Dustborn will be released on Steam, PS4/PS5 and XBox on August 20, 2024. The €30 game comes from a small studio in Norway and was supported by financial injections from the European Union and Norway. The action-adventure has become the target of some influencers who see the single-player game as the embodiment of everything evil and wokem.
Why is Dustborn hated so much? Some content creators have identified Dustborn as the core of all the evil they are against. Dustborn is considered a symbol of excessive political correctness and an example of a game that players bother with an exaggerated political message.
The game is deliberately ridiculed in clips: The big streamer Asmongold alone has 3 videos about Dustborn, all of which have received between 730,000 and 1.1 million views. In the clips he shows seemingly absurd fight scenes in which attacks like “cancel” and “trigger” appear (via YouTube).
Some smaller YouTubers have taken aim at Dustborn and have published numerous extremely negative videos about the game. It receives similar hatred as the consulting firm Sweet Baby Inc. and is demonized in the same way on YouTube.
The game has hardly any players on Steam, there are currently 5 players online at the same time, but it has been experiencing huge headwinds on social media for months – similar to what Concord, the hero shooter from Sony, has experienced, which was also accused of being “woke”. be.
Dustborn – trailer for the musical adventure in a comic look
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The man behind the game is a Norwegian who has been making games for 30 years
This is what the developer behind Dustborn says: In an interview with the Norwegian site gamer.no, the head of Red Thread Games speaks about the enormous hatred that is shown to him and the studio. Ragnar Tørnquist has worked in the games industry for 30 years and is one of the leading minds in gaming in Norway.
He says he was totally surprised by the hate from the US towards his game. You hadn’t expected this and didn’t know how to react to it at all.
An initial post on social media simply asked people to behave and was washed away by a wave of hate. Since then there has been silence on the subject, but that doesn’t help either.
How does hate manifest itself? The CEO says:
It’s easy to ignore what’s being said in forums or on X. Email feels a little more familiar, but receiving text messages wishing you dead is unsettling.
The most absurd thing he was accused of was a YouTube video in which it was claimed that the CEO wanted to drown babies (via YouTube).
This is completely made up. Of course he doesn’t want to kill babies. But there is no way to take action against such a video and it is simply a very damaging lie.
He had to ignore it and hope that people were intelligent enough to understand that it wasn’t true.
Dustborn was financed with financial injections from Norway and the EU
These are the numbers for Dustborn: The CEO says there are rumors the game is funded by the “American government.” But that too is a lie.
16 people worked on the game and received around 1.2 million euros from the Norwegian government and 150,000 euros from EU funding. Ultimately, the company’s goal is to become independent of such subsidies. But at the moment, state support is crucial for the Norwegian gaming industry.
Dustborn is not a financial flop for the company. Although internal goals were not achieved, everything was within the framework. A lot more people would play Dustborn than the numbers circulating on the internet.
“You start to question decisions”
What are the effects of hate? The CEO says: The current hatred is hindering the team’s creativity. The financial situation is already difficult:
You start to question decisions regarding character design, narrative, word choice, PR and even game mechanics. This comes from being more nervous about what reactions you might get. But we won’t stop being ourselves.
He himself sees Dustborn as an “exaggerated game that speaks for itself.” It is colorful, inspired by comics and shows a sarcastic view of the world. Dustborn doesn’t take itself too seriously:
I hope people can see the game and understand that it is an alternate world, which also applies to the story. The game may be a dystopian depiction of the world, but the story is not designed for realism. It’s written with humor and exaggeration, and it’s very tongue-in-cheek.
Apparently some influencers completely missed this wink.
In recent months there has been backlash against a number of players who have been identified by people online as being “too woke” and suspected of trying to foist a political message on players. These games often have non-white women as protagonists: A new action role-playing game fails to launch on Steam – opponents of the “woke company” Sweet Baby Inc. rejoice