RACE AND GENDER IN GAMES

author=Crystalgate
You need to maintain your original vision, or rather, it needs to look like you're doing that. The LGBT characters/relationships need to fit into your game without disrupting it.

If they don't and you include them anyway, it's hard to get around the fact that you included them for other reasons than the good of your game. Heck, you actually included them at the expense of your game. First of, that means that the complaints about it being "too political" is starting to look somewhat justified, you harmed the game for a purpose that does seem on the political side. Second, you are actually sending the message that LGBT characters harms the story.

author=Crystalgate
Yes, the world is sort of there already. While there are a non trivial amount of bigots left, it's also so that being inclusive is now a PR thing. As I covered in an earlier post, it can be a PR disaster if you screw it up, but barring that, chance is good PR outweighs the loss of sales due to losing the bigots.

Yeah, I'm hoping you are correct!

Just to clarify my earlier thoughts; it's not as though I'm on the fence about authentically showing off these characters in the game itself - they've been written as-is for several years now, and I draw ever-closer to finishing the game.

It's more along the lines of...how I handled them in 2012 or even 2015 might have been quite different - more subtle, mainly - compared to how far I'm willing to go with what's being displayed in 2019. But the relationships were always a part of the storytelling, etc. The marketing is more my concern, because that's what people are seeing and digesting without any narrative context.

author=Liberty
You say all that but one game that I know of that had an openly gay character as the main has been lambasted as being 'deliberately gay' by, you guessed it, non-gays. It's a decent game that doesn't deserve the hate, but because it hit the 'gay agenda' and made no secret of the fact that it was made for gay people to enjoy, others decided it was an attack against them because god forbid anyone have anything nice if it's not centered around _them_ or some shit.

Yup, exactly. It's a catch-22, really. And it's hard for me to gauge the current climate of how people would react, beyond a small liberal website like RMN or my existing Twitter fanbase.

I don't want to be held hostage by the endless hordes of disgruntled gamers, because at the end of the day, I'm pouring my own finances and livelihood into completing the project. Having it falter as a result of something as trivial as...accusations of "pandering!!!1" would be regrettable. But I suppose, in some way, all art might run that risk. If you try to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one. If you try not to offend, you risk not saying anything meaningful; etc.