Get Woke, Go Broke: Pro-LGBT Fantasy Game 'Dragon Age' A Complete Failure
One of the primary complaints about the intrusion of woke ideology into popular entertainment is how it often throws the audience out of their suspension of disbelief. When you are entranced by the astonishing worlds of science fiction or fantasy movies and video games, the last thing you want to be confronted with is a character preaching real world left-wing politics.
At the very least, such discussion should be had through symbolism and allegory, not literal pontificating from a woke narrator force feeding the audience lessons about diversity, equity and inclusion. Frankly, no one cares about woke nonsense, and even if they did there's better content to inject it into and better ways to go about it.
Another problem with leftist rhetoric which many consumers complain about is that it is often used as a replacement for good writing. It doesn't seem to matter to activists if a film or book or game is compelling and entertaining, it only matters that all the right minority groups and victim groups are included in the story. The audience is expected to applaud for the mere presence of DEI and overlook the mediocre content. If they don't, well, they must be "bigots".
Anyone attempting to lace political propaganda into their storytelling must also consider that what is trendy at the time they write the project might not be very popular by the time they finish it. This is especially true of AAA video games, which often take five years or more to produce. The developers of failed ultra-woke games like Concord and Dustborn probably should have taken into account the possibility that wokeness would be widely despised by gamers and the public at large by the time they finally got a final product ready to release.
This is exactly what happened with Dragon Age: Veilguard, a pro-LGBT fantasy RPG that took over a decade to make.
The AAA game is now officially considered an embarrassment for developer BioWare and publisher Electronic Arts; a month of spin by gaming journalists was not enough to save it. The production hired on LGBT activist writers for character development and the game focuses specifically on trans identity - A disastrous error when one sees the cringe inducing dialogue and plot devices scattered throughout.
Players note that the game gives them the option to not be LGBT, but playing as straight greatly limits the story options. They also point out that the game does not allow them to say or do anything "mean" to the other characters. Dragon Age is a safe space...
The game developers also proudly boasted about Veilguard being the first game to feature trans modifications to their character creator, such as "top surgery scars", along with the inclusion of gender fluid pronouns.
The addition of trans propaganda into video games is a clear attempt to target young audiences and normalize what amounts to a celebration of mental illness. In the past two years alone there have been multiple and massive game failures due almost exclusively to this kind of woke content (Get Woke, Go Broke). Dragon Age: Veilguard is no exception.
Though leftist journalists tried to run interference before the real numbers for the game were finally released, the data is in and the project is clearly imploding. On Steam, Veilguard had a peak player count of only 89,418 which was cut down to19,000 daily users in less than a month. For a AAA game this is abysmal.
To put this number in perspective, another AAA game released this year called Black Myth: Wukong (which featured zero woke content) had a peak Steam player count of over 2.4 million. Four months later the game still has a daily player count of around 80,000. Dragon Age: Veilguard cost over $250 million to produce. Black Myth: Wukong cost $43 million to produce.
The troubled title shipped 1 million copies to retail locations, but quickly garnered a massive return ratio. The game’s trade-in value plummeted down to just $22 after 12 days. Exact sales numbers have yet to be released but the game is projected to have sold around 500,000 copies - It reportedly needs to sell 4 million copies or more at top price just to break even.
There's simply no denying it any longer, woke games are a money loser.