He definitely won’t be working with Hollywood. Whatever he’s working on will be a Czech production, because Dan doesn’t like the way things are done in modern Hollywood. Anyone who knows him even a little would expect him to assemble his own capable team outside of Hollywood and use AI for anything he lacks the budget or manpower for.
People like you don’t really know anything about Dan. He was probably one of the first people in the Czech Republic to openly champion GamerGate back in 2014 and bring attention to it among Czech gamers. To this day, he posts several times a day on his personal Facebook (in Czech) about the latest excesses of left-wing activism.
Dan has always been anti-woke, but for a long time that position wasn’t about opposing minorities in games. It was about opposing the overemphasis on pushing a message at the expense of everything else, especially the story. Dan has explicitly said he wanted to show progressive creators that it’s possible to write a good story and make a good game while including minorities without lowering the overall quality of the product. In other words, he wanted to prove the left that it can be done well.
As for gay inclusion, it was already present in KCD1 (Istvan Toth, Erik, and a monk in the Sasau monastery). Many of the people claiming that KCD1 was "based" while KCD2 is "woke" don’t even know this because they’re just tourists. Also, for some reason KCD1 attracted a Tumblr audience that started shipping Henry and Hans (they call it Hansry), and a lot of fan art came out of that back in the day. That doesn’t automatically make those people woke activists btw. One of my friends, for example, draws Hansry shipping art (she even had it signed by Tom McKay and Luke Dale) and she’s strongly anti-woke. Dan said he also wanted to give those fans a little something in KCD2, which is why that gay scene was included but it was done in a subtle way and wasn’t forced on anyone. You really have to actively pursue it if you want to see it at all.
Dan actually wrote a post about this whole new "controversy" in Czech on his personal Facebook page. He didn’t "get ousted". According to him, the workload of making massive games like KCD was physically destroying him. After he left the Mafia series, he had to build Warhorse Studios from scratch, and there were several points when it looked like the company might not survive. Before KCD went into development, he still had dark hair and a beard (you can even see it in their Kickstarter video), but during development he went completely gray. He ended up in the hospital after KCD1 and nearly had a heart attack during KCD2. He decided he doesn’t want to keep working at that insane pace and stress level anymore.
He’s financially independent, wants to work on smaller projects at his own pace, spend more time with his family, and focus on new ideas (which he has so many apparently). He’s also talked about how AI and new technology are about to radically change game and film production, and he doesn’t want to commit to another 5-year, 300-person "monster" project in the old model because it’s like sending a rocket to a distant planet, and when the crew finally arrives, they discover people are already there — because after they launched, someone invented lightspeed travel (or something like that).
So it seems much more like a personal and strategic decision than some dramatic corporate fallout.
► Show SpoilerLMAO "My friend does deeply woke alphabet nonsense things, but isn't woke because he/she says they're not, and I go along with it."► Show Spoiler
