Game Developer Went Woke and … Can You Guess the Rest?

Videogame developer Rocksteady Studios — maker of the acclaimed "Batman: Arkham" series — is laying off employees left and right after disappointing sales of "Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League." You'll easily guess the reason why.

The game is Woke AF, as the kids say these days.

Professional game reviewers aggregated by Metacritic overwhelmingly agreed that the game was "mixed or average" in execution, with just 12% and 11%, respectively, giving it a positive or negative review. Users, on the other hand — and you see this same discrepancy all the time with movies on Rottentomatoes — hated it. 65% gave it a thumbs down and just 25% a thumbs up.

So many complaints were about how "Suicide Squad" treats men.

Here's an excerpt from an in-depth user review:

The game's portrayal of male characters is particularly troubling. They are often depicted as weak, incompetent, or outright villainous. The female characters, on the other hand, are portrayed as strong, capable, and morally superior. This blatant misandry is not only offensive but also detracts from the overall quality of the game.

"All Sweet Baby Inc. [the studio that developed the game for Rocksteady] does is turn some characters black or colorful for no reason," wrote another user. "And by the way, the game is boring! Boring games don't get gamer's money."

Who cares if the game is boring so long as arbitrary color quotas are filled, comrade?

Another user called it "A game full of radical leftist propaganda" and complained about the "absolutely horrible gameplay and horrible story if you can even call it that. What a woke dumpster fire."

One more:

A woke mess. If you are a gamer like me you are sick of this woke agenda being pushed in all our beloved video games. Don't give these people your money. Esp sweet baby inc. They literally hate the gaming community. So don't give people money that hate you.

Game developers keep forgetting — on purpose — that their customer base consists largely of young men and boys. So does Hollywood. Gamers and action movie fans (male and female) put our money down for the heroic manly men and the heroic hot women who love them.

So gamers aren't buying, and Rocksteady just laid off almost half of their Quality Assurance staff.

But here's the thing about Rocksteady: The latest "Suicide Squad" didn't disappoint because the Quality Assurance people failed at assuring a quality game; the people who failed were the writers who injected leftist commentary into a superhero game that's supposed to be about impossibly well-built men and women in Spandex beating and shooting the crap out of one another. All the quality assurance in the world can't fix a bad premise.

I have to admit I haven't been much of a console gamer since the original Xbox 20-mumble years ago. But my teenage sons are both big PlayStation guys and have told me more than once that "the woke stuff" has crept into their PS5 console. My tastes now run to computer historical real-time strategy games.

I do my gaming in the past because developers insist on sucking all the fun out of the present.