Cliff Bleszinski openly admits going woke can hurt games.

[M76]

In an instagram post on February 4, Cliff Bleszinski (former Epic games dev.) reminisced about why his LawBreakers Overwatch competitor failed.

Here is the original post bellow:

Ever since the studio closed I've been wracking my brain what I could have done differently. Pivot HARD when the juggernaut of Overwatch was announced. Been less nice with my design ideas and more of a dictator with them.

One big epiphany I had was that I pushed my own personal political beliefs in a world that was increasingly divided.

Instead of the story being "this game looks neat" it became "this is the game with the 'woke bro' trying to push his hackey politics on us with gender neutral bathrooms." Instead of "these characters seem fun" it was "this is the studio with the CEO who refuses to make his female characters sexier." Instead of "who am I going to choose" it became "white dude shoehorns diversity in his game and then smells his own smug farts in interviews" instead of just letting the product ... speak for itself.

It's okay to be political when your company or studio is established for great product FIRST. But we were unproven and I regret doing it. (This will be quite the doozy of a chapter in the upcoming memoir.)

All he says is true enough, but in the end in true Cliffy B. fashion, he also admits he only regrets doing it because he couldn't get away with it.
Is this the first time a significant insider admitted "get woke, go broke" is actually a thing?

Of course this confession has access media scrambling to put out articles of denial.
a few examples:
The Verge outright denies everything and calls it self deception
Or Forbes trying desperately to downplay the implications

You get the idea, links are archived (except for the instagram post) so you can click them without giving them revenue.

 

[Jim Kim]

It had nothing to do with "going woke" and everything to do with: quote from bluesnews forums

​

C'mon Clyffy, we did the postmortem two years ago. - Lawbreakers characters and environments were just kind of bland, esp compared to the competition. - Overwatch was already established, but worse timing is that the BR genre was just catching fire, and this wasn't that. - Didn't really bring anything new to the genre. - High skill level meant not newb friendly. Even adding bots so people could practice offline and get used to the characters and weapons, or even just comp-stomp would have helped. Seriously, the original UT had female and ethnic characters. Being "too woke" had absolutely nothing to do with this game's failure. Try again.

 

[Darunion]

hmm interesting. I personally never even heard of this game until now

 

[dgz]

English is not my native tongue. How does one reminisce their own failure... unless they're awesome. Never trusted this guy. Also, he tried to fuck us and said some serious bs back in... 2006 I think. About the time they released Gears of War.

Not to mention Quake plays better than UT

 

[M76]

It had nothing to do with "going woke" and everything to do with: quote from bluesnews forums

Of course LawBreakers didn't specifically fail because of being woke (I doubt it was even a factor). You're missing the bigger picture: Watching the media scrambling to put out the fires this created sounds loads of fun.

 

[absolute_yed]

if i were a CEO i would only see cliff as a liability. he did unreal tournament(for which i am eternally grateful, always), he did gears, but hes not anywhere near the golden hen to match his personality. without actually commenting on any specific politics, sad to say hes the quintessential cringey try-hard leftist white guy begging for a crumb of tail.

 

[Bigbacon]

wtf does "woke" even mean?

 

[Derangel]

The game was never "woke". The messaging around it and Cliffy was never "woke". Cliffy just refuses to admit fault and would rather pass the buck elsewhere, like he always does. He wants to blame other people for being "too divided" or whatever instead of admitting he fucked up with his game. Cliffy being "woke" (which he never was) had nothing to do with Lawbreakers failure, especially next to freaking Overwatch.

 

[Kardonxt]

This is nothing new for Cliffy B. He can never admit his games fail for being bad, he always has an excuse.

At least he didn't directly blame PC gamers this time.

The more this guy fails the more it becomes apparent that UT and Gears did well because of the team behind him and probably actually had very little to do with him running the project.

 

[T4rd]

wtf does "woke" even mean?

Basically forcing "diversity" by adding whatever minority races you can think of and/or generally unattractive LGBTblahblahletters characters at the expense of any real character development because obviously one's race and sexual orientation is more interesting and important to their character than any personality traits or personal values that person has and is also the sole characteristic that defines them as a person.

But as others have already alluded to, this had virtually nothing to do with the games failure.

