Special purpose keyboards can make sense (see e.g. music editing keyboards with sliders and volume knobs), but I'm with you that in this case the website totally fails at making a case for it.
What's the difference between calling it "woke agenda" or "market changes"? Seems to me you agree with the other poster, that AAA game devs now make games targeted towards different people.
"woke agenda" implies that agenda is...being woke. "Market changes" implies companies that chasing money as they designed to do. AAA publisher goal is to make as much money as possible, they achieve that by selling as many copies as possible. That is achieved by targeting wider audience. Teenage boys and man babies with brains of a teenage boy can only get you so far.
Woke in nearly all contexts in 2026 can be substituted for a racial, xenophobic, and/or homophobic slur and mean exactly the point of the person who used it. The lack of actual examples when called out makes it very obvious.
Sure, but that's just arguing over the morality of terms. On the one side you have people worried that their culture is being destroyed, on the other side you have people worried that their culture isn't represented. Both sides seem to think the other side is the devil.
Having gamed for three decades now I'd say the shift has been very real. There's a much larger fraction of games that have representation of women, mental illness, disabilities, races, etc.
Is that progress or destruction? Depends on which side you fall on.
You're saying there are no examples, does that mean you think no shift has happened? That games are still made the same way? If so, are you claiming that games always had this sort of diversity of representation? Or that games nowadays still don't have it?
It's similar to asking was the end of Jim Crow or slavery progress or the destruction of white spaces and to be sensitive to the people who wanted those to continue. I think a lot of the issues we have today are because people in both periods did not ostracize those people like Europe ostracized the Nazis.
Having a main character that isn't a straight white male is so minor in comparison. But giving that idea credence is a dangerous path backwards to those arguments of the past
My argument isn't that one side is right and the other one is wrong. I'm not asking for sensitivity towards any side either. I'm talking about there being change at all. I'm hoping for more honesty in these discussions.
So when people, who don't like this change, point out their dislike of it, the reasonable reaction would be to argue that the change is good. Not that there hasn't been any change.
If Steam were that shallow you would see competing efforts like Origin, Uplay, Epic Games Store etc take off. In reality Steam is anything but shallow, it's the cumulation of two decades of adding customer focused features. Competing efforts not only can't be bothered to invest as much into features, but they always add features with the goal of benefiting the store owning company, not the customer. That's a key difference that makes them fail.
That depends on where you live. In my country the government keeps an up-to-date db. Everything else in the country depends on and queries that db too, so it's not isolated.
My sample size is pretty small but when I've witnessed people (both PMs and engineers) "design through AI" I have seen two flavors:
- aimless AI wandering, leading to pretty, frankly, useless design docs
- using AI to "expand" upon a bullet pointed/shorthanded design doc. To which I feel like saying "the bullet points are already a good design doc!"
I understand that teams sometimes have specific formats that they have to make deliverables for, but having a nice 5 point bulletpoint list turn into 5 paragraphs... all for me to turn the 5 paragraphs back into 5 bullet points in my notes is depressing.
I do think you can get a lot of value in the mechanics, I just have had so much success leaving the thinking to me and the rote stuff to the AI. I'm going to have to think about the design eventually anyways right?
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