Take-Two Interactive, the major publisher behind Rockstar Games and 2K, has quietly scrubbed references to “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) from its 2025 annual investor report. This marks a sharp contrast to its 2024 filing, which prominently featured a dedicated DEI section filled with corporate praise, LGBTQ awards, and claims of how “diverse teams are more effective,” alongside the usual rainbow-branded jargon tailored for the DEI industrial complex.
But before anyone pops champagne thinking this signals a course correction, don’t be fooled because the damage is already done.
For years, DE&I has been used not to promote merit but to reengineer the workforce through superficial characteristics: race, gender, and sexual identity. It’s not about skill. It’s not about results. It’s about how many identity boxes a company can tick when hiring an employee, workers whose incompetence and ideology weaken product quality, diminish artistic freedom, and flood projects with messaging over substance.
In Western game development where White men still represent the majority of both the player base and the industry’s creative and technical workforce, DE&I has operated as a mechanism of enforced conformity and replacement.
Rather than prioritizing talent and experience, it frequently promotes symbolic hires to fulfill political optics. It’s a hiring framework built on resentment, anti-White, homosexual values, and political guilt. It doesn’t fix “inequality,” more rather it manufactures division and failure.
Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a textbook example. For the first time in franchise history, Ubisoft has positioned Yasuke, a historically insignificant figure as the primary protagonist.
Instead of drawing from the rich and well-documented history of Japan’s Sengoku period, the developers chose to reinvent Yasuke as a mythical Black samurai, despite the fact that historically, he served under Oda Nobunaga and was never granted such a prestigious title.
This isn’t authenticity, it’s a rewriting of history to fit an ideological narrative. And of course Ubisoft just HAD to include same-sex romance options for Yasuke for good measure.
Ultimately, the game was a commercial failure for a variety of reasons beyond the constantly controversial historical revisionism, though the new history of a “Black samurai” was the main reason for its failure. The backlash and poor reception were significant enough to push Ubisoft into deeper dependence on Tencent, which now holds controlling influence over many of Ubisoft’s iconic IPs.
Other examples of this trend can be seen in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, a title helmed by a transgender director whose previously worked on The Sims. The game features characters with visibly graphic top surgery scars and a cast designed to showcase racial and sexual diversity, including an androgynous companion who explicitly identifies as non-binary in dialogue with her family.
The bottom line is that DEI is an ideology that deliberately undermines media quality. Prioritizing identity over ability, whether based on race, gender, or sexuality it detracts from the final product all the same. Take-Two is no exception; they were among the last publishers to use their E3 stage time to make sweeping declarations about diversity and inclusion rather than focus on actual video games.
In its 2024 Annual Report, Take-Two stated, “We firmly believe that diverse teams are more valuable and effective, and that diversity is key to our success.” The company also spotlighted recognition from LGBTQ organizations and outlined scholarship programs aimed at expanding the diversity of its talent pipeline.
Now in 2025, the DEI section had been quietly rebranded as “Community & Engagement,” with its language noticeably softened. The original statement was revised to say, “We firmly believe that diversity of thought drives the innovation that is integral to our success.” Notably, all previous mentions of LGBTQ awards and diversity-focused initiatives were removed.
This shift toward the more vague concept of “diversity of thought” aligns with language increasingly used by companies adjusting to a changing political and legal environment. Recent moves by the U.S. Justice Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have cast doubt on the legality of DEI practices that explicitly prioritize race, gender, or other protected characteristics in hiring decisions.
The timing shows Take-Two’s move is less about abandoning DEI ideology and more about insulating itself from potential legal or political consequences by the Trump administration, especially as consumer backlash grows over products seen as saturated with inauthentic and performative representations of diversity.
But removing DEI from an investor report doesn’t erase it from the DNA of the products. Games like Grand Theft Auto VI and Borderlands 4, both long in development, were shaped under the peak of gaming’s DE&I takeover.
The influence of those hiring and creative practices will be embedded in the final product, regardless of what the company says today.
After continually loosing key, tenured staff in favor of bloating their headcounts substantially over the last few years, Rockstar has already signaled its new direction.
The company quietly revised GTA V‘s next-gen edition to remove drag queen NPCs spawning outside of a gay club while removing other content deemed “insensitive” such as the Captain Spacetoy with “interchangeable genitalia.”
Now, GTA VI is being marketed with promises not to “punch down” in its humor, a baffling departure from the franchise’s legacy of irreverent, no-holds-barred satire. The new protagonist? A Latina “girlboss” set in a version of Vice City that feels less like a satirical Miami and more like a sanitized, modern-day Detroit if GTA 6’s racial demographic is anything to judge.
GTA VI’s reimagined Vice City will feature a predominantly Black population and be heavily influenced by contemporary social justice themes all while attempting to maintain the franchise’s image as edgy and “mature.” This follows Rockstar’s decision to censor the Confederate flag in the GTA Trilogy version of Vice City, signaling a broader shift in tone and creative direction that treats “marginalized” groups as untouchable.
DEI and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) frameworks are frequently tied to funding from major global investment firms like BlackRock and Vanguard, which favor portfolios aligned with socially progressive values.
This creates strong incentives for companies to develop content that reflects those ideals at the expense of creative freedom. The result is a wave of hollow, formulaic media marked by censorship, gender ambiguity, and a disproportionate focus on racial and sexual identity.
