Summary
It seems like now more than ever, large-scale campaigns against inclusion and diversity has come to attack pretty much every game that’s announced these days that doesn’t include a straight white man as its sole protagonist.Assassin’s Creed Shadows was attackedfor having the Black samurai Yasuke as one of its main characters,as has Dragon Age: The Veilguard,Alan Wake 2, and most recentlySilent Hill 2 Remake, as manygot angry at a “body positive” neon sign that was actually ripped straight from the original game.
It’s caused a lot of misinformation to spread like wildfire, as certain people behind the outrage whip up fans into hate-fuelled frenzies for profit. One such developer that has become the target of these frenzies isThe Witcher 3andCyberpunk 2077studioCD Projekt Red, which was recently named as a developer that is in “dire trouble” due to a supposed significant loss of talent and the resulting “diversity hires” to replace them.
They’re claims that have no merit, aren’t backed up by solid evidence, and even CD Projekt Red itself has come out to shoot down those rumors before they could even begin (thanks GamesRadar).In a post on Twitter earlier today, CD Projekt Red CEO Michal Nowakowski called the claims “complete nonsense”, and then systematically started addressing every issue brought up.
CD Projekt Red CEO Defends Studio From DEI “Conspiracy Theories”
In regard to CD Projekt Red supposedly losing a bunch of talent, Nowakowski claims that the studio has “the lowest rotation of people” it’s ever had in recent years, and points out that the director of The Witcher 3 - a person that was used as an example of CD Projekt Red’s high turnover - left the studio more than two years ago. We can actually do the math on that one for Nowakowski,as Konrad Tomaszkiewicz actually left in May 2021, making it more than three years ago.
Nowakowski then goes on to address the claim that the studio only hires based on diversity, explaining that CD Projekt Red hires “based on merit and talent alone”. There was an attempt to discredit this bysharing a page on the studio’s website about diversity, but this also doesn’t disprove that the studio hires based on talent and merit.
Finally, Nowakowski shoots down the claim thatthe reason the next Witcher game will run on Unreal Engine 5is because of the loss of talent, explaining that the actual reason the studio is ditching the REDengine is so that it can “work on our games more efficiently and we remain cutting edge tech-wise”. He then tells people to “stop looking for conspiracy theories” and asks if we can go back to making cool things again, and truer words have never been spoken.
