After the news of the Layoffs at Surgent Studiosit developer of the metroidvania Tales of Kenzera: ZAUa certain fringe of players has decided that the It’s Sweet Baby Inc’s fault.a consulting firm that focuses on issues related to inclusivity in video games. According to David Jaffe, however, this is not the case.
Jaffe’s point of view
For the father of the God of War serieswho spoke about it in a video posted on his very active YouTube channel, believing that a game developed by a studio led by a black person needed a consultant to improve diversity representation is not very smart reasoning, to say the least. In his words, it’s unlikely that a consultant was needed to tell “this black man how to make his game more inclusive.”
For the former developer, “if you’ve played it, you’d know that the reason they’re firing people has nothing to do with Sweet Baby Inc., no matter what they did.”
Here Jaffe goes into more detail, emphasizing certain level design flawsas well as the fact that Tales of Kenzera: ZAU belongs to a genre where competition has become ruthless. In short, the layoffs come from these problems, which are real and tangible, certainly not from some external consultancy.
Besides, it’s not clear why those who are against diversity in video games should have it in for Tales of Kenzera: ZAU, which in reality is exactly what is loudly demanded every time a character of a different ethnicity is introduced in a remake of some old work: an original story set in Nigeria, based on local mythology.
#Tales #Kenzera #ZAU #Studio #Layoffs #Sweet #Baby #David #Jaffe
