The games industry has kowtowed to the cultural logic of conservative ascendancy for years – this week's US election shows how out of touch with the broader audience that has been

There is a perfectly logical way in which you can look at an election result – even a truly seismic election result – and say that it is largely irrelevant to the business decision-making of the games industry. Elections do not change your customer demographics; all of Washington or Westminster or Nagatachō may change overnight, but the people who bought your games yesterday are still the people who will buy them tomorrow, aren't they?

If you follow that logic… well, nothing has really changed. The world of politics may have shifted, but that doesn't change the facts on the ground. If yesterday decisions were made that the best way to engage and satisfy your audience was to pull back from diversity and minimise representation, then those decisions must make an equal amount of sense today. It's not like the audience changed.

Yet you knew that was wrong, even as you read it. Democracy at scale is still a new and surprisingly thinly understood thing, but we all have a pretty strong sense that elections shift more than just the bums on seats in a legislative chamber. Elections move culture. They embolden, or cow, whole swathes of the public; they crown cultural ascendants and kick the legs out from under former icons whose moment is now past.

That function of shifting the cultural moment could not be more relevant to an industry like the games business.

Source link