I thought they were private companies and could do what they wanted???
Yes, and indeed they can. But a marketplace acts as an access system between the vendors (stallholders in a conventional physical marketplace, devs / publishers in the case of Steam) and the customers. A marketplace that loses either its customers or its vendors fails: indeed, to lose one is effectively to lose the other. So a marketplace has a rationale to protect its vendors as well as its customers. Whether or how it chooses to do so is up to it.
Ah yes how dare us Gamers "take a shot at taking down the bankers and pernicious pushes done by them, won't some-one please think of the poor bankers"
The problem is how resolutely shit and delusional some of you are about it all: "
Yeah! Let's take out Sweet Baby Inc: that'll show the bankers who's boss."
Firstly, the idea that companies are spending $100+ million on a game's development, and all the problems can be put down to the miniscule fraction that they spent on script consultants. And not, maybe, the fact that they slightly screwed up the gameplay, multiplayer function, it was full of bugs, etc. Trying to tell yourselves that the company sacrificed all those things that the devs obviously understand they've got to get as right as possible to shift their games, because they could get away with covering up all the problems with a female protagonist. It's bad you're deluded enough to believe that without you having to think we should credit it, too.
Screwing up products is eternal and perennial, whether creative arts, engineering, or anything else. Creators always occasionally screw up and put out bad work, are overtaken by innovations and developments that they can't keep up with. Maybe it's complacency, or they just had a really bad year at the office, or institutional sclerosis, playing safe, whatever. It's just suddenly every racist and misogynist points to the occasions where this coincides with anything that has post-80s social attitudes and screams "Go woke go broke" like it means anything at all except their rage that they're no longer being pandered to as special and superior.
Like the post someone put in where one of you and your chumps goes something like "Sweet Baby Inc first, then Vanguard and BlackRock", as if they are ever going to touch the massive private equity firms with this bullshit. Gamestop wasn't even a roadbump in the system as a whole. None of you are ever going to touch "the system", and you're in a mass delusion to think you're doing a damn thing by attacking "woke". There's real shit going on as private equity buys up your health and care services, asset strips and wrecks them, and if you're even aware you're certainly nowhere to be seen protesting or doing anything meaningful to stop it. I'm not even sure you actually do want to stop them, it's just a sort of cynical fig-leaf. Either way, how they must all look at you and laugh, as you assault a script consultancy firm or temporarily prop up a modest-sized store chain as their assets swell another trillion or two.
The really simple bottom line is that your whole brigade just doesn't like women, homosexuals, non-whites etc. Yeah, I get it ties in with a wider sense of unhappiness about the world, politics, economics, frustration with lack of opportunity, exploitation of the weak and the poor (of which we nearly all are) and all that. And a lot of that sort of discontent flitters in in various forms, often in genuinely crazy ways such as the above, or the absurd lies and leaps of logic you fill the threads with, desperately trying to tell yourself (in the form of telling us) that this is making the world a better place. But at the final analysis, the anti-woke lot are really just slaves who are abusing the other slaves and pretending it's fighting for freedom.
