Massive Entertainment COO Believes Politics in Games Are ‘Bad for Business’

Even though The Division takes place in a dystopian future, Massive Entertainment explicitly attempts to distance itself from making any kind of political stance. When he spoke at the Sweden Game Conference 2018, Massive Entertainment COO Alf Condelius said the company was not interested in addressing politics. In fact, he said he believes politics are “bad for business.” According to him, the studio would rather leave political statements up to players’ interpretation.

Speaking of the possible political undertones of The Division, Condelius said:

It’s a universe and a world that we created for people to explore how to be a good person in a slowly decaying world. But people like to put politics into that, and we back away from those interpretations as much as we can because we don’t want to take a stance in current politics.

It’s also bad for business, unfortunately, if you want the honest truth… but it is interesting and it is a discussion that we have, and it’s an ongoing discussion we have with our users, of course, because people want to put an interpretation into the universe that we create and they want to see their own reality in the fantasies that we give them, and the stories that the games are.

However, Condelius was asked about another project his studio is working on a game based on the 2009 film Avatar. That is a movie with an explicit personal message, so some wondered how his statements will fit into that. While admitting the message of the movie is “political,” he also stated, “we’re not going out and saying you should vote for that person, or you should not do this.”

Massive Entertainment is currently prepping for the release of The Division 2 on March 15, 2019. It’s Avatar game, on the other hand, has no release date. That won’t be released anytime before 2020, and we haven’t even seen footage of it yet. The Avatar game, however, has no impact on the team working on The Division series.

[Source: GamesIndustry]