Over the years I’ve bought quite a few Sony electronic products. I’ve always found them reliable, reasonably priced and functional. The Japanese focus on excellence made Sony a worldwide brand, a brand that dramatically expanded with its gaming platform, PlayStation.

PlayStation remains profitable. Sony provides cutting edge games people want to play, and has steadily improved not only the PlayStation hardware but the gaming software. Then came Concord, a first-person shooter game.

Graphic: X Screenshot, Concord Launch Trailer

Sony spent more than six years and $150 million developing the game. It was supposed to be the best game of its kind ever. But Sony made a serious mistake: they went woke, sexually and politically:

Sony appears to be folding and walking away from the table. Their new first-person shooter, Concord, has been a bust since its launch on July 23, reaching only 697 peak concurrent playerson Steam – an even lower number than that of its beta test, suggesting many gamers didn’t come back for the actual game. Sony and their in-house studio, Firewalk Studios, got desperate enough to remove the LGBT tags from Concord’s store page on Steam, which was funny considering how big a ballyhoo was made over Concord’s diversity and inclusion. But it appears not to have helped, and this morning, Sony dropped a big bomb when they announced that they will take Concord offline on September 6, which is this Friday, exactly two weeks since its release. 

Holy CNN+, Batman!  That streaming service, which cost truckloads of money, died only a month after launch. It seems no one wanted to pay good money to hear more of the same woke commentary from the same woke talking heads spouting the leftism that has tanked CNN ratings.

And it’s not as though Sony had no other warnings. Disney has managed an epic fail.  They’ve all but destroyed one of the most loved, popular and profitable franchises in entertainment history: Star Wars.

Disney’s latest attempt to rewrite Star Wars, The Acolyte, was canceled after a single season.  Why?  Star Wars fans didn’t want to watch a series that presented the Jedi as evil space cops who wantonly murder black and gay people. Sound familiar? The writing was also poor and didn’t adhere to the prior Star Wars universe, as confused as Disney has made it since buying the franchise. Add lesbian, Jedi space witches and it’s little wonder the series tanked so quickly. Star Wars fans have been willing to give any Star Wars property a chance, but this one was a woke too far.

The lead actress, Amandla Stenberg, responded as one might expect:

Graphic: X Screenshot

About that: 

“That’s when we started experiencing a rampage of I would say hyper-conservative bigotry and vitriol, prejudice, hatred, and hateful language towards us.”

“Hyper-conservative bigotry and vitriol, etc.” Unfortunately for Stenberg, those hyper-conservatives didn’t personally contact potential viewers and convince them to tune out.  They did they on their own because—who coulda thunk it?—woke doesn’t work with Star Wars, and fans spoke with their remotes. Disney wasted $180 million diverse and inclusive dollars.

All these entertainment debacles have common elements. Their producers, if they ever knew their audiences, disregarded that vital knowledge for what they surely saw as a higher purpose. They didn’t care that they’re in business to sell a product their audiences want. They decided to force feed them a product they thought they needed for their moral betterment. Rather than entertaining them, they lectured them, told them they were morally deficient and needed the scolding and heavy-handed instruction of their betters.

For some inexplicable reason, Americans tend not to appreciate that, particularly when they think they’re paying for something else.

Worse, the moral re-education they were pushing was wokeness, political and sexual indoctrination masquerading as a pseudo-religious belief system. Fourteen-year-old gamers, had they been asked, could, and gladly would, have explained to Sony executives why that was going to blow up in their faces.

Still worse, these producers, in their moral certainty, abandoned the elements of good story telling in their respective genres, genres whose fans are deeply engaged and expect not only logical continuity, but a focus on plot, the storyline, dialogue and action. Going woke requires those time-proven elements be ignored for contemporary, luxury deviance and virtue signaling.

One wonders how many times the venerable axiom “get woke; go broke” will have to be proved before people in business get back to doing business and leave moral instruction to parents and churches?

What’s next? A woke version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves? Oh, wait…

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.