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Comment by klipklop | Hacker News Reader

I don't believe Google has the right culture to make compelling video games anyways. Maybe at best a super safe mario clone for children. Anything remotely controversial will have half the staff protesting threatening to quit.

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Why does a game need to be controversial to be compelling?

Compelling to a significant demographic maybe? “Controversial” can include violent. Seems like those games tend to be technically amazing, as well as particularly entertaining / humorous if that’s your thing.

Exactly. Some of the best selling games are games like Call of Duty, GTA or Mortal Kombat.

Any game like that would have a full on employee revolt as people demanded the team involved to be fired.

Google sells all of these games on Google Play without any form of "revolt" from their developers. So im not sure where you're getting this idea, other than baseless conjecture

It's not a novel idea that all great art is in some way disruptive or transgressive. If you're aiming for art with cultural relevancy you've got to push some kind of boundary, mechanical, technical, or social.

If you have an culturally oppressive environment, whatever flavor, you're going to struggle to make great art.

That is true. Google alt-righties would riot at anything that was controversial in a gaming sense (like having women as protagonists).

More likely, people losing their minds over what the protagonist in a Star Wars game looks like. [1]

https://etcanada.com/news/548672/star-wars-jedi-fallen-order...

"Redhead erasure" is, in my experience, a talking point for "great replacement" types, who I would think tend to overlap heavily with the "women can't have muscles", "there are two genders, men and political", and similar mindsets that are the incumbent position in gamer culture.

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