Jim Sterling (The Jimquisition)

They mentioned it on twitter

Blizzard is a fucking farce I swear.

Its a never ending rabbit hole with them

Maybe Steph'll rank themselves on that scale for a laugh or to show how woefully inept and tone-deaf Blizzard are willingly being with this.

Now I dearly hope they do that, it'll be great

What happened?

Blizzard released a blog post talking about a tool they have internally to rate how diverse their characters are by giving numerical values to some traits (Race, Culture, Physical Ability, Cognitive Ability, Gender Identity, Sexual Orientation, Body type, etc...). This was meant as a "Look how progressive we are putting effort into making sure our characters are diverse" but this rapid became a laughing stock full of unfortunate implications.

The first and most obvious is that it implies Blizzard's own employees don't have eyes but instead need what reads like a fucked up character sheet to design characters.

Then there's the fact that Blizzard itself suffers from diversity issues in its hiring practice and Blizzard turning around going "See we don't need to involve people of diverse background in the creation of our stuff, we have a tool to numerically score how diverse our characters are!"

Then there's the various... questions the tool itself raises. How do you rate ability? According to the tool being Egyptian is a 7 on culture, so rating culture is a bit of a wince-inducing thing. How do the hamster, the robots, and the gorilla rate on the diversity tool?

As people began to mock the tool Blizzard edited to assure everyone that the tool they were so hype to present isn't actually being used to develop any games guys despite them saying it's been around since 2016 and the blog itself cites its use in overwatch 2. They also pulled the screenshots from the blog.

Kotaku does a good job tearing into it

Fanbyte too

—- What's really funny is the tools best use is probably letting you see how across the entire cast what kind of representation do you have. The blog however doesn't talk about that and instead chooses to present this in the dumbest way possible when they could've just explain the actual intended use in 2 sentences.

Edited by Ghilz on May 14th 2022 at 9:52:01 AM

Also I'm pretty sure they have Cole Cassidy's old name on that thing too.

App was made in 2016 so that makes sense.

It'd be stupid to expect Blizzard to have internally gone and removed all references to his old name. From a code standpoint that'd be dumb.

Like I'd bet hard cash if you decompile Overwatch's code it still internally calls him McCree most places and it'd probably be unreasonable to expect it not to.

Edited by Ghilz on May 14th 2022 at 12:37:42 PM

The news of it came out just as news hit that Acti-blizz had fired 12 people and threatened a bunch of others in attempted Union busting.

With the way coding works... they wouldn't change his name completely internally. Its not really feasible coding wise. Many internal names for characters in games are code names that dont actually match the name later came up with but never change.

Edited by Memers on May 14th 2022 at 3:31:03 AM

Just gonna peek here because Konami had an earnings report and see if there's the usual misconception

Yeah, Konami's issue is the opposite problem. We wish they'd sell off some of their IP's so someone else can make something with them that isn't a pachislot game.

That's also a meme. Konami had no more different pachinko-loaned IPs compared to other companies. Also their gaming division is currently their most profitable, with gambling only third. Second is arcade-amusement.

Pachislot is arcade gaming. It is in fact a loophole to deal with the fact that actual gambling is illegal in Japan.

No Konami lists the two separately on their earnings report. "Amusement" is the Arcade business while "Gaming & Systems" is the gambling and casino stuff ("Digital Entertainment" is the videogames). They indeed make about 10 times more revenue from Videogames then they do from gambling (215 billion yen to 25 billion yen)

Edited by Ghilz on May 15th 2022 at 10:25:58 AM

Yeah, you can't even "loophole" it in reports. Gamers are just sour about it due to Kojima being axed.

Edited by Ookamikun on May 16th 2022 at 1:24:49 AM

Well there ARE asterisks coz the Videogame division also includes physical card games. Plus by their own words the majority of their earnings is from the mobile market and Yu Gi Oh (Yu Gi Oh Duel Masters and phone sports game like Baseball spirits are listed as their primary earners last year alongside regular Yu Gi Oh).

So it's not like Konami didn't change or transition, they moved to mostly mobile games with in-app purchases.

That said the statement that Konami's sitting on I Ps it has little intention to use isn't actually wrong either. Again, Mobile is the core of their video game business, by their own words.

Edited by Ghilz on May 15th 2022 at 10:32:22 AM

Got any proof for that ulterior motivation you’re ascribing rather then not assume bad faith?

And so this doesn’t get easily misconstrued, that the reason is the reason for the action and not that “people are sour over Kojima”, as you put it.

Edited by fredhot16 on May 15th 2022 at 10:43:35 AM

I mean, one of their most successful games is Momotetsu and it's Japan only. Same with the recent Power Pro-kun. And isn't the new YGO game digital only? Also they actually merged their mobile to general gaming because the former was somewhat failing (remember they had those mobile games that ended in service).

Don't look at me, look at Goeff simping for Kojima years ago while calmly ignoring other devs and their practices.

Edited by Ookamikun on May 16th 2022 at 1:45:43 AM

Who the f*** is Goeff?

Why the f*** does Goeff matter?

Are you sure you’re in the right thread? <_<

Edit: Also, you’re getting looked at because you’re the one making the claim in this thread.

I hope “this guy likes Kojima but doesn’t talk about other developers” isn’t the basis. Because that’d look a bit assumptive.

Edited by fredhot16 on May 15th 2022 at 11:03:26 AM

I'm guessing The Game Awards host Geoff Keighley. Who apparently is close friends with Kojima. idc to read what he specifically said/did about his axing though.

Edited by Adannor on May 15th 2022 at 9:40:40 PM

I brought him up because he started the whole Fuck Konami thing, with his whole rant in VGA many years ago. And yeah I may be assuming, but the dude practically caved in and didn't mention anything about Activision when pressed and even went "don't harass them".

Really. You're giving him that much power?

How could a call to not harass people be taken negatively?

And what the hell does he have to do with this, again?

Edited by fredhot16 on May 16th 2022 at 12:09:55 PM

No, Sterling started the "Fuck Konami" thing.

Activision's "Diversity Tool" Is F*cking Awful (The Jimquisition)