In her song “PROFIT,” Doechii says, “They don’t make statues of critics, they don’t make statues of fans.” Doechii didn’t win a Grammy by catering to the whims of her label or her followers—a recurring theme throughout the album Alligator Bites Never Heal is Doechii’s commitment to her artistic pursuit, despite the fluctuating support of the people around her. Doechii knows that you can’t please everybody, and attempting to do so will only hold you back from making great art.
A common refrain in video game spaces is the importance of player feedback. Obviously, quality assurance and bug fixing are vital parts of the game development process that require meticulous playtesting and iteration toward the truest version of any given game. But some players are convinced that their personal preferences are just as important as, if not more important than, technical feedback, and that game developers are obligated to encode their opinions into canon.
“In 2026, one of the most radical things a game studio can do is ask its players what they actually want to see and then listen to the answer,” says YouTuber TheBackgroundNPC in a sponsored video about the upcoming dark fantasy RPG Lords of the Fallen 2. The video is a bizarre marketing campaign for a new in-game collection of generically horny, female-only armor.
The armor drop is a blatant attempt to cater to misogynistic culture war fanatics, as TheBackgroundNPC complains about the designs of female characters such as Abby from The Last of Us Part II and other hot women who certain gamers can’t get it up for (and make everyone else’s problem). TheBackgroundNPC describes these compelling, thoughtful character designs as “stripped-down femininity—almost like an embarrassment of the female body itself,” and contrasts them with CI Games’ “unapologetically beautiful” male fantasy mannequins of the sort we’ve all seen a billion times before.
CI Games presents the incredibly generic, stereotypically revealing outfits as revolutionary: “You wanted fierce,” they write on X. “You wanted beautiful. You wanted provocative.” The outfits were revealed exclusively in the 20-minute sponsored video—the studio literally hides behind an approving female content creator, as if trying to quell their own guilty subconscious.
The problem with making design choices not because they’re interesting but because of their likelihood to appeal to fans is that, inevitably, people will see right through them. It took less than 24 hours for CI Games to follow up on the armor reveal with a desperate attempt to save face, promising that the game has modest outfits, too. Meanwhile, a quote post aptly describing the outfits as falling into the “unhorny valley” ratioed the initial announcement with more than double its likes.
TheBackgroundNPC celebrates the idea of a studio actively involving a player in the design process. But if it’s truly so amazing, why did the studio have to pay her to make a video about it—to build them a statue?
