Author of mystery novels, including DON'T EVER GET OLD, nominated for the Edgar, Anthony and Thriller awards. Winner of the Macavity award.
New York
Joined August 2010
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Daniel Friedman retweeted
THIS WOULDVE CRUSHED ME IN OBAMAS FIRST TERM. NOW IT BARELY RATES A "HAHAHA OWNED"
BioWare is not, like, a guy. BioWare closing is not like Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino getting fired or cancelled.
BioWare is a business entity that existed for 30 years. During that time people — including lead creatives who were responsible for the great games — came and went.
Some video game studios manage to maintain a culture and a sensibility around excellence and the key creatives either stick around for a long time or pass the reins to handpicked successors who share their values and preserve the culture and standards of the studios.
What has happened in the game industry over the last 15 years is that there came to be a widespread belief that the cultures that incubated excellent games were exclusionary racist, sexist, homophobic boys clubs that needed to change in order to welcome in different kinds of people.
Instead of hiring people who shared their values and sensibilities, the people at these game studios were pressured to push their workforces toward being 50% female while achieving racial equity. The staff of the studios changed dramatically, the cultures of the workplaces changed dramatically and the games changed dramatically.
The pandemic sent a lot of people into their homes to play video games, which seemed like it was going to drive an era of growth for the industry. At the same time, the new generation of gaming hardware required more detailed assets, more animation, and therefore more people to make these massive games.
So there was a huge hiring boom at the precise moment that there was an overarching focus of the demographics of the industry, which means that nearly every Western game studio’s workforce was completely transformed. Over 40% of games industry workers under the age of 25 identified as LGBT or nonbinary on recent surveys.
Additionally, some studios have had unique pressures that have driven a lot of turnover. At Rocksteady Games, for example, a lot of the people who made the Batman: Arkham trilogy were not interested in building the live service game Warner wanted, so most of the principals on those games left the studio during the production of “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.”
The studio cannot pivot back to what used to be its strength at making single player titles after that failure because all the people who are responsible for the classic games are gone. They no longer have that strength. They no longer have the institutional capacity to make great games because great games are made by great people and the great people are gone. A similar thing happened to BioWare during “Anthem.”
They couldn’t just pivot back to making great “Dragon Age” or “Mass Effect” games after the failure of “Anthem” because too many people were gone and the culture had changed. They weren’t the same studio and they weren’t a great studio anymore.
The BioWare that was shuttered today is not the studio that made “Mass Effect 2” or “Knights of the Old Republic.” That studio hasn’t existed for many years. It was just the “Dragon Age: The Veilguard” studio.
For people blaming “capitalism” for the failure of BioWare:
Do you believe a video-game studio comprised of more than 200 highly-paid employees who made a video game that cost $200 million to develop and was unsuccessful in the market would somehow keep their jobs under socialism?
Who would the money to finance BioWare be expropriated from, since the sales of the games they make have not, for the last decade, covered their salaries and expenses? Why would preserving a game studio that makes expensive and unpopular games be a priority of a socialist state?
Claiming the LGBT content in Dragon Age: Veilguard was “not part of the main quest” is a dodge that relies on people not knowing how BioWare games have typically been structured.
The way these games are organized, at least since Mass Effect 2, is that there is a central quest chain, and then each supporting cast member has their own major storyline. You can technically skip characters’ stories, but each of them is a major chunk of the game’s content, each of them contains items or upgrades you can’t get elsewhere and failing to complete them all prevents you from getting the best ending.
An entire character storyline in Veilguard was about Taash the Qunari trying to reconcile their nonbinary identity with the rigid customs and protocols of the Qunari people, and the player character has to help Taash come out to their parents and become more comfortable with nonbinary identification to progress in the quest.
This is a lot more extensive and harder to avoid than the LGBT content in previous BioWare games, which might involve one of half a dozen mutually-exclusive romance sidequests that do not affect your progression or your ending being with a same-sex character.
Dragon Age was not “by all accounts good.” It got high reviews from several major outlets specifically because of the LGBT content.
Either EA/Bioware managed to get those outlets to assign the game to LGBT reviewers or the outlets did that on their own after recognizing that the LGBT themes and content were so extensive that this was an LGBT game that should be reviewed for that audience.
For example, IGN gave the game a 9/10, but the reviewer identifies themselves as nonbinary in the review text and praises how important they feel the game’s representation was for LGBT gamers.
However, nonpolitical outlets like SkillUp were very critical of Veilguard’s game mechanics. They found the combat shallow, simplistic and repetitive, the puzzles dull and rudimentary and the story insufficiently engaging to carry such mediocre gameplay. These complaints were acknowledged by BioWare fans at the time who blamed the problems on managers and executives who had pushed BioWare to make a live service title before the development pivoted to single-player, leaving MMO-style mechanics in the gameplay.
