It wasn’t a fluke, but the studio that made it doesn’t exist anymore. “Spider-Man” came out eight years ago, and during that period, every Western AAA game studio has been transformed. The video game boom during the pandemic combined with the dramatic increase in the need for more people to work on the increasingly complex games these companies were making coincided exactly with the woke “reckonings” during which the entertainment industry discriminated heavily against men, especially straight white men. This coincided with the already ongoing push for gender parity in an industry that was 85% male in 2010. And since “trans-women are women” and studios were desperate for any kind of “woman” they could get, they onboarded huge numbers of LGBT staff. Today, surveys of games-industry workers find more than a quarter identify as LGBT, and over 40% of workers under the age of 25. The people who made your favorite games of the 2010s were pushed out of their jobs or forced to get on board the new agenda. Every video game waves gay pride flags. All the games that used to celebrate masculinity are replacing their male heroes with women or making their male heroes gay. And the quality has gone down, because the people who know how to make quality have been cancelled, the studio cultures that valued quality were deemed “boys clubs” and had to transform to be more inclusive. So now you get games like “Wolverine” with one-dimensional gameplay but lots of “accessibility” features. Everything is woke, everything is gay, everything is bad, and game after game produced with these priorities and these values, made by people hired under this rubric will fail. Sony gave Wolverine to a team that was so invested in having Logan kiss Sabertooth that they forgot to build a combat system, and now they’re gonna lose $200 million and the Marvel license.