Because that reactionary authoritarian faction has had the majority stake the Polish Government for close to a decade.
They’ve repeatedly pushed policies designed to undermine Polish democracy, pull the country away from the EU and closer to Russia. As well as some of the most brutal anti LGBTQ and anti immigrant laws in the developed world. With trans people being the more recent big scary.
This has repeatedly spurred mass protest movements and the development of an enfranchised but minority opposition. Made up of pro business pro EU moderates and a youth driven progressive movement.
Most recently the majority has moved to basically permanantly cut out that opposition by completely ratfucking the government structure. Spawning another wave of mass protest, and an attendant crack down that’s particularly focused on Trans folks.
CDProject is Poland’s largest company. And the single largest video game company in Europe. They’re closely associated with the Polish Government, to the point where Polish friends of mine joke that Poland’s chief export is Witcher games.
Their connections do not appear to be to the ultra-right wing majority. But mainly through the pro EU moderates, and career bureaucrats. And the company, some of it’s employees and principals have made public statements in support of the protest movements in the past.
IIRC at the point where they announced these features and made promises about representation and what have the opposition was ascendant. With Poland pulling off it’s like third or fourth successful, safe, pride month.
More recently it has gone very south, very quickly. I wonder how free CDP was to actually do anything on this front.
I think the preferennce would probably be to do a little work and get it right rather than being actively, wilfully provocative and harmful.
There are absolutely tonnes of games with trans representation, and there will continue to be. CDPR seem to have chosen to court controversy and appeal to the edgelords.
CDPR: The point of this tasteless ChroManticore advertisement is that these corporate overlords are forcing these overly sexualized images on everyone and that’s the not OK part regardless of community.
Also CDPR: Be sure to get your real-life ChroManticore at our corporate booth at the corporate media conference! Just show your corporate pass at the door and it’s yours!
Also CDPR: Our corporate marketing department is running a social media cosplay contest, check out the winner - a sexy cis gendered woman with a glowing dildo used to make herself the nameless ChroManticore model! Be sure to buy our product!
If someone tells you that something you said or did is hurtful, and to please change that, do you keep doing the hurtful thing? Or do you change your behavior and try to do better?
Right? I really don’t know why this is considered such a huge burden, but apparently some people feel it is.
Again, why is basic human decency such an imposition?
Not to pour kerosene on this fire, but there’s also the part of the game that actively induces seizures in those that are sensitive to flashing/strobing lights (link)
While I don’t personally have that problem, I have friends that do. Combined with the usual spate of 0 day bugs, the aforementioned bonfire of gender issues, and the fact that I pretty much have to replace a 4 year old mid-to high end video card that still has a lot of miles left on it with one that’s practically unobtanium at the moment, that makes the game a hard pass for me.
“Phobia” implies “horror” and “aversion” as well as just “fear”. It’s an irrational reaction against something, an urge to get away from it and/or get rid of it.
i’d go even further to say that if one’s greatest discomfort with the notion of transphobia is etymological then one is likely to be part of the problem.
It shouldn’t even be that hard to do good representation these days. Saints Row 3 and 4 did this nearly 10 years ago.
The character selector allowed you to pick any body type you wanted, pair it with some 6 or 7 different voice actors with male or female sounding voices. You could pick any number of hair styles or skin tones (human or inhuman). You could wear any outfit available in the game. There was a height slider, boob/crotch slider. You could make your character realistic or over the top – whatever you wanted. Pronouns weren’t a problem because voiced dialog just referred to you as they/them (except for some occasional script bugs that would use he/him). Unlike CP77 you could also change any aspect of your character’s appearance any time you wanted – body type, hair, voice. If you decide 10 hours in you want your character to be completely different, it lets you. CP77 doesn’t even let you get a haircut.
Even romance options were pretty uncomplicated. Saints Row 4 broke down the romance options to simply going to a crew member and literally asking if they wanted to fuck. This was largely a subversion of Mass Effect’s overwrought romance system which required tens of hours of courting a locked set of characters specific to your gender only to end up with a 2 minute cinema with a flash of ass and/or breast as a “reward”, but it was still a nice change of pace.
Pretty progressive stuff for a game where you could use a giant purple dildo or “dubstep gun” as a weapon.
Jim Sterling on this – still as relevant today as it was when he published this video in 2013:
I love how the series evolved from kind of a serious second tier GTA clone into this absurd no-rules sandbox game where you’re fighting space aliens in a VR hellscape trying to help Santa Clause save Christmas. While they really found their groove in 2 (which had some great storytelling), it was really 3 and 4 that just decided “fuck it, let’s just make this shit as ridiculous as possible”.
It kind of reminds me of the evolution of Fast and the Furious from being a fun and dumb series of films about cars and street racing to being a fun and dumb series about heists (and cars).
There is a one player shadowrun RPG. I play it on Steam; it’s probably available elsewhere. Shadowrun returns, the sequels Shadowrun Dragonfall and Shadowrun Hong Kong. It’s a blast.
a bit of education might be in order. most people who are gay or trans or straight or cis don’t choose their sexuality. the most people can do is choose how to respond.
some people might choose to live silently, trying to pretend they are something they are not, trying to fulfill the stereotypical roles that don’t represent their insides, and deal with the daily trauma that causes. others might try to live as themselves and deal with the endless pushback and even physical harms that entails.
in both cases, it’s the greater society that has the choice here how to support people. we have the choice to work on our own prejudices, actions, policies – because, no, people don’t get to choose their gender identity and sexuality.
i cant look into cd projeckt red’s soul (s) and guess whether their intentions were honorable or not. but like any group making products for public consumption, they have an obligation to listen to their audience on stuff like this. that’s the exchange of doing business. so don’t feel too sorry for them.
they’re making money just fine. trust that they have the bandwidth and the backbone to listen to honest criticism
According to Forbes, it’s not even in the top 7 (there’s only 7 Polish companies in the list), and each of those 7 have a yearly revenue between 25 to 35 billion zloty per yer, while CDPR had around 500 million zloty in 2019 (that’s around $130m).
So they may be big, but they’re not the biggest fish in Poland by far.
