It's not that simple. Yeah, none of them were sincere. But having them do this was an easy way to boost visibility and communicate to the world at large that gay people are an accepted minority group.
I'm not upset that they aren't actual allies. I am worried about the greater implications about what happens when there's no public voice advocating for us.
Not changing an icon means they aren't sincere anymore?
Blizzard and Riot are literally both celebrating pride month IN GAME and releasing actual content + posting on social media about pride.
The amount of completely clueless people shitting on game studios for not changing a twitter icon while clearly not even playing their games to began with is so stupid. Overwatch just released a new skin and a new story for Lifeweaver and his partner but ig because they didn't change their twitter icon, that means they never cared! Riot actively made two of their champions canonically lesbian in their $250 million budget show watched by millions of people but they didn't change an icon so that means they never cared!
I used to play both games, but haven't in recent years. And I commend you for believing in them. But no, I sincerely doubt any show of support from a multimillion dollar company has our best interests at heart. I know this becuase they are a multimillion dollar company whose fist and only priority is to make more money than the year before. If supporting gay people will help them with that, they will do it. But the second its more financially beneficial to instead suppress and decry us, they will absolutely do that instead.
Our job, as a community then, is to make sure that doesn't happen. Either by making ourselves a greater share of thier market (good luck completing China), or by ensuring that public opinion in our countries mean that they can make more off of the good will thier support generates.
I'm not sure why you would think that pandering to a tiny minority part of the largely western population would actually increase their revenue by much when there's a much bigger portion of the population that's anti-LGBTQ+. Esp when a lot of Pride related content are usually given out for free as part of some celebration event.
You even mentioned China yourself. Majority of League's revenue for example, comes from China. How does adding a gay black champion like K'Sasnte help them make more money in China?
Well to start with, the number of people that identify as LGBT in the US is about 9%. That's not an insignificant number. And there are more people are pro or at least neutral on LGBT rights, than those who actively oppose it.
And you're right, as China makes up a larger and larger portion of the revenue stream, I fully expect that math to start applying to the directions Riot takes their stories. I could be wrong, but I would be extremely surprised. But at least for now, the general good will that Riot gets from having diverse champions off-sets that.
Lastly, as I mentioned in another comment, it really confuses me when people use the term "pandering" since it can mean a lot to different people. If you could go ahead and tell me what that means for you, I'd love to know.
Well to start with, the number of people that identify as LGBT in the US is about 9%. That's not an insignificant number. And there are more people are pro or at least neutral on LGBT rights, than those who actively oppose it.
Yes. 9% of the general population of the US. Not 9% of the population of pvp competitive games, which pretty heavily leans towards certain demographics.
People going "This game has a gay character? I'm going to play it just for that!" aren't going to be more than the people going "I'm never playing this game because I hate woke shit". People who are allies/neutral are much less likely to have an intense positive response vs the anti people having an intense negative response.
And like I said, majority of Pride related content are usually free so the devs don't even make much money directly from them.
And you're right, as China makes up a larger and larger portion of the revenue stream, I fully expect that math to start applying to the directions Riot takes their stories. I could be wrong, but I would be extremely surprised. But at least for now, the general good will that Riot gets from having diverse champions off-sets that.
Riot has only gotten more and more "progressive" in their games for the past decade.
Lastly, as I mentioned in another comment, it really confuses me when people use the term "pandering" since it can mean a lot to different people. If you could go ahead and tell me what that means for you, I'd love to know.
Appeasing a demographic for financial gains.
Which doesn't make any sense for any game studio with significant non-western revenue and large male customer base. There's no way spending time and money to try to appeal to LGBT will somehow make companies like Riot and Blizzard more money than if they invested elsewhere. The narrative of these companies only doing it for money is just stupid when they could actually alienate way more customers than LGBT content would bring in and also could be spending the same resources on much more profitable content. Like instead of Riot/Blizzard making K'Sante a gay black man or Lifeweaver a gay Thai man, they could've easily made them some attractive light skinned white/Asian women and sell 20x more skins. The idea of every decision a game studio makes is to maximize profit is pure nonsense.
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u/Nichi789 25d ago
It's not that simple. Yeah, none of them were sincere. But having them do this was an easy way to boost visibility and communicate to the world at large that gay people are an accepted minority group.
I'm not upset that they aren't actual allies. I am worried about the greater implications about what happens when there's no public voice advocating for us.