This year has seen a lot of high-profile commercial disasters in the movie and vidya industries. It is all-too-easy to make fun of game or movie studios that burn a solid nine figures in order to push an agenda. More interesting, though, is looking at the mechanisms in place behind it.

I felt motivated to write this article after reading that the critically acclaimed game Unknown 9: Awakening, with its visually unappealing protagonist, was supposed to launch a media franchise, similar to Pokemon. As I had mentioned in a previous Open Thread, there were plans for “Unknown 9” games, novels, comics, podcasts, etc. There surely were wet dreams about big-budget movies, too.

Unknown 9: Awakening peaked at around 250 concurrent players on Steam, despite the publisher handing out vouchers of this game. Probably tens of thousands of vouchers were given away for free with the purchase of an AMD graphics card. The disparity between the actual success and the ambitions of the game studio and its backers is extreme. I do not think it can be explained by delusion alone because there was too much money involved, and too many people. They furthermore did not just woke-ify an existing franchise, hoping that nobody will notice that they took a sledgehammer to a beloved franchise. With that approach, there is often an extended time lag between the rot setting in and fans getting wise to the fact that their favorite franchise is no longer what it used to be. Thus, initial sales may still be quite respectable. We have seen this with the Star Wars franchise. The latest trilogy of movies made $2.0, $1.3, and $1.0 billion, respectively, at the box office. Fans were eagerly awaiting the first of these movies, and fewer and fewer returned to learn that Han Solo has always been a tranny or that the Rebel Alliance is an all-female fighting force.

I believe the people behind Unknown 9: Awakening were well-connected. They had people willing to spend a lot of money, hoping for a big pay-off. However, the goal to do that was not to produce a great game. No, instead these people were convinced that they could use their stranglehold on the media to create a new hit franchise out of thin air. Well, his can be done but not very often. Normally, you start with a game or movie that surprisingly ends up being much more successful than expected. A decade or two later you either have a cultural behemoth like Pokemon or a franchise everybody is sick and tired of like Terminator. There are game studios that try to kick-start franchises, but the underlying product is at least competent. Level-5 does this frequently. These franchises rarely survive for more than a few years, though. Their most recent attempt is Megaton Musashi.

Starting with the assumption that your game or movie will lay the foundation of a multi-billion franchise, even if the product is utterly mediocre is only plausible when these factors are met: access to easy money, strong press contacts to ensure positive coverage, and a view on mainstream society according to which the underlying quality of a product is completely irrelevant because “marketing” creates value and desirability. This is really what not a few people in business think.

Key to the woke-industrial complex is the belief that you can get people to spend money on something they do not want if you only manipulate and coerce them enough. Surely, you do not want to be called a “racist”, so go and buy that crappy game with unattractive female protagonist! That these people could even form this belief is a consequence of simply having had too much control over mass media for too long. However, as it turns out, you can deceive your target audience for quite a while, but not indefinitely long. The chickens are coming home to roost, and a lot of alleged creators in both the gaming and movie industry have found themselves out of a job. The woke-industrial complex is not dead yet, far from it, but it has been weakened.