This might be one of the wildest entries in the “Get Woke, Go Broke” chronicles, and naturally it came from the realm of video games, the most contentious battlefield in the culture war.
Let me set the stage for you, because the background only makes this funnier.
Sony spent six to eight years developing a game called “Concord,” spending a whopping $150 million to make the game. The game was a first-person shooter (FPS) designed to be played live with other players. It was released on PC and PlayStation 5, and was marketed as the latest and greatest game of its kind in the market.
It was also overbearingly and unapologetically woke, which means that more focus went into messaging than actual gameplay. As such, the game didn’t even reach a middling amount of fun.
Here’s where it gets good.
The game was released on July 23. Only a week later, Sony announced it will cancel the live-service for the game and will be shutting down its servers. Such was the lackluster response and fan backlash against the game. While Sony did attempt at least some damage control, the game’s mediocrity and messaging was too much.
According to Geeks and Gamers, hardly anyone played it:
Sony appears to be folding and walking away from the table. Their new first-person shooter, Concord, has been a bust since its launch on July 23, reaching only 697 peak concurrent players on Steam – an even lower number than that of its beta test, suggesting many gamers didn’t come back for the actual game. Sony and their in-house studio, Firewalk Studios, got desperate enough to remove the LGBT tags from Concord’s store page on Steam, which was funny considering how big a ballyhoo was made over Concord’s diversity and inclusion. But it appears not to have helped, and this morning, Sony dropped a big bomb when they announced that they will take Concord offline on September 6, which is this Friday, exactly two weeks since its release.
It didn’t help that its developers were insufferable. Jon Weisnewski, the Lead Character Designer for Firewalk Studios is, like most radical leftists, an anti-white racist who believes white people have “privilege.” There are also no white men in the game, despite it being branded as “inclusive.”
Like most things, the only people who seemed to be fans of the game were the ones who liked its messaging. With the game now sinking below the waves, the leftists and game journalists who heaped as much praise as they could on it are fuming.
They’re coming at it from every angle, too. For instance, jobs are on the line and if you don’t buy and play this game they could be fired!
Concord community posts are funny pic.twitter.com/wdjxduwuLc
— Pirat_Nation 🔴 (@Pirat_Nation) September 1, 2024
Sony backing down is giving those hateful gamers a victory and raise their morale!
I just ABSOLUTELY hate that chuds will take this as a win and it will embolden them to be even worse. I hate it sooooo much.
— Kahlief “Positivity Peddler” Adams (@KahliefAdams) September 3, 2024
And then, of course, there’s the denial that the implementation and importance of wokeness in the game had nothing to do with its downfall.
People who say games like Concord failed because of woke, DEI or pronouns have no idea how the videogame business works, and have other issues. They need to find out why they get so angry all the time, and it’s not because of the games they play.
— Joe the human 🌈 🇵🇸 (@Joe_The_Human94) September 4, 2024
The truth is, this was always bound to fail. The repeated pattern of something going woke then swiftly going broke can’t be denied, and I’m not sure how many times corporations need to learn this lesson before they finally get it.
