Huh? I literally said in my post that I’ve never run into an instance of someone not being hired by their merit. I don’t understand how anyone could not hire someone if they didn’t have talent and passion, so we are in agreement there, unless you have a different definition of merit.

What does happen at any company that measures diversity in their talent pool, Larian included, is they will look at the diversity make-up of their teams and make an effort to find more diverse candidates for full-time roles and ensure there is multiple types of candidates in an interview cycle for a role. All this does is ensure as a hiring manager, you are able to evaluate a greater variety of people, and find that best and most talented candidate. Again, you’re describing situations where people are “forced” to make some kind of decision, and making it sound like it’s some bad decision like they had to leave a “better” candidate on the table, when I have never seen this happen. You want to know what companies hate to do? Firing people because they can’t do the job. It wastes everyone time, costs us money, lowers team morale, potentially impacts timelines and the quality of the project. I can promise you no company would ever choose some diversity candidate who is bad at their job, just to make some number go up. If that were the case, the diversity numbers though out the industry would be in a MUCH better place than they are now.

I don’t know what you’re thinking about with the “in your face” agenda point. Do you have an example that comes to mind of other studios? BG3 covers topics of sexuality, race, and gender in the storylines and character interactions from what I’ve played, so it’s not like they ignore these topics which are often debated IRL politically. It’s handled with tactfulness in a fantasy setting, and the player is given agency throughout, so they may not lead down certain side-stories, but it’s certainly covered in the game.

This viewpoint is so disconnected from the actual reality that it’s disingenuous at best. I have worked in the games industry for nearly 20 years working with AAA and small teams. I have never felt like I’ve hired someone, or have had someone on my team who didn’t earn their position through talent and passion. You’re making up some political reality that does not exist, and being angry at something that is not happening just to weave some weird narrative that I feel is about 5 seconds from you simply saying “go woke, go broke”.

It is important that you realize that diverse viewpoints makes games better, and that has to come into consideration for teams as well! More diverse viewpoints on your team will make a better RPG! Yes, you obviously need passionate and talented people, that goes without saying. But to make the best games, you need a diverse team.

There was this quote they gave when asked about impact to the surrounding ocean.

Natick uses raw sea water for cooling, with the water returned to the ocean a fraction of a degree warmer than ambient. Due to rapid mixing in ocean currents, the temperature impact just a few meters downstream of the datacenter is undetectable. We used cameras on the exterior of the vessel to observe wildlife during deployment. We found that the datacenter provided an attractive location for sea life, and was quickly colonized by multiple species of fish and other sea life.

At a huge scale, that maybe could be an issue if you extrapolate. But as others have pointed out, data centers today already require air and water cooling which isn’t likely as efficient so net gain on the environment is probably worse with land data centers in terms of cooling. And they noted the hardware inside had a higher reliability, potentially due to its pure nitrogen atmosphere in the capsule, so that’s less need for buying replacement servers and performing maintenance.

No clue if this thing is actually feasible beyond small scale due to the very high deploy and retrieval costs. But in my opinion this isn’t like some environmentally oblivious solution.