By Nelson Schneider - 02/09/25 at 03:35 PM CT
Yahtzee Crowshaw over at the Second Wind gaming YouTube channel coined a phrase – and is now selling t-shirts bearing it – that becomes increasingly relevant, year after year. “Let’s all laugh at an Industry that never learns anything. Tee, hee, hee!”
Our most recent bout of uneducatable Industrial Gaming pontificating comes from none other than Electronic Arts – the last stable member of the former Triumvirate of Evil Gaming Companies, with Activision now part of Microsoft and Ubisoft teetering on the brink – who once won Worst Company in America two years in a row. EA CEO Andy Wilson told investors that the reason the publisher’s latest sequel in the ‘Dragon Age’ franchise flopped so unbelievably hard was entirely due to the fact that the game didn’t have any ‘shared world’ features – which is code for ‘It wasn’t a Live Service.’
Talk about sheer ignorance! Andy needs to lose his job immediately, since he is willing to ignore the obvious answers staring him right in the face in order to do apologetics for an unsustainable game design model that has already proven to be on the decline for the last few years.
EA, like so many other American corporations, does not want to address the elephant in the room that is Wokeness and its detrimental effect on everything. Do people really think that average Americans voted for Trump, every Republican they could in Congress, and every stupid Republican ballot measure because they wanted more subscriptions bleeding their wallets every month, instead of being sick and tired of having Woke talking points, Intersectional Feminism, Gender Ideology, Critical Race Theory, and Queer Theory shoved down their throats by every level of government and the private sector? Really?! (And don’t blame me, I’m way above ‘average’ and have never voted for a Republican.)
I remember seeing a segment from “The Daily Show” shortly after the 2024 election, in which resurrected host, Jon Stewart, interviewed a statistician who flat out told him that Wokeness was poisoning the well for the entire Democratic party… and Stewart pushed back with disbelief! Yes, Wokeness is the THIRD WORST THING about the Democrats, statistically, and the Left-Wing continues to refuse to cut that baggage loose.
This exact lack of self-reflection is currently burning through the biggest players in Industrial Gaming (and Hollywood, for that matter) like a wildfire, and EA’s lack of awareness is just astounding. There are exactly two things I learned about “Dragon Age: The Veilguard” post-launch: 1) It is no longer any flavor of RPG, but is now an Action game with invincible, undirectable NPC companions, and 2) That it features a long, drawn-out scene between companion NPCs that shoves Woke messaging down players’ throats about the horrors of misgendering a non-binary individual.
And those are the two reasons I removed “Veilguard” from my Steam wish list and set it to ‘ignore’ instead. It had nothing to do with the fact that “Veilguard” has no Live Service guff tacked-on. Hell, I enjoyed “Dragon Age: Inquisition” quite a bit, in spite of the noticeable slide in the quality of its RPG mechanics, and I barely touched the Live Service features. I actually would have preferred they weren’t there in the first place.
No, EA cannot blame the lack of recurring revenue for “Veilguard’s” failure. It can only blame the terrible staff at BioWare who further bastardized the franchise’s RPG roots into something unrecognizable while the writing staff filled the story with cringe-inducing, unrelatable characters and interactions aggrandizing a world-view that only an incredibly small percentage of the population shares. There is not a massive clamoring amongst the general gaming audience for Live Services, but here is a massive clamoring for games that don’t try to propagandize bizarre counter-cultural ideas that most people find to be somewhere between ‘revolting,’ ‘off-putting,’ and ‘weird.’ Indeed, the only ‘shared world’ features most people seem to want is for the people who make videogames, TV shows, and movies to live in the same reality as we do, so they can create stories with universal themes and relatable characters that can eventually become shared experiences.
