Oh boy. A lot of what he's mad about, at least in gaming, is part of a the road to hell being paved with good intentions, especially in gaming. Historically gaming underpays compared to the rest of tech. Which is wild to think about since you're competing for entertainment dollars out of budgets.
Gaming was not socially acceptable for a long time. This lead to people who play games being ostracized, and then moving into the gaming industry. Here they find others who were ostracized for gaming, and it becomes an island of "misfit toys" so to speak. These people who were likely bullied or otherwise harmed for the formative years of their life don't want others to experience the things they did.
This is why "DEI" took off so heavily in games. The workforce by and large had shared experiences of being outcasts. This new mindset claims to elevate those who are marginalized. It created a galvanizing effect where the people genuinely believe they are fighting for whats right. Now they belong to a team, when they really haven't belonged to before.
This workforce is also highly likely to be online more than normal people. People can self select into their echo-chamber of choice which reinforces these beliefs. Now they can say "we are putting {representation} in {game}" and they will be cheered by the groups they've self selected into.
I cannot stress enough, these are almost all genuinely good people, who are convinced they are doing the right thing. Combine this with the way that gamers/internet people give opposing view feedback, and you can see why some dig their heels in. It's not something that's a simple solve socially as "creating an AI game studio".
This also ignores most of the economics of generating good games, especially anything that becomes an online service. There's a reason Tencent has their hands in everything.
Games will be great again because an excess of AI-generated garbage that nobody wants to play will make the middling games of today seem immaculate by comparison.
The problem isn't big studios making games, either. The problem is when moonshot products (eg. Cyberpunk 2077, Star Citizen, Duke Nukem Forever, et. al) invest heavily in marketing an experience people don't want. Conversely, a lot of the best and most-hyped releases of the past decade have been niche games with insular communities, like Half Life: Alyx, MGSV, MSFS2020 and Elden Ring. The natural appeal of a well-designed game far outweighs the lifting marketing can do making a buggy and miserable experience seem fun.
Yahtzee Croshaw commented on this a few months ago eulogizing Concord for Second Wind. The AAA moonshot game doesn't work because it's exceptionally hard to skate where the puck is going before you even see the puck move. A game like Concord (or Cyberpunk 2077, for that matter) spends so long in development hell, basically making a best guess at what the market will want out of it when it eventually releases. Then we get tonally muddled Overwatch ripoffs and cutscene-laden FPS "RPG" titles with rote randomization mechanics ripped out of Borderlands' rotting corpse. Bad games get made because they copied Elon's strategy of promising things that don't exist.
Gaming was not socially acceptable for a long time. This lead to people who play games being ostracized, and then moving into the gaming industry. Here they find others who were ostracized for gaming, and it becomes an island of "misfit toys" so to speak. These people who were likely bullied or otherwise harmed for the formative years of their life don't want others to experience the things they did.
This is why "DEI" took off so heavily in games. The workforce by and large had shared experiences of being outcasts. This new mindset claims to elevate those who are marginalized. It created a galvanizing effect where the people genuinely believe they are fighting for whats right. Now they belong to a team, when they really haven't belonged to before.
This workforce is also highly likely to be online more than normal people. People can self select into their echo-chamber of choice which reinforces these beliefs. Now they can say "we are putting {representation} in {game}" and they will be cheered by the groups they've self selected into.
I cannot stress enough, these are almost all genuinely good people, who are convinced they are doing the right thing. Combine this with the way that gamers/internet people give opposing view feedback, and you can see why some dig their heels in. It's not something that's a simple solve socially as "creating an AI game studio".
This also ignores most of the economics of generating good games, especially anything that becomes an online service. There's a reason Tencent has their hands in everything.
reply