And notably, almost nobody who acknowledged the mechanical problems or the repetitiveness of the gameplay argued that the story and the characters were strong enough to carry the underwhelming gameplay.
Streamers and YouTubers — both those on the right and those who are just kind of gamer bros — relentlessly mocked the story and many of them also complained about the gameplay, and they reach a large chunk of the audience that is crucial for a game like this to succeed with.
You can’t rewrite history and try to claim that “Veilguard” was a “Mass Effect 2” or even an “Inquisition” that was kneecapped by some chuds throwing a tantrum over wokeness. This was a mid to bad game that almost nobody except the very narrow slice of the audience that actively advocates for LGBT representation in games was pleased with.
The problem wasn’t that some people hated this game for the gay content, the problem was that almost nobody loved this game for any reason other than its gay content.
And that’s why BioWare is getting shut. If all the pieces were in place for them to make a hit game, and all they had to do was make it less gay, then management would just make them make the game less gay. The problems there ran much deeper.
A lot of leftists think it is a problem that workers who make video games that were disappointing as works of art, unsatisfying for players and failures in the marketplace are losing their jobs.
But layoffs in games are good and necessary. It cost between $200 and $300 million to make "Dragon Age: The Veilguard." A game of that scale needs to sell about 6 million full price copies to break even. "Dragon Age: The Veilguard" reached about 1.5 million players (some of whom were EA subscribers who did not pay full price for the game) before it began getting aggressively discounted.
Now the studio is shuttered and everyone is fired, and instead of funding another game from the people who spent $300 million making something that almost nobody wanted to play, maybe EA will invest those resources into making a game players will actually enjoy.
There was overinvestment in games during the pandemic, resulting in massive industry growth and that hasn't translated into a bounty of excellent products.
Instead, we have a lot of extremely large, lavishly funded studios making bad video games that nobody is buying. This is obviously not sustainable. Hence the layoffs and consolidation.
Leftists seem to think that socialism would somehow protect the jobs of workers in the games industry. But how could it? Why would it?
Who would you expropriate to keep Bioware intact after it spent ten years making "Dragon Age: The Veilguard"? How could you justify that use of those scarce resources rather than any number of other priorities?
It's like the meme about the leftists imagining they will be the resident poets and latte artists in the commune while everyone else toils in the fields.
Why should people who make bad games have steady employment making video games? What possible social benefit comes from subsidizing the production of bad video games?
This quoted post is unavailable.
The lead writer of "Dragon Age: The Veilguard," Patrick "Trick" Weekes (they/them), was laid off from Bioware after the failure of the massive RPG in 2025.
They now work at Innersloth Games where they are the writer on "Among Us Story: On Guard" a narrative adventure game set in the world of "Among Us," which will release in 2027.
Reviewing a demo of the upcoming game, Polygon described the writing as "light and hokey."
One important point that is getting lost in the critic embargo discourse: If the studio is screening the film for the public while keeping critics under embargo, that means the studio thinks the movie is hot dogshit.
If a third of women were actually being raped at Cornell, no parents would send their daughters to this place and no girls would want to go there.
Campus “rape” is a fake moral panic like the freak out over Satanic daycares, and someday it will be looked back on the same way.
Parents are paying $400K to send their daughters to a place where they have a greater than 1 in 3 chance of getting raped? nytimes.com/2026/10/20/opini…
Daniel Friedman retweeted
You need to understand how Right-wing people under 40 view the Left.
When we think of Leftists, we do not think of Barack Obama or Ezra Klein. Yes, these guys are on the Left, but younger Millennials and Zoomers on the Right do not think of Leftists in their own age bracket as polished technocrats.
These are not the sort of people that make up our Left-wing counterparts that we grew up with, went to school with, or work with.
When we think of Leftists, the first thing that pops into our head are a bunch of disgusting, depraved, spiteful mutants who want to destroy everything around them as payback for the crime of being born.
We think of Discord troons that invaded our hobbies, Reddit mods who are drunk on the most insignificant power imaginable, that one girl from high school or college who became a literal Communist, and that friend or family member who cut off all contact because we refused to treat their mental illness like a status symbol.
We think of people who, if they ever became a majority of the country and actually managed to possess political power, would inevitably kill tens of millions of people out of blind envy and petty cruelty.
Younger people on the Right come across as impatient and anxious in their mindset and mannerisms because they understand what will eventually happen when these people succeed their Gen X and Boomer predecessors in the Democratic Party.
They know what is to come if their own generational cohorts on the Left actually take power, and they feel incredibly exasperated that it seems like none of their parents or grandparents understand just how late the hour truly is.
