Somehow the video game industry is the ONLY industry that is not only exempt from this practice, but seemingly encourages and rewards it with upward mobility. If your shitty social media behavior causes a game to lose sales or completely bomb, you'll just be rewarded by being hired as the lead developer at another prestigious company after the fact instead of black listed.
There's a few reasons for this. The foundation being that the games industry is young, and that means that, like every industry, it needs to spend a bit of time learning the hard way what the dumber choices are (the possibility that maybe some dumber things are universal only selectively applies to dumbfuck corporate heads). It's also, as a result of being a new industry, one that's always been among the most integrated with tech, including other social media systems.
One of the big things is that having a social media presence is a bargaining chip for hiring someone. There is way more than the job and the salary that goes into taking a job or not, after all - for some people, having the 'platform' (the ability to shape what other people are seeing and reading at a larger scale) is a significant motivator, to the point some people care more about spreading The Message than they do about getting money. and thus the theory goes that you can hire cheaper people if you let them scream into the void with a company badge on. Besides, online, it's supposedly the case that the left wing is super-dominant, and all these globalist tendencies will play well across the world, right?
...well, obviously it doesn't work out that way. Not the least of which being that if you hire people who care more about The Message than money, they will happily spike your chances to get the latter by inserting the former wherever they can, as obnoxiously as they can. The left wing is slowly getting upended and was never as dominant as it seemed to be, and even the traditional definition of that's been left so far behind that these lunatics would call anyone who doesn't walk in lockstep with them fascists. And of course, in this day and age code-switching is well and truly dead - anyone who is talking out at your company will be noticed by your audience.
Lastly, a lot of it was coming from billionaire 'philanthropists' and government funding programs who are trying to force their somehow, incredibly, even
more out of touch morality on an unwitting populace. Having your dumbasses scream out into the void is perfectly fine if they're just restating their allegiance to your lord's agenda, and they do it for free. It's a great plan... right up until the point people realise it isn't, and the philanthropists realise that the plan has in fact largely had the opposite effect to what was intended.
If this means anything-it’s that a segment of liberals and leftists on Twitter and tumblr will defend anything-anything to own the chuds. Call it woke apologetics. Or anti chud polemics, IDK. This is true for vidya, film, TV and every other medium. It completely distorts how successful any given product is-because there is an element that will always defend it simply to “own the chuds”. We see this in video games, TV series(rings of power, modern Star Trek), and films(ghostbusters, TLJ, etc…)
The good news is that this means these products will continue to fail until people take this for the hollow white noise it is, at which point it will probably become
way harder to greenlight popular twitter trends. Which should be helpful for everyone's sanity.
