>these kinds of features are almost always driven by activist developers

Guilty as charged! I'm an activist developer who threw down the gauntlet and insisted The Sims support same sex relationships.

In the June 1998 prototype, when two women tried to kiss, the would-be-kissee slapped the kisser. So I wrote up in my design review that it should support same sex relationships instead of resulting in homophobic violence. The design documents were updated to say heterosexual romance would not be the only kind available, and Patrick J. Barrett III implemented it his own way, which was better than mine: no sexual preference property at all, just relationships, so it was up to you who to love.

Then a lesbian kiss lit the fire at E3 in 1999, right after Columbine, when the press was desperate for a non-violent gender inclusive video game to write about.

The Kiss That Changed Video Games:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-kiss...

Then the franchise made EA $5 billion.

How EA’s $5 billion Sims empire has become a magnet for female talent in a male-dominated field:

https://fortune.com/2025/01/31/the-sims-25-anniversary/

>who don't care what damage they do inside the team itself to push these kinds of things through, they muffle true innovation, take away bandwidth needed for more important things, and break teams.

That's unmitigated GamerGate bullshit. Nobody's bandwidth was stolen, and the team didn't break up -- just the opposite: we original Sims team members have continued working with each other frequently on different projects over the many years since.

And same sex relationships WERE the innovation -- Gonzalo Frasca used them as the textbook example of procedural rhetoric, because the designers didn't just draw a rainbow flag, they built a rule into the simulation.

Procedural Rhetoric:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_rhetoric

Here are the design documents and the record, so you don't have to take my word for it:

https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSimsDesignDocuments/

https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...

>Good game developers focus on universal appeal

That IS universal appeal. Gays and girls and even boys played it, and it proved there was a huge female audience for games 14 years before GamerGate got it all wrong by attacking women while pretending it was about journalism.

>most often soiling a whole franchise

Calling same sex romance "rot" that ends up soiling a whole franchise is historically ignorant bigotry, and the claim that inclusion ruins games is the same argument GamerGate made, which The Sims had already proven wrong starting in 2000, more than a decade before GamerGate, when it shipped and went on to become the best selling PC game of all time.

If that's what soil looks like, every publisher on earth would line up for a shovel.

Enjoy your noodles, but get used to them!

EA is shutting down BioWare