This guy makes several key mistakes, and doesn’t understand the relationship between (or difference between, for that matter) developers and publishers / executives. He pivots in one sentence from talking about number of layoffs to talking about failed games, but those are not direct corollaries. Big publishers and large studios laid off teams with games that performed incredibly well. Lots of teams that were mid-development were killed. Remember Tango Gameworks? The studio that everyone liked, and didn’t have any flops? That was completely laid off? It had nothing to do with their games, and was entirely about Xbox forcing its 1P studios to release on Game Pass, which doomed their sales. It was bad executive management at MS, not bad games, choosing to buy Bethesda and Activision at the expense of budgets for its existing studios. Obviously Redfall and Concord were huge flops, but they were a tiny fraction of the layoffs across the industry.
He correctly points out that Gaming is a subset of the software industry, and that the trends and decisions being made by executives across the industry are the same, but just sort of hand-waves that away by saying it’s not just gaming, and that “people are facing economic challenges right now” in general. Yeah! And guess that those challenges are? Short-term P&L gains via mass layoffs, in order to claw back money from acquisitions, stock buybacks, and executive pay-gouging. But it’s not developers doing that, it’s publishers and executives. No one writing code is like, “I’ve decided to make live-service schlock”. But they’re the ones losing their jobs, not the dorks who did decide that.
“What is unique in gaming, is that this is largely self-inflicted.” (6:40) My brother in Christ… stahhhhhp.
He then turns this into some kind of attack on game journalists, who have been rightfully calling out the game industry layoffs, as though they’re… supposed to only report on things happening uniquely in gaming, and not also in other industries, even if it’s also happening in gaming? The narrative that “if a studio is laid off, it was their fault, or just the economy forcing them to be laid off”, is the false narrative of the publishers, and this guy is (whether he realizes it or not) helping bolster that narrative.
Lastly, this dude is dropping right-wing dogwhistles left-and-right. Listing “ideological soapboxes” alongside “bloated projects” and “garbage games” for failing games tells me everything I need to know. And if you check the comments, his fans definitely heard the whistle too.
Here’s his brilliant take on thousands of line-level developers being laid off for decisions made above their heads by millionaires:
“As a customer I’m going to be honest, I just don’t care or feel anything for any of these internal struggles that these companies go through.” (7:10 in the video)
Big “stop picketing and deliver my Amazon package I paid money for” energy right here.
Remember Tango Gameworks? The studio that everyone liked, and didn’t have any flops? That was completely laid off?
He pointed that out as an exception. But, it’s been mostly the AAA studios that produced massive, massive high-budget flops, and then they laid off a bunch of their staff.
But it’s not developers doing that, it’s publishers and executives. No one writing code is like, “I’ve decided to make live-service schlock”. But they’re the ones losing their jobs, not the dorks who did decide that.
No, but when developers and the rest of the teams see that it’s “live-service schlock”, they should start looking at their resumes, instead of thinking “well, my job is safe because it’s a large corporation”.
Why would anybody working on Concord think that it’s a good game with a good concept that is going to succeed? Or Kill the Justice League? Or Multiverse? You think all of those microtransactions and attempts at catching some unoriginal idea are going to be well-received?
Just look at it for what it is, and realize it’s going to fail. And then plan accordingly.
He then turns this into some kind of attack on game journalists, who have been rightfully calling out the game industry layoffs
No, look at what they did before they talked about the layoffs. Sure, calling