Studios increasingly produce narrative-driven content aimed at meeting ideological benchmarks rather than satisfying their audiences.
The results are plain to see: widespread censorship, the stripping away of femininity, characters detached from reality, and an odd obsession with gender ambiguity and forced racial diversity.
Why? Because DEI mandates it.
Take-Two scrubbing DEI from its investor documents is like a student deleting their search history after plagiarizing, it doesn’t change what was done, only hides the evidence.
The gaming industry is stuck in a cultural tug-of-war. Developers are caught between consumer expectations and the demands of vocal activists who criticize attractive female characters or lament the absence of performative diversity. Take-Two’s rebranding effort seems more like a tactical move to avoid backlash while keeping the same ideological content under a different label.
Grand Theft Auto 6 is destined to both fail and succeed, regardless of any ideological messaging it contains. Simply put, it’s Grand Theft Auto, its name alone guarantees sales.
The franchise is no longer merely a mainstream staple, Grand Theft Auto V, with a lifespan of around 13 years and over 200 million copies sold, has transformed it into a full-blown normie magnet, selling nearly ten times more than its predecessor, Grand Theft Auto IV, or any earlier title in the series for that matter.
Very few of the original developers who revolutionized 3D open-world games and made Grand Theft Auto a household name are still at Rockstar Games. Since then, the studio has ballooned under Take-Two Interactive, which now oversees more than half a dozen fully owned subsidiaries supporting Rockstar’s flagship teams in North and San Diego.
All of this has been funneled into what is literally the most anticipated and expensive video game in history. Reports suggest that the budget for GTA 6 exceeds $1 billion dollars, a realistic figure when considering the scale of its global workforce, licensing, distribution and the cost of marketing as we approach its release.
Since the release of Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018, Rockstar’s thousands of employees across the U.S., U.K., Canada, India, and now Australia appear to have been focused entirely on GTA 6.
To recover such an unprecedented cost, likely over $450 million in wages alone Take-Two may push GTA 6’s retail price to $80 or even $100, marking a major shift in AAA pricing strategies. The publisher, already infamous for monetizing its 2K sports games through microtransactions aimed at younger audiences, may see this as a new standard.
GTA V’s staggering 200+ million sales remain a significant outlier, fueled largely by the explosive popularity of GTA Online and third-party roleplay platforms like FiveM which is now under Take-Two’s control. Reproducing that kind of breakout success with GTA 6 is far from guaranteed. At a $100 price point, the game would need to sell at least 10 million units just to break even on its $1 billion development costs.
Which is a massive ask, especially in today’s economic climate though certainly not impossible, at a retail price of $80 USD it would only need to shift 12.5 million units.
The reason for my skepticism is straightforward, GTA Online had over a decade of live service support and addons, with new missions, heists, vehicles, properties, and more. For GTA 6’s multiplayer to simply emulate GTA V, it would need to match that level of content from day one, offering 600+ vehicles, hundreds of missions, dozens of properties, and multiple high-replay heists to justify Shark Card purchases and sustain player interest once released.
The question remains: how much will carry over? And how much will players be forced to re-buy? Mishandling that would severely damage the game’s longevity. It’s hard to imagine GTA 6 maintaining a ten-year lifecycle like its predecessor, especially with current gaming trends showing waning long-term engagement.
Take-Two’s leadership has made clear that GTA 6 must be PROFITABLE, and it’s certain that players will be nudged into repurchasing much of the content through microtransactions.
Let’s not forget: we never got single-player DLC for GTA V because Rockstar chose to focus entirely on monetizing GTA Online. And now, with the possibility of GTA 6 being priced at $100, expecting it to match GTA V’s 30 million first-year sales seems wildly optimistic.
Add to that mounting concerns over corporate overreach, content censorship, and Rockstar’s new unwillingness to “punch down” at any “marginalized” groups, a key element that once defined GTA’s satirical edge. With GTA 6 seemingly focused on pandering to specific demographics through its setting, themes, and characters including rumored male strippers it’s clear the game has entered a very different ideological space.
Given how GTA V content was censored under pressure, there’s little doubt that anything deemed politically sensitive will be aggressively protected as it aligns with the demands of Take-Two Interactive and the feminist hires at Rockstar Games.
All indications suggest that GTA 6 is bound to sell, but it also appears poised to stir controversy and sheer disappoint, risking alienation of longtime fans. If the game fails to deliver both in quality and content, justifying its massive budget could be a serious challenge especially since Take-Two executives are unlikely to wait an entire year relying solely on Shark Card microtransactions to bring the game into profitability.
Take-Two’s quiet shift may reflect a wider corporate retreat from overt DEI commitments, especially as political and public scrutiny grows. Removing buzzwords doesn’t erase the years of development shaped by those values.
With a masculine Latina lead in GTA VI and the inclusive character palette of Borderlands 4, it’s clear the underlying politicized philosophy remains unchanged across Take-Two’s 2025/2026 AAA lineup and likely will continue unphased heading into 2027 and 2028.
Until there’s genuine reform, until hiring practices return to being based on talent rather than identity criteria’s, don’t be fooled by the silence. DEI hasn’t disappeared; it’s just been rebranded under vague labels like “BRIDGE.”
Expect GTA VI and Borderlands 4 to carry the same ideological fingerprints we’ve seen in recent years, even if Take-Two’s paperwork no longer spells it out.
