Abubakar Salim possesses the kind of optimism actors require. After years of failed auditions and lost parts, he’s as familiar with rejection as he is success. That persistence has paid off in roles on shows like Raised by Wolves and House of the Dragon. This year, he added another success to his record with the release of Tales of Kenzera: Zau, an eye-catching Metroidvania game that honors his late father and celebrates Bantu culture. It also marked his jump from acting in video games to making them.

His timing couldn’t have been worse. The games industry is in free fall, with massive layoffs hitting on a near weekly basis. For smaller developers, like Salim’s Surgent Studios, the situation is even more grim. As funding dries up, many small studios are simply vanishing.

Concurrently, online mobs decry the inclusion of people of color or those from marginalized groups in games, calling it “forced diversity”; if these games underperform, conspiracists point to these titles as an indication that representation equates with failure, ignoring the ongoing and nuanced challenges the industry faces.

When Salim released Zau in April, its Steam and Metacritic pages were bombed with users complaining about “3-letter agencies behind it that want to push an agenda” (a reference to consultancy firms like Sweet Baby Inc. or the acronym for diversity, equity, and inclusion: DEI). Reviews of Zau on those platforms have otherwise been quite positive.

Roughly six months after the game’s release, Surgent announced—like so many other studios this year—that it would put its team on hiatus until it could secure funding for its next project.

Surgent and Salim aren’t giving up. The team is pitching a new game—currently known as Project Uso—that they’re billing as an Afro-gothic, choice-driven RPG inspired by Planescape: Torment. Fittingly, it’s about not letting “fear of death consume you.”

Salim has a grand vision for Surgent’s future, even if he knows the current climate in the industry makes that future seem precarious. “We are definitely at a place where it is pretty dire,” he says. But he’s persistent. “Look, we’ve been pitching,” he adds. “We’re excited, we can feel it, we’re pumped for it. So you know what? Fuck it, let’s just talk about it.”

In game development, iteration is everything. Developers learn how to make games by actually making them. Surgent is no different. With their first game they built a team and found their voice. Now, they want to make a follow-up worthy of Zau.

“We want to emulate that sense of building with a community of people, with gamers in mind and with the players in mind,” Salim says. The team has made a Metroidvania already. RPGs are where they want to fire next. “What if Planescape: Torment had a baby with Batman: Arkham and that kind of combat, that kineticism,” he says of the game’s inspirations.

As for being Afro-gothic, Salim says the idea is to blend African culture with the sensibilities of Mary Shelley. Like its predecessor, the game draws from elements of African folklore and spiritual beliefs. Salim also opted to set Uso in the same universe as Zau, he says, to reflect “the different shades of life and world as the world as a whole.”

For Zau, Surgent Studios partnered with EA Originals, Electronic Arts’ initiative to fund small, independent projects—a model Salim says traditionally means everything is kept under wraps until the game is nearly finished. This time, the studio wants to involve its would-be players in the planning process by showing their hand while it’s still a prototype.

Game studios often use early access or involvement to better shape their games; Supergiant is currently gathering player feedback for its highly anticipated sequel to Hades. Salim hopes that by involving Surgent’s audience early, they can also help players better understand game development and how the industry works.

That’s a literacy direly needed in online game communities, where conspiracies about the impact of consultancy companies, “wokeism,” and “forced DEI” have wormed their way into conversations with and about devs at game studios. Developers seek third-party guidance for a variety of reasons: sensitivity reads, additional writing resources, to ensure accuracy, and more. Firaxis, for example, worked with Shawnee tribes on its upcoming strategy game Sid Meier’s Civilization VII to make sure they were properly representing the culture.

Surgent is no different. Salim sought help from many people when working on his first game. Content creators have honed in on its involvement with consultancy Sweet Baby Inc., which has been the target of an ongoing harassment campaign for advising studios on the representations of minority groups in their games. Across message boards and YouTube, they claim Surgent’s attempts to bring diversity to games is the reason for the studio’s financial troubles.

“It’s really funny to see all these sort of conspiracy theories of, oh, they needed to do it to get extra funding,” Salim says. “It’s like, I wish I had that extra funding, then we wouldn’t be where we are right now.”

As with many online conspiracies, the truth is the most mundane explanation. Salim was a voice actor on Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Origins; Kim Belair, Sweet Baby’s CEO, worked on several Assassin’s Creed games. The two inevitably crossed paths. Salim says that when he wanted to make the jump from acting into writing a game of his own, Belair was one of several people in the industry he approached for advice. Any mention of Sweet Baby in the game’s credits is for a simple reason: “We should credit everyone,” Salim says.

Salim’s been frank about harassment the studio has faced. He’s brushed off the “‘go woke, go broke’ crowd,” as he calls them—the people who argue that any whiff of diverse characters will tank a game.

“You can’t reason with these people,” says Wendy Via, cofounder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. Via is well-versed in how far-right extremists are using online platforms to further their aims. The gaming space in particular has long been a nexus for politics and culture, a space where conservative ideologies lead to targeted harassment, even before Gamergate brought these issues to the fore in 2014.

“Games, just like all the other social media platforms, they’re going to reflect what’s happening in society, particularly in our political system,” Via says. DEI backlash has been a well-documented talking point for the right throughout the 2024 election season. As guidelines for massive online spaces like X have changed, so too do the conversations that are surfacing. “We have to rely on the companies to put in place good policies and then actually enforce them,” Via says.

A Black developer with a very visible presence online, Salim has recently struck back at content creators on X and YouTube who have made racist remarks about him. During his Zau announcement during last year’s Game Awards, Salim appeared on stage in a black suit accessorized with an intricately designed scarf. A few recent video clips went viral on X in which creators refer to Surgent as “Spear Chucker” Studios and refer to Salim’s clothing during that presentation as a “Kwanzaa costume” and compare his look to Rafiki, a monkey from the animated film The Lion King. (Salim says the scarf is Italian, “just a scarf with African design.”)

“There’s a difference between someone saying, ‘I am boycotting your game because you worked with Sweet Baby’ to someone saying, ‘What’s this ooga booga game?’” Salim says. “There’s a big difference.”

Before migrating to X, the video with the racist remarks was on YouTube but was taken down after WIRED reached out for comment. “We removed the video in question for violating our harassment policies, which prohibit targeting an identifiable person with insults or slurs based on their race,” says YouTube spokesperson Jack Malon.

In a separate YouTube video, creators who’ve been critical of Salim talk about “roasting a brownie” whose name “sounds like a Palestinian alarm clock.” That video, sent to YouTube’s spokesperson, remains up; it has since been moved to a members-only part of the YouTube channel where it appeared. “RIP Spear Chucker Studios,” one of the creators said in the video before it was made private.

The studio’s hiatus, its search for a partner during an industry-wide financial crisis, the harassment and racism—”it’s been relentless,” Salim says. He’s had moments of doubt where he’s considered sticking to film and TV. But the idea of giving up, he says, “makes me sick.”

Project Uso, much like Zau, is a personal project for Salim. When Salim’s daughter is his current age, 31, he’ll be in his sixties; his father passed at 66. “There’s a part of me that looks at her and then sees what’s going on in the world, with Palestine, with Ukraine, with everywhere,” he says. “I don’t want her to see that, but at the same time, this is the truth.”