"Toxic positivity" is destroying games and game companies (and the companies are still not learning from it)

What is "toxic positivity"? Well, it's one of the several things that happens when a company hires a bunch of political activists who have been brainwashed, indoctrinated and trained at American colleges and universities.

As these brainwashed drones have gotten more and more power and influence in these companies, by now often having (for some inexplicable reason) climbed the corporate ladder into positions of power within the company, they have been doing their hardest to make these companies an extension of the university campuses that they came from. To apply the same rules with an iron fist, the same conduct requirements, the same ideologies. What they were taught and lived at university, they are now enforcing in these companies.

These rules are authoritarian, extremely strict, and very numerous (most of it relates to illegal discrimination in hiring and promotions), but one of them is what has been coined by critics as "toxic positivity".

And what is that? It's a rule that you absolutely and categorically cannot hurt anybody's feelings, at any point, in any way. You cannot "trigger" anybody. Hurting someone's feelings, making them in any way have negative emotions, being upset, being disappointed, is no different from physical violence, and thus is absolutely and categorically forbidden. Everything must always be positive.

And one of the things where this applies is that you absolutely must never say "no" to anybody's ideas, opinions and suggestions. After all, if someone presents an idea or suggestion, and it's rejected, that might hurt that person's feelings and make her upset, trigger her, and she may become depressed and suffer from anxiety, and that would be no different from punching her in the face. (And yes, it's almost always a "she".)

Likewise you absolutely cannot criticize someone's work and performance. Even if someone takes two weeks to do a task that would take an experienced developer a couple of minutes, you cannot criticize it, you cannot comment negatively on it, you cannot demand better results.

It should be quite clear how this leads to extremely inefficient software development. Rather than focusing on what's relevant, important and what works, they have to deal with a flood of useless suggestions and ideas, and they have to deal with extremely inefficient developers who are absolutely incompetent at their job, while at the same time the actual competent professional developers are hindered at every turn.

That's how you get games that took 8 years and 400 million dollars to develop, even though the game itself is, without any exaggeration, something that an expert team of developers could have done in six months at one tenth of that budget. And 8 years and 400 million dollars produced a game so bad that it was shut down and all purchases refunded in less that two weeks from launch. Unsurprisingly, the development company went under.

And the same thing is happening over and over. Games are failing, game companies, small and big, are going under. Even a gigantic company like Ubisoft is not free from this. Even gigantic game developer branches backed up by billion-dollar-companies, like the Xbox team, are not free from this.

It's not a working business model. It's extremely inefficient, it's extremely expensive, and the end results are usually completely subpar and hated by the target audience. And, on top of that, quite ironically, the "toxic positivity" in these workplaces actually causes them to be stressful tyrannical hellholes where nobody is happy and everybody has to be constantly walking on eggshells. No wonder so many competent developers are leaving those sinking ships.

Yet, for some reason, these companies are still not learning the lesson. They can see the results with their own eyes, yet they still don't believe it. They still want to deflect blame.

It's just insanity.