“The Simpsons” was a beloved animated sitcom that ran for ten legendary seasons and concluded in 1999. The show was celebrated for what was widely perceived as a near perfect run that wrapped before it wore out its concept and overstayed its welcome.
Creator Matt Groening and showrunner James L. Brooks famously decided to bring the show to a conclusion after experiencing the negative audience reaction to the season 9 episode “The Principal and the Pauper,” in which it was revealed that the school’s principal was actually an impostor who had stolen the real Seymour Skinner’s identity. Brooks did not want to sully the show’s legacy by doing a bunch of weird episodes as the franchise slid into mediocrity and cultural irrelevance, so the writers and cast decided instead to go out on top and end things on a high note.
However, because of its centrality in 90s pop culture, a long-running Internet joke is to pretend “The Simpsons” is still on the air, a premise that gets more absurd and deranged with each passing year. If this show were still producing new episodes, it would be in its 38th season now, and most of the voice cast would be in their 80s.
The joke is to imagine how distorted this charming show would have become if it had been stretched out to more than 800 episodes. Comedy posters on “weird Twitter” used to try to top each other by making up terrible ideas for what modern episodes of the show might be like.
For example, a viral 2012 tweet imagined an episode where Lady Gaga helps Lisa Simpson with her self esteem. In 2019, popular shitposter Megan Amram originated the premise of Bart Simpson becoming a men’s rights activist to protest a gender-swapped reboot of “Itchy and Scratchy.”
But perhaps the most elaborate Internet “Simpsons” joke was a 2017 YouTube mockumentary “The Problem With Apu,” in which the comedian Hari Kondabolu ironically pretended to be offended by the charming and innocuous convenience store owner character Apu.
Everyone thought this was hilarious, especially since the show had been off the air for nearly two decades when the mockumentary was released. So, Twitter ran with the joke by pretending to “cancel” Apu, and the viral gag memorably resulted in the character’s voice actor, Hank Azaria, recognizing the meme by promising never to perform the character again, which everybody thought was really funny since Azaria had been retired for years.
Now, nearly a decade later, fans are pretending that the show — which has now been off the air longer than most people tweeting about it have been alive— has brought back the “cancelled” character with a new racially-appropriate voice actor.
I actually don’t think this is that funny, and I kind of think the gag of pretending “The Simpsons” is still airing new episodes has overstayed its welcome, a mistake the actual show “The Simpsons” would never have made.
If you haven’t seen this 1990s classic, which — and I cannot emphasize this enough — ended after 10 seasons in 1999, you can watch all the episodes on Disney+ (except the one with Michael Jackson that got pulled from streaming).
There are two Buddhas in this picture and zero Mohammeds because the AI that will create this image has a system prompt that prohibits it from creating images that blaspheme Islam.
Mamdani has avoided major policies that would derail his mayoralty like "police reform" so that he can focus on using public resources to campaign nonstop and very successfully on behalf of other socialist candidates who absolutely will push to implement major changes that will make everyone's lives worse.
Mamdani has discovered that socialism can succeed in New York through one simple trick: abandoning socialism theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1…
Daniel Friedman retweeted
“She is a sister. Don’t loot here, let’s go there!”
Muslim rioters in France recognize the shop owner as a fellow Muslim just before nearly destroying her store by accident.
Not a single Muslim-owned business or mosque has been looted in the riots.
This is one of the most viral moments of “Nathan For You,” because Fielder is such an enigmatic figure and this is one of the few moments where he seems to break character.
He had gone in to film the scene with the gas station owner to film his little summary monologue, and the interaction went in such a totally unexpected direction that even Fielder, whose great improvisational talent is shaping these unscripted exchanges into comedy by “Yes and”-ing people who don’t realize they’re in a sketch, was caught off guard.
Daniel Friedman retweeted
I once sold a truck to a guy who called and agreed to pay full price as long as I brought it to the airport within the hour. It was incredibly sus, but my truck had been for sale for months, and I had grown desperate. So I went. It only got weirder.
The moment I arrive he hops in the drivers seat for a test drive, and a run to the bank to get the money to buy it. He’s a freakishly large porcine fellow, adorned head to toe in dirty work clothes. He looked like Hagrid if he were an alcoholic with a the world’s most unionized construction job.
We get to chatting on the drive. Work, life, conspiratorial ramblings, Donald Trump, Pakis. The usual, if you know this type of guy.
I come to learn he needed to buy my truck to get home. He had bought a one way plane ticket to come buy a different one, but had been ghosted by the seller when he landed. He was stranded at an airport on the other side of the country with no other plan.
So I thought, “well maybe I know the guy who ghosted him. Let me see if I can help.” I asked to see his phone to read his FB Marketplace message with the seller.
He had been talking to some guy with Broken English and a vaguely middle eastern sounding name for several days now. The guy was selling an incredibly desirable truck for 30% below market. A virtually impossible deal. The vehicular equivalent of a horny singles in your area add on a porn site.
He turned to me and said “y’know, his listing says the truck is about an hour from here, maybe I should go look for him.”
I said “bro I’m looking at his profile, he has this same truck listed in every city in North America. The plate in the photos isn’t even from our state. This truck is spammed hundreds of times across marketplace.”
To which he replied, “yeah I thought that was weird. I think it’s a glitch.”
“No it’s not a glitch… you didn’t send him money did you?” I asked, fearing the answer.
“Yeah I sent him a money, otherwise he was gonna sell it to another guy.”
I winced. “how much?”
“Five thousand bucks.”
“……okay.”
“Well let’s look him up, we have his name.” He replies confidently.
“Look him up where?” I ask.
“Facebook”
“I’m looking at his Facebook. It’s not real.”
Just then we arrive at the bank, he parks my 2500HD in the handicap spot at a 45 degree angle. I say maybe we should pick a different spot, he tells me he isn’t picky.
We set up the wire transfer, he makes a disparaging remark about brown people to the teller. She frowns, she is brown. The money luckily still gets sent. And he takes off in the truck.
Hours later he calls me from the middle of nowhere. He had decided to fuck with the aftermarket tuner while driving and bricked it. He was stranded.
I don’t think all you xitter users realize just how difficult the modern world already is for an 85IQ person to navigate.
With 53% of youtube shorts views now coming from AI content, these people are about to be thrust into a completely incomprehensible dream realm forever.
Bricklayer, 49, travels 1,200 miles for dream girl - only to discover she's AI-generated trib.al/3CcGOfk
Progressive “mainstream” news outlets intentionally buried a number of major stories harmful to Democratic candidates, most saliently Joe Biden’s decline and the Hunter Biden laptop story.
It is perfectly reasonable for an outlet whose editorial leads are trying to distinguish themselves among the news monoculture to actually report out these stories and to tell the truth when other outlets will not. Abdul El-Sayed and his family have troubling links to the Muslim Brotherhood and Talarico’s disappearance from the campaign trail was odd and deserved scrutiny.
Daniel Friedman retweeted
The europoor meme can be funny, but it's also midwit and wrong.
As someone with both EU and US passports who's lived in both sets of elite poles (SF/NYC and BCN/BER/PAR), let me just give you the TLDR:
-The percent of GDP spent on welfare in the US is the about the same as the EU (smidge under).
-The effective tax rate in the coastal US is about the same as the EU (smidge under).
-Both are (former) middle-class societies where much of society feels the social contract is broken. In the US, elites abandoned the middle-class decades ago, and the well-to-do in states like CA/NY have reconciled themselves to paying almost half their paychecks and getting nothing in return, planning to insulate themselves from the suck by paying for private everything: neighborhoods, schools, medical care. If their earnings keep on rising, they're OK with it.
In France, that bourgeoisie hasn't been decimated yet, and they still expect (delusionally perhaps) basic social infra like schools to function (which is what these protests were initially about). The infra in Europe is a lot better than in the US, despite the GDP delta (New Yorkers can only dream of a subway like Madrid's). But that's clearly eroding in time, without the wage growth (or private social infra) to allow for a paid workaround.
-The free healthcare blah blah meme is fake: the public health systems in Europe have collapsed to the point it's mostly a public/private hybrid, for anyone with a solid paycheck, and fuck you if you're poor, go to the public system (which is the ER in the US). Guess what? In Europe you've got deductibles, in/out of network and all the same shit as in the US (though yes, the cost is still lower, though more or less correlated with wages).
-Boomers on both sides of the Atlantic are living in a dated lala land, but they vote to keep the system in place. In Europe it's legislation and printing money to prop up pensions; in the US, it's legislation and printing money to prop up housing prices and the stock market, which is the American 'free market' version of pensions. Rampant inflation and cost-of-living problems in both, with youth locked out of housing and living in precarity.
-Both are struggling with having been historically middle-class societies
US better positioned only because it has more economic growth (hello 80 hour weeks), and (obviously) leadership in critical fields like AI. But the foundational problems of an out-of-touch elite, incoherent immigration policy, and general social malaise that sees no meaning or purpose at the End of History is absolutely the same in both polities.
Americans who mock what's happening in Europe simultaneously believe some X mirage about what Europe is (and have never lived there), as well as don't understand what's going on in their own country. The French Revolution happened a few years after the American one, and once again, the two countries are echoes of each other, as similar countries tend to be. France is probably the most 'American' country in Europe, in all the republican senses of the word (and no the Yookay isn't in Europe).