 

[SamuelL421]

Lawbreakers failed because of poor marketing, a terrible / confusing title, and not having enough of a "hook" to differentiate it from competing FPS.

I honestly thought the game was some sort of futuristic cops and robbers FPS based on the only ad I remember seeing when it was released. I didn't learn until after they announced the server shutdown that the game was actually a sort of low gravity arena shooter.

 

[Aix.]

Releasing a game around the same time that Blizzard released a game in the same genre was pretty much a death sentence. I honestly didn't even really see much on it other than the fact that everyone basically said RIP due to Overwatch. To me it fell into the bin with games like Brink and Section 8 pretty much immediately. Certainly no one was talking about "woke" shit at that time, but I guess if you have nothing to do you can always start a blog and try rewriting your own history.

 

[jiminator]

Same old BS into a saturated market dominated by giants. Why play some new game you have to buy and figure out and hope others join when you can just play more overwatch and not worry about it.
nothing about this game made it different or standout worthy.
It sucked in every way possible and rather than acknowledge that he wants to complain about the "wokeness" in the game.
I mean like what youtubers ripped the game because of "wokeness" ?

 

[Darunion]

Releasing a game around the same time that Blizzard released a game in the same genre was pretty much a death sentence. I honestly didn't even really see much on it other than the fact that everyone basically said RIP due to Overwatch. To me it fell into the bin with games like Brink and Section 8 pretty much immediately. Certainly no one was talking about "woke" shit at that time, but I guess if you have nothing to do you can always start a blog and try rewriting your own history.

I started playing battleborn at the time too, when overwatch launched, the available matches dropped drastically. Games were dissimilar IMO but close enough to cause one to beat out the other I think.

 

[Dan_D]

This is basically Cliffy B making excuses for why he failed yet again. He's never understood the market or what makes a game good or makes a game successful. UT and Gears of War succeeded in spite of him and not because of him. This is something he'll never admit. He's just trying to stay relevant in some fashion by identifying with woke politics. The truth is, as others pointed out, that Lawbreakers sucked because it was a shitty game. It had nothing to do with political correctness or being woke. In fact, I never heard those words being used to describe the game at all.

 

[Aix.]

I started playing battleborn at the time too, when overwatch launched, the available matches dropped drastically. Games were dissimilar IMO but close enough to cause one to beat out the other I think.

I knew there was another direct competitor at the time but couldn't think of it! The group I played with at the time primarily played TF2 but was basically looking for the next big thing for our community to play. OW didn't really hit the mark for that, but it pretty much crushed all opposition trying to release around the same time.

 

[viivo]

All aboard this thread. Destination: some very dark places.

 

[Comixbooks]

3-D Graphics wrecked everything instead having sprawling hand drawn sprites you have this floaty thing to work around a few games have defeated floaty 3D graphics.
It's just the same game mechanics repeating each other.

 

[DoubleTap]

Lawbreakers literally could not even run at 2560x1440 - the activation points in all the interface and menu items became broken and didn't match what the cursor was on.

It deserved to fail.

 

[sfsuphysics]

In an instagram post on February 4, Cliff Bleszinski (former Epic games dev.) reminisced about why his LawBreakers Overwatch competitor failed.

Here is the original post bellow:

All he says is true enough, but in the end in true Cliffy B. fashion, he also admits he only regrets doing it because he couldn't get away with it.
Is this the first time a significant insider admitted "get woke, go broke" is actually a thing?

Of course this confession has access media scrambling to put out articles of denial.
a few examples:
The Verge outright denies everything and calls it self deception
Or Forbes trying desperately to downplay the implications

You get the idea, links are archived (except for the instagram post) so you can click them without giving them revenue.

I'm not quite certain I'd label this as media "scrambling" to put out articles of denial, I mean it's a lot like academia "publish or perish" and Cliff simply gave the catalyst for articles the be published, and quite honestly no "rushing" was necessary to write said articles, I mean hell this thread alone pretty much is enough to write an article on the subject and it took all of a few hours, knowing the game existed, and knowing when exactly it came out which isn't a huge state secret.

