This week, at The Game Awards 2024, Naughty Dog — the developer behind The Last of Us and Uncharted — revealed a brand new IP called Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. And so far, the reception to the major new PS5 game has not been overly positive. The reveal trailer — on both the PlayStation and Naughty Dog YouTube pages — has far more dislikes than likes, and the comments on the former are broadly negative. And we don’t even know what the comments on the latter would be because Naughty Dog, anticipating backlash, disabled the comments with their own upload.
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As he typically does, popular YouTuber and streamer Asmongold weighed in on the controversy. And people seem to care what he has to say, as the video has been “Trending” on YouTube since its upload. To this end, it has over 800,000 views in less than 24 hours. What did Asmongold have to say? Not much positive. In particular, he thinks the protagonist was the wrong choice.
“Maybe it’s just me but I feel like the market for masculine, non conventionally attractive female leads in games isn’t as big as the video game industry thinks it is,” begins the video, with Asmongold reading a post on X he made about the game.”
In the video, Asmongold continues: “This game probably started development over five years ago, and maybe back then a character like this might have seemed like a better idea.
“The graphics for this are really good. If you don’t like the character or whatever… there are a lot of paintings that I’m not a fan of, but I can admire that it looks really good. I think though if you are looking at a space bounty game that has 80s retro aesthetic that is about bounty hunting and shooting people and fighting with laser swords you are looking at a super majority male audience. You are going to have a sausage fest. That is just the way it is. If you try and make a character that doesn’t appeal to the main audience of the genre that you are designing a game in, you are going to have that game not do well.
“You can talk about people being misogynist, they’re racists, they’re bigots, they’re stupid gamers, you shouldn’t listen to them, but at the end of the day you are not going to bully those people into buying the game. It didn’t work with Concord. It didn’t work with Veilguard. It just doesn’t work. I mean Naughty Dog released the trailer with the comments turned off. You don’t release a trailer with comments turned off if you think you are going to get a lot of good comments. “
As you can see in the video above, Asmongold concludes by noting the underlying metrics for the game’s reveal trailer are not good.
“I was kinda surprised they saved this trailer for the end,” said the YouTuber. “They had to turn the comments off. If you look at the dislike extension, the game is getting mass disliked. It is very obvious this game did not very a good reception with audiences, right? Whether you agree with it or not, you got look at the numbers, and that’s it.”
