I feel that generation of console was the beginning of the degradation of modern games, every franchises that were consolized were turned into shit since then. It was as bad as how the mobile market affected the gaming world today.
TLOU was the game which really highlighted that for me, I couldn't believe I was hyped for that shit. It played like a stiffer Uncharted with shitty stealth tacked on wrapped up in a cliche Hollywood storyline. The LGBT easter eggs and DLC were indeed just the rotten cherry on top.
I never cared too much for the woke shit because I saw it all as a marketing ploy by cynical publishers to try to make up for burning out their audiences. Whether it's sports leagues whose whole schtick is bilking cities across the country for unnecessary new arenas, game publishers who chuck in as much microtransactions and lootboxes as possible, especially aimed at children, or movie writers who are fresh out of ideas, going 'woke' is the perfect shield because it gives you a whole new army of fantards to defend you, even if they have no real interest in the medium. So you get away with ruining beloved franchises and such, every time. Look at the NBA, for example. Why are they pandering to China and going woke? It's not because they actually care about China. It's because they've burnt out their traditional audience. The average "sports fan" nowadays, especially when it comes to the NBA, doesn't give a fuck about much beyond highlight reels and online drama. Nobody watches the games much, anymore. It doesn't help that the on court product has declined tremendously since the nineties, and that the whole league is basically a glorified farm team for LA. Kyle Kuzma said it himself, "I’d rather be talked about bad in L.A. than play in Orlando and not get talked about."
"The people that get mad when I state that Utah, Milwaukee, Indiana, Orlando, and other places like that have zero chance at top free agents or will lose their “star” because that star needs to go to a real city should take what Kuzma is saying as a sign," said one commenter on an article about it. "Even a mid level player like him knows it’s not worth playing in those markets."
So, naturally, why would anyone from those markets watch your product?
The players don't give a fuck, they're just chasing endorsements and bimbos at the club. They only get into this sport because they think it's the easy life. The new changes to the game since the nineties have killed the game.
So, naturally, ratings go down, and they were long before Trump and the idea of a "culture war" came around.
So, what does the NBA do? See this untapped billion plus people market over in China.
But China doesn't come cheap. It wants them to kowtow to their values and beliefs, and if you don't? They'll make your life hell like a spoiled gold digger.
Hence what happened not that long ago with the Hong Kong controversy. Then the BLM shit came up.
The NBA's stars have shoes made by literal child slaves. Does anyone truly believe they care? Or is it really just a bunch of amoral corpos who think that they've just found a great way to hide their bullshit?
Saints Row is another, more topical example. Here's this raunchy IP full of crude jokes and gangstas running around killing people, right? Well, it turns out that Saints Row was
already going downhill before with 3. We went from SR2 (itself only made by pure luck because Volition fucked up with a cutscene in SR1) to SR3, chock full of Reddit "humor," stripped features, a bland, boring setting, characters who looked completely out of place.....and gamers
loved it? The same folks who bash the reboot loved SR3. They thought SRIV, which was literally SR3 DLC sold at retail price as if it were a full game (complete with more of the aforementioned bullshit, but now you get the most cliche addition ever in aliens and references to Jane fucking Austen, an author literally nobody playing Saints Row gives a shit about) was the bee's knees. Volition even fucked over people who paid for the Dex DLC in SR2 by having him end up the way he did in Gat Out of Hell, which itself was glorified DLC for SRIV complete with peak Reddit "humor" in a fucking musical number.
That they went woke and fucked up the reboot (which was unnecessary from the get go regardless of whether it was woke or not) is trivial when you consider the series was already dead from 3 on. Remember when 3's missions were just glorified activities with no real significance? Remember when they went from the Ronin and Sons of Samedi to a fucking emo twink and a wannabe Maero? I'm sure a pro wrestling gang would've been great....back in 1999. I knew Saints Row (reboot) would be shit because the series had already gone downhill long ago, and it'd just be more of the same. They went woke simply to avert criticism. Amoral corpos too lazy to come up with new material (they need
all the money and can't risk even losing a single cent) decide to take what was left of a great IP and turn it into a millennial pandering fuckfest (but they have to appeal to zoomers who actually play games) and, when called out, they simply hide behind "you're just a rotten chud lol" because it's the easiest trick in the book. It also helps you get past the fact you hired people with no experience with the franchise in any way to work on the game (hence the changes to Freckle Bitches, Rim Jobs, etc). Because then that's when you can get really woke. "You just don't like women in gaming lol" and the like.
Personally, I couldn't care less about the SR reboot. I knew it'd be shit as soon as it came out. For me, gaming went to shit long before "woke" was even a word. Fallout 3 stands out as the game that did it for me, because it was ahead of its time in how it hit every modern gaming stereotype such as arrogant devs who don't care about the source material, fanboys defending it at every corner, and so on. I knew then that gaming and I were done, so I moved on, only keeping tabs on it whenever I had to see what coworkers were telling me about or whatever.
They even ruined Postal, of all things. Postal! When you even fuck up
that franchise, you
know all hope is lost.