even though they have outperformed men in education for some time now. Young women have also been out earning young men but are still prioritised in hiring in order to fulfil quotas. However, young men are still classified as privileged so there is no societal incentive to support them. That's where DEI begins to do harm.
The mods are free to come and kill the discussion if they consider it off-topic.

This shouldn't be necessary. Everyone could just leave the highly politicized garbage on X, 4chan or any other shithole.

You know what, sure. The topic was growing old, time to put it down.

Uh the horrendous responses. Playing Video Games does NOT make you an expert on business, how P.R, H.R or stuff like that happens in the video game industry. Having certain group of people take part of a sector doesn't mean random people without proper curriculum will get a job for free. It's actually good since it keeps developers from designing stereotypes and following tropes that the status quo promotes. There's several nuances to why companies would rather make their games more grounded in reality and less offensive to various publics, specially women and LATAM people since they are a growing market, but like I said there's nuances and actual studies, not thoughts and conclusions made by grown ass gamers that spend their day writing and discussing video essays about video games.

Like I said, it has nothing to do with "Woke" or whatever prejudice-enabler scapegoat excuse you want to use, there's reasons why Veilguard failed and it's mainly related to a watering-down approach, EA and other various factors.

Bowing down to naysayers is never the way. When they crawl out of the woodwork, double down and keep going. Toot toot!

You had me...

...then ya lost me. Securrty!

Difference being, GOG isn't a shithole, and except for the occasional troll, I don't see anyone here acting like a typical X or 4chan poster. Did the conversation veer a bit off-topic? Sure, and I'll take my share of responsibility for that. ;) But am I the only one who's noticed that the discussion has for the most part remained calm and respectful instead of turning into a hatefest like you'd see at those garbage sites you named? To me, even if the subject has gone a bit off the rails, it says something about our community that those who are participating in the discussion are doing so without starting a flamewar.

The problem with politicized conversations only comes when the opposing sides start to see each other as enemies and begin to treat each other that way. To me, that's the biggest problem these days, particularly in the US but certainly not exclusively so. I'm old enough to remember when having a political difference with someone DIDN'T mean you had to start flinging personal attacks until you stopped speaking to one another. It's refreshing to see thoughtful conversation in a gaming forum, since a lot of gamers are known for being, shall we say, volatile. :D

No, and I don't see anyone here claiming to be an expert. But having the ability to read and the benefit of life experience DOES make people capable of having detailed and thoughtful opinions on such topics, and I DO see that here. If you don't like the topic or the opinions on display, no one's forcing you to read them or comment on them. As botan9386 said, the mods can kill this topic if they wish.

Follow the barking... :D

It might be this time, but usually it won't end well here. This forum has a no politics rule. Older threads have been closed because of it, especially when it was off-topic.

I just wanted to commend you for this entire post, especially these bits. You seem to be able to stay calm and collected and write decent civil responses, so kudos for that. Still gotta work on my own (rare but they still occur) tendencies to worry about "sides" and reply accordingly , but I hope with time i'll make some progress Cheers!

Sorry to bump this thread after several days, but this is the first chance I've had to get to the library and get online since my last post, and I wanted to reply to this bit.

Fark, I appreciate the kind words, but the truth is I happen to be someone with a short temper, so I don't always do as well in the real world as I usually do online with remaining civil. ;)

For me, the difference is with a text conversation like this, I NEVER post without rereading what I've written all the way through at least once, and usually more than once, making tweaks as I go. This is part of the reason my posts on forums have always tended to be wordy/lengthy, I keep adding stuff as new thoughts occur to me during the rereading.. It's been that way for me since the early days of the internet when I was in high school, and I'm in my 40s now.

One consequence of doing it this way is that when a response is triggered by momentary anger or incredulity at something someone else has said, I often have time to cool off before submitting my response. I have a short temper, as I said, but it also rarely lasts very long. I can be absolutely furious at something, but when five minutes has passed I've calmed back down and looked at the situation more reasonably.

I don't fare as well in real-world arguments, face-to-face, where I don't have the time to so carefully consider my words and formulate a better response. Once you speak the words, you can't take them back, and that has bitten me on the rear more than once in my life. I'm not saying I run around getting in arguments with people all the time or anything like that, but it does happen more often face-to-face than online for me.

If you really look at most flame wars online, regardless of what forum you're on, there are almost always two common denominators: one, trolls usually get involved and amp the tension up, and two, the people who aren't initially trying to be trolls start posting too rapidly, without taking the time to think about what they're saying.

For me, staying civil online comes down almost entirely to taking the time to think about what I want to say, and life experience has taught me that if you actually want to try to convince someone to consider your point of view in a discussion, well, you won't accomplish that by pissing them off. If I'm going to use my time participating in a conversation, regardless of what the topic is, I don't want to have people dismiss me out of hand just because I decided to act like a jerk. ;)

*points upward* See? Much wordier than I intended to be, but I kept thinking of more thoughts to add during rereads. :D