If anything I applaud media for slapping this guy down a few notches, he wanted to insert his views (I guess?) into the game as a whole, and since no one bought it to figure out what they were, one last desperate attempt to get his views out by saying the reason his game probably didn't do well was because of "his views" and now I'll list some of the choices I made... meh, overly sensationalistic at the least

 

[HockeyJon]

At least he didn't directly blame PC gamers this time.

Actually, he kind of did, by putting the onus for the failure of the game on gamers not playing the game because they didn’t like his politics, instead of acknowledging the correct reason, which was that they thought his game sucked and were playing those made by his competitors instead. Cliff has his head so far up his own ass, he’s probably making Kanye blush.

 

[Flogger23m]

wtf does "woke" even mean?

Broken English for saying "are you okay?" More specifically, asking if someone is unconscious or dead after a beating or fight. Example, after a man is beaten to a pulp someone in the group may shout out "He woke?"

I suppose these is some social justice warrior definition attached to it now.

 

[JAB Creations]

All forms of fascism (especially when they try to insult and masquerade as liberals/liberalism (Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were true liberals for those who are really really confused)) are unnatural and evil. Confusing people to take advantage of them to ultimately enslave people is and never will be ethical. Any attempt to promote such bull should result in much harsher consequences then losing money. Good people should be protected against aggressive thieves, especially those who want to enslave others.

 

[Lakados]

Going woke didn’t hurt shit, releasing a glitchy, less fun version of Overwatch, with near to no marketing did.

 

[Chimpee]

All forms of fascism (especially when they try to insult and masquerade as liberals/liberalism (Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were true liberals for those who are really really confused)) are unnatural and evil. Confusing people to take advantage of them to ultimately enslave people is and never will be ethical. Any attempt to promote such bull should result in much harsher consequences then losing money. Good people should be protected against aggressive thieves, especially those who want to enslave others.

What? Talk about going off tangent.

 

[Burticus]

Alert the media.... Cliffy B says stupid shit.... film at 11. The dude is a douche-bro who's name is affiliated with a couple of decent games. How much did he actually code?

Anyway, no one cares about him or whatever he is shilling nowadays so he has to stir the pot to get attention. Next up will be some leaked pics of his balls.

Do not feed the troll! Move along.

 

[Delicieuxz]

John Romero, Cliffy B, and George Broussard should make a game together: Daikatana Breakers Forever. Their slogan can be, "Our games, your ass, what's the difference?"


Honestly, though, I'd love to see what they'd come up with if they made a game together.

 

[Flogger23m]

John Romero, Cliffy B, and George Broussard should make a game together: Daikatana Breakers Forever. Their slogan can be, "Our games, your ass, what's the difference?"


Honestly, though, I'd love to see what they'd come up with if they made a game together.

These is making good games before they became so overly monetized, and then there is making old games. With all the bad, underdeveloped features of the 90s. That is probably what you'd get from Romero at least.

Gaming was best in the early 2000s. Around 2010 things started to change and by 2014-2015 the industry had changed forever. Some good games still do come out though.

 

[pillagenburn]

I have no idea what the big deal is. I thoroughly enjoy superimposing strong cyborg females over my entire recollection of history of World War 2.

 

[Flogger23m]

I have no idea what the big deal is. I thoroughly enjoy superimposing strong cyborg females over my entire recollection of history of World War 2.

You're on the right side of history.

 

[Rizen]

I don't remember any sort of political or "woke culture" outrage over this game at all.

CliffyB has said some dumb shit over the years and has a lot of detractors for that, sure, but a high-skill arena shooter isn't really what the market wants anymore. He's a creative guy with bad business sense, news at 11.

 

[RanceJustice]

I'm both very left leaning and object to "woke-scolding/political correctness" including regarding gaming. I really don't think the failure of Lawbreakers had anything to do with this. First and foremost, it was an also-ran to Overwatch - that alone put it down a few pegs. There were also a ton of delays, mechanical gameplay issues, and the fact they partnered with the disgusting fetid corpse that is Nexon , sank the game. The game didn't even make a big enough dent to justify a "woke" backlash, really!! There weren't tons of people panning the otherwise successful title at/near launch even within the "RAWR IT HAS A WOMAN IN IT SJW SJW SJW" demographic ; the game got very little press and social media presence in the scheme of things.

The cynical part of my mind says that CliffyB is using this excuse for PR reasons. He knows that "admitting the game was woke" will drum up controversy. Certain people and publications that would never give it a second look as a knockoff Overwatch will now engage with talking about the game and CliffyB himself, on both sides of the issue. I don't know if he's pitching another project soon, but if he is t that pretty much confirms the PR angle as he can get a lot of both positive and negative articles about his old game, glaze over the actual objections to the title and claim its failures were on "wokeness" (and look! All these journalists, streamers, and others are discussing it so it must be so!), and then claim the NEXT game won't make the same mistakes (or perhaps will be "anti-woke" , for a little extra oomph) and benefit from a lot of interest just for that reason.

 

[M76]

The cynical part of my mind says that CliffyB is using this excuse for PR reasons. He knows that "admitting the game was woke" will drum up controversy. Certain people and publications that would never give it a second look as a knockoff Overwatch will now engage with talking about the game and CliffyB himself, on both sides of the issue. I don't know if he's pitching another project soon, but if he is t that pretty much confirms the PR angle as he can get a lot of both positive and negative articles about his old game, glaze over the actual objections to the title and claim its failures were on "wokeness" (and look! All these journalists, streamers, and others are discussing it so it must be so!), and then claim the NEXT game won't make the same mistakes (or perhaps will be "anti-woke" , for a little extra oomph) and benefit from a lot of interest just for that reason.

As much as being woke can't sell a game, being anti-woke can't sell it either. First and foremost you need a good game. It might drum up buzz, but then it all fades away and nobody actually buys the game if it is not that great.

 

[WBurchnall]

wtf does "woke" even mean?

Woke, more or less, means you've adopted the set of beliefs generally incorporated under the umbrella of intersectional feminism. This includes some core tenants like everyone experiences oppression for different facets of their group-dynamics/class structures and one can experience multiple oppression at the same time. Thus a black person might be more oppressed than a white person and a black disabled person is doubly oppressed. So they'll say the later has white-privilege and able-privilege and a host of other privileges(thin, tall, hair, etc). People "not woke" will ponder whether an extremely rich, person occupying the most powerful government position of the most powerful nation on earth, aka Obama, a few years ago, was really "more oppressed" than say a white kid, growing up in a trailer park, with his teeth rotting from drinking too much mountain dew. Intersectional feminism would suggest yes, Obama was more oppressed due to the classes he belonged too and thus experienced more oppression growing up going to Harvard.

The next tenant is everyone's lived experience is important and that the more oppressed you are, the less power you have and opportunity to speak your voice, therefore the more important it is you get the opportunity to be heard to express your...concerns or grievances. Thus, you get the progressive stack. The more layers of oppression, the sooner you should have a chance to talk in any dialogue. So the black disabled woman speaks first, then the black woman, than last the white straight cis-gendered male. This includes even goes as far as if it is a medical conference, only the white straight cis-gendered male as a medical degree and he's the guest speaking/guest of honor.

You can see examples of Bernie Sanders paying for his own stage, hosting his own event and giving up his stage and microphone to two loud angry African American woman promising to let them speak and allowing them to interrupt his campaign rally. Effectively, getting bullied off the stage willingly for the sake of being progressive and showing how "woke" he is. The degree of wokeness refers to one's "true belief" in intersection feminism. The more one believes and acts it out, the more "woke" one is to being able to see that "everything is racist, everything is sexist, everything is homophobic, ... and you have to point it all out" - Sarkessian.

The final tenant is that equality as an end goal justifies the means. So, as an example, if we need 50% of cabinet ministers to be female to have a 50/50 gender ratio, it is acceptable to selectively discriminate against potentially more qualified applicants and deny them a fair chance at a given position, based upon them having the wrong sex. So you'll see very "woke" organizations like the BBC having job postings which literately state "Non-persons of color need not apply". Effectively reversing the racist attitude of "no blacks allowed"; however, this is not seem as racism because part of this tenant is to define racism as "privilege + power" and the male or white person being denied the opportunity to apply, based off their skin color or gender, is assumed to have "power" and "privilege". The opponents to this belief would bring up the trailer park example and ask if the white kid growing up in a trailer park really had "privilege" and should be denied the right to apply because of his "power" (or if he has any growing up poor).

 

[limitedaccess]

If anything Overwatch is more "woke."

Lawbreakers from what I remembered had a very late 90s/early 2000s design in terms of fluff and aesthetics. Other issues aside it just didn't seem like it appealed to either people preferring more contemporary game design nor older game design in terms of fluff/aesthetics.

I knew there was another direct competitor at the time but couldn't think of it! The group I played with at the time primarily played TF2 but was basically looking for the next big thing for our community to play. OW didn't really hit the mark for that, but it pretty much crushed all opposition trying to release around the same time.

There was actually another game from Bethesda (publisher, not the developer) scheduled to come out in that time frame as well called Battlecry (yes very similar name). It however ended up unceremoniously cancelled, they saw the writing on the wall.

 

[M76]

wtf does "woke" even mean?

It is the world view where individuals are not judged based on their individuality but their inherent group identity (race, class, gender etc) it's basically racism on steroids extended to all traits.

Feigning fake ignorance about the phenomenon is very popular these days, but I've decided to assume everyone is genuine in this question, which is possible if they were completely outside the loop for years.

 

[5150Joker]

In an instagram post on February 4, Cliff Bleszinski (former Epic games dev.) reminisced about why his LawBreakers Overwatch competitor failed.

Here is the original post bellow:

All he says is true enough, but in the end in true Cliffy B. fashion, he also admits he only regrets doing it because he couldn't get away with it.
Is this the first time a significant insider admitted "get woke, go broke" is actually a thing?

Of course this confession has access media scrambling to put out articles of denial.
a few examples:
The Verge outright denies everything and calls it self deception
Or Forbes trying desperately to downplay the implications

You get the idea, links are archived (except for the instagram post) so you can click them without giving them revenue.

He'll use any excuse he can rather than to admit he just created a game that was overshadowed by it's competitors and that's why it failed. Look at Apex Legends, it's very "woke" with an openly gay Native (Gibraltar), gender neutral (Bloodhound) and metrosexual (Mirage) characters yet everyone accepts it just fine and it's very popular. Nobody is complaining about it being woke and the developers have gone on record saying they are proud of doing this and plan to continue with it. Cliffy's game failed because it wasn't very good, woke had nothing to do with it.

P.S. I'm actually surprised more right wing white dudes aren't hating on Apex. They brought in a straight white male as a teaser for S4 (Forge) and then promptly killed him off..lmao. I guess most people just don't care these days except for the fringe who see white males as "under attack" from the "woke" crowd.

 

[M76]

P.S. I'm actually surprised more right wing white dudes aren't hating on Apex. They brought in a straight white male as a teaser for S4 (Forge) and then promptly killed him off..lmao. I guess most people just don't care these days except for the fringe who see white males as "under attack" from the "woke" crowd.

Is there anyone who plays apex legends for the story? I doubt that.

 

[5150Joker]

Is there anyone who plays apex legends for the story? I doubt that.

You must not have visited the Apex subreddit.

 

[M76]

You must not have visited the Apex subreddit.

Sorry, I should never underestimate the levels of cringe people can attain.

it's very "woke" with an openly gay Native (Gibraltar), gender neutral (Bloodhound) and metrosexual (Mirage) characters yet everyone accepts it just fine and it's very popular.

Sigh. You still don't get it. Woke doesn't mean having other characters than white straight males.
It's having characters whose only characteristic is that they are not straight white males.
No white male in a game was ever defined by that trait alone. It's not a virtue.
You still need to write an actual character for them. But for some reason woke writers seem to stop after "he's gay" like that's all they need to have a good character.
That's what we call a token gay character, and that is what pisses people off.
And if we happen to hate the character with no actual character that is when the accusations start flying "you only hate it because you're a homophobe" etc.
Like nobody ever hated a straight character, for any other reason than being straight. It sounds ridiculous when reversed, right?
That's exactly how ridiculous it sounds to me when someone accuses me or millions of other gamers of hating a character for being gay.

I'm not upset by gay characters in games, I'm upset by people preaching about them, and using them as a scapegoat for me hating the game. Much like CliffyB is using wokeness as a scapegooat for his game's failure.