I’ve been keeping up with one of the larger fronts in the culture war happening in the gaming industry revolving around a game called “Stellar Blade.” The game has been the focus of a battle between the woke left and gamers, two factions that are consistently finding themselves at odds with one another.
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The woke left, which has infiltrated both the gaming industry and gaming studios, believes the same thing every woke person in entertainment believes; that everything should be a message-carrying system and check the appropriate boxes.
As I wrote back in April, the studio “Shift Up” released a game that featured various censored outfits for its main protagonist “Eve,” a woman who was designed based on the South Korean model Shin Jae-eun. However, Western publishers and major corporate developers, infested as they are with the social justice-obsessed, have an issue with beautiful or sexy women being depicted in any form.
Despite Shift Up declaring it wouldn’t censor anything, there was a day-one patch that did just that. There was evidence that it was a rush job done for the game just before launch, which had many people suspecting that the censorship was done because of pressure from Sony, a company that has succumbed to the woke mind virus.
To be clear, the developer said that this was always the plan, but too many clues point to the opposite.
This prompted backlash from gamers who, once again, were not going to allow these pseudo-moral busybodies to infantilize them and tell them what they can and can’t see, hear, or do. A backlash against Sony began that had people unsubscribing from its online gaming subscription service, and a petition was started to convince Shift Up to put things back the way they had originally intended, and still displayed in every other country but our own.
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(READ: It’s Not About Revealing Clothes: How ‘Stellar Blade’ Became a Front in the Culture War)
Now, once again, gamers triumphed over the woke left as Shift Up has announced that they are adding the uncensored versions of the outfits back in:
Not everyone is pleased about this, including Paul Tassi of Forbes, who believes handing this win to the gamers is only going to cause gamers to think they can win other battles in the future:
The bad part of this is that the “culture war” folks here have been rewarded for their frankly ridiculous campaign lambasting this game, the developers, Sony, everyone for the original outfit changes as some sort of conspiracy which did not exist. The outfits themselves are fine (again, there are a dozen outfits at least this revealing in the game), but this being a “reward” for this group and their behavior is not a great look.
Tassi, like many of the game journalists, misses the point, and I can’t help but think he’s doing it intentionally.
The point was that a business promised something and then withdrew that promise, clearly at the behest of a small group of people who have a certain political leaning. That’s bad business and not what we paid for. Moreover, it’s not that small group’s business what others can and can’t partake in.
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The fact that journos seem angry that gamers got their way says enough about what they really care about. Both versions of the outfits are now in the game…so why do they care?
I think that in the end, they’re mad that we proved we have a voice and it works. They’re not the only influence in the room, and that bothers them.
But this is kind of how this has been for years now. The left-leaning try to take over the gaming space, and gamers push back until they eventually win.
Also, you should play “Stellar Blade,” if you can. It’s a really good game.