Gamers have tolerated woke content in a lot of successful games. “Last of Us 2,” “Baldur’s Gate 3” and “Hogwarts Legacy” all had very preachy, performative content in them. My contention has always been that it is not the woke content that kills the games and the studios; the woke content is just a symptom of what is going on behind the scenes, which is a change in culture, values and personnel that has been occurring at the studios that make these games. But the woke content in “Dragon Age: The Veilguard” was extraordinary. Unlike in previous BioWare games, the LGBT content was not siloed to the romance options; it was the subject matter of Taash’s quest. Previous games had gay stuff in them, but “Veilguard” was about gay stuff. It was a gay game. And the player did not have any agency in how to deal with it. You did not have the option to tell Taash that she was a woman and she needed to get over herself and focus on the mission; you had to go on her journey of adopting new pronouns and correcting everyone’s pronoun use as a supportive woke friend. This is niche subject matter that might fly in a $19.99 indie game for LGBT audiences, but the game was seeking a mainstream audience, and with a $250 million+ budget, it needed to find one to break even. Most gamers know this game not from playing it, but from YouTube clips that were circulated to mock it.

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.