The video game Concord has become infamous for being, quite possibly, the biggest video game failure of all time (at least as of writing this, ie. unless it somehow manages to make a successful comeback). That's because it had a budget of several hundreds of millions of dollars, took 8 years to develop, and was completely shut down (and all purchased copies redeemed) in less than two weeks from launch. Its budget and the timeline of its complete shutdown make it, by far, the biggest flop in the entire history of video games.
One would think that with a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars, and 8 years of development, that it would be some kind of absolutely massive video game. Vast open worlds, extensive intricate narrative with hundreds of hours of voice-acted dialogue and motion-captured character animations, enormous amounts of assets, awesome visuals...
Yet it's not. Or, rather wasn't. It was just a relatively small multiplayer arena shooter of the same kind as for example Overwatch and Valorant. The amount of content in the game in no way justifies such a huge budget and development time.
But what made it take a whopping eight years to develop, and have such an inflated budget?
One extremely likely reason is given, albeit indirectly, in this video by AndyPantsGaming.
The video isn't about Concord. It's about Ubisoft. It talks about the testimony of a former Ubisoft employee about how the working culture at Ubisoft has been going downhill over the last ten years because of "DEI" and diversity hires. About how over ten years ago software development in the company was very efficient and competent, allowing them to come up with great innovative games and to develop them quite fast and efficiently.
He recounts how things started to become worse and worse over the years because of the diversity hires. More and more of the developers, as well as the managers, became less and less competent at their job. He recounts one particular telling example of someone who was given two weeks to change some variable name in a bunch of files, and how she manually, and very slowly opened a file, manually went through it changing the name, and so on. Even though this is something that can be done with a simple script in just a few minutes.
(This example is quite telling in that not only was this diversity hire not competent enough to know and use such a simple script, but whoever gave her the task didn't know that either, and gave her a whopping two weeks for something that could be done in minutes.)
Well, this also explains how such a relatively simple game like Concord took a whopping eight years and hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, given that the development company behind it is notoriously and open far-leftist, advocating for "diversity and inclusion" and all that jazz.
In such companies "diversity" is religiously preferred over competency. "Diverse" developers are preferred over competent ones. "Diverse" managers are preferred over competent ones. And that's how you get both managers and developers who don't know what they are doing, and take an enormous amount of time to do simple tasks that could be done in a small fraction of the time by a competent dev.
It's actually a miracle they get anything done.
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