I dunno, seems like going from "not a single one that has embraced Social Justice and done better for it" to "well, it was a good game first so it's political content was ignorable" is changing the goal posts. My argument is that there were almost certainly sales that happened that would not have happened if it was a game about your brother because wokesters were informed about it, and because wokesters talking about it reinforced public opinion about it.
Even ignoring the (probably very few) people who bought it for solidarity or whatever but didn't play it because they don't really play video games.
Granted, there are people that decided that they absolutely wouldn't buy it in any circumstance because dangerhair recommendations but I also doubt that that demographic is the sort of people that would ever buy a game purely for a story in any situation regardless of content. So I doubt the negative effect of SJW recommendation is very great in this case.
But it's like this: if I see a random internet person who clearly embraces SJW shit like something, I will ignore their opinion (unless EXTREMELY well stated). If I see an SJW and a non-SJW agree that something is good than I will be more interested in it then if it was two non-SJW liking it because agreement across the aisle is an interesting result.
That's absolutely why *I* bought it. I am not by nature a non-action adventure player, so I would have ignored it if not for the novelness of SJWs creating a thing that normal people liked.
It really isn't, considering that Gone Home's biggest selling point
isn't OMG LESBIANS, it's the fact that it does really well as its own thing, similar to Night in the Woods (
which I did Let's Sperg through, if you're interested). There's actually a lot done well in the game, which is far more divorced from your average Social Justice/politics crap than many of its contemporaries. The Social Justice part of Gone Home isn't front-and-center, it's side dressing, not what the game is based around. It's there, but it doesn't overwhelm the entire package. Similarly, games like Subnautica (where the devs have an agenda they're willing to force into things but it's not a centerpiece) doesn't count either, for similar reasons, nor does an incident where an otherwise-decent game with some moron shoving oblique Social Justice shit in under the radar (Hi Battletech) count, and I'll be getting into that in a sec.
Even Life is Strange, a fucking centerpiece of Hipster douche faggotry, doesn't really escape this rule of logic, since the main reason people like it isn't how Social Justice the story is, it's because of the game's better moments of characterization, decent music, and how the story itself is told. It succeeds despite the fact that I'm like 90% certain it was written entirely by a procedural AI script intended to mimic hipsters. Divorce the hipster douche crap from the game and you still have, to hear the positive reviews tell it, a heartfelt, if incoherent story at its core.
The crux of the argument here, which is what I was getting at, is that fucking
none of these games are selling
because of their Social Justice component. Social Justice itself
does not sell games. It never has, and it never will, because Social Justice Warriors (A) are not a market, in that
they demonstrably do not consume media
designed to appeal to them, and (B) are demonstrably not numerous enough to justify pandering towards.
Now, admittedly,
I am the same motherfucker who played through ReGiCiDE, and numerous other games for JPATG that if you completely remove the Social Justice component from them, you get a complete void of actual content, interspersed with complete shit gameplay at best, so my viewpoint is, in all likelihood,
skewed a fair bit. That said, watering down a work in favor of appealing to a Social Justice demographic will never, ever work and will always, without exception, hurt a game's sales rather than help.
Pandering to it anyway tends to result in shit like this.
