If you can’t blame yourself then blame someone else, that seems to be the go-to method when something isn’t as successful as you wanted it to be. Take the Days Gone director John Garvin for example, who has blamed the game’s middling reviews on a few technical issues and some “woke reviewers” who couldn’t be bothered to play the game apparently. Now that’s a claim that’s bound to rile up a few feathers.
The Days Gone director took to Twitter to express this controversial theory of his when replying to a fan who couldn’t understand how this 2019 open-world survival game didn’t get as much praise as it should have done. Garvin explained in the reply: “Three reasons. 1) It had tech issues like bugs, streaming, and frame rate. 2) It had reviewers who couldn’t be bothered to actually play the game. 3) And three, it had ‘woke’ reviewers who couldn’t handle a gruff white biker looking at his date’s ass.”
For those of you who don’t know what ‘woke’ means, it is a term that was originally referring to those people who were aware of social injustices such as racism, sexism, and any form of discrimination for that matter. In more recent times though, it has been adopted as a term that politically right-leaning people like to call others who have more progressive political ideas. The term itself is used with ignorance, and people who throw the word ‘woke’ around are usually those that want to dismiss the very real concerns of a particular topic or subject, and in Garvin’s example, blaming the game’s problems on something else.
Days Gone currently has a Metacritic score of 71, which isn’t a bad score at all, and the game is a pretty good one as well that has a unique take on the open-world survival genre. In comparison to other PlayStation 4 titles like Ghost of Tsushima and God of War, which have scores of 83 and 94 respectively, it falls some way short.
The latest claim from Garvin was surely going to result in a backlash from Twitter users, fans of the game, and anyone else really. The above tweet was seen as a negative one, with one fan replying to the tweet by saying, “C’mon John: ‘woke’? You’re better than that,” to which Garvin replied. “Nope, I’m really not… if a reviewer objects to a character because of identity politics, I call that woke… how am I wrong?” This is the hill that he is willing to die on, so good luck with that one. Garvin’s account has since been locked because of the comment, and his tweets are limited to his existing followers.
This isn’t the first time that Garvin has complained about the success of the game though, it’s almost like an annual thing right now. Last year Garvin claimed that the game sold poorly because not enough people bought it at full price, going on to say, “If you love a game, buy it at f**king full price. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen gamers say, ‘yeah, I got that on sale’ or whatever.”