CEO Marek Tyminski was present during the investor call, and later chimed in on Xitter to echo Hill’s points and spread the word to CI Games’s audience of (in Hill’s phrase) “core and adjacent” players. In that tweet, he gives a clunky #shoutout to 2023’s Lords Of The Fallen - a huge success for CI that has been savaged for its extensive launch bugs, and which is now being positioned for a “2.0” redemption. In confirmation that “anti-DEI” is now a CI Games PR campaign, Tyminski is also now openly toying with updating Lord Of The Fallen’s character model labelling to suit transphobic, “anti-woke” ideas about gender.

These hawkish daydreams lend themselves easily, even inadvertently to active prejudice. Back in 2021, CI were obliged to apologise after throwing a preview event in which journalists were invited to shoot at people dressed as Arab stereotypes. In their apology, CI Games claim they weren’t “directly” involved in the event and that as such, “certain decisions were overlooked”. A DEI consultant might have helped them spot all that in advance.

The argument that games with “social or political agendas” are a risk commercially, meanwhile, echoes the reactionary claim that there isn’t really an audience for games that express leftwing positions of any kind. I’m interested to see Hill put some actual figures behind that, because the comments thread battlecry “go woke, go broke” doesn’t stand up to casual analysis.

Just look at Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 - “the biggest Call Of Duty ever”, according to its creators, despite being the first Call Of Duty to feature a non-binary character, whose voice actor has had to deal with transphobic harassment. God Of War: Ragnarök, meanwhile, is a flawed deconstruction of patriarchy that features input from the narrative consultancy Sweet Baby Inc - a popular boogeyman for the DEI Detectors - and has still managed to sell tens of millions of copies. Fortnite hosts an annual pride event, amongst other “woke” initiatives, and remains one of the most-played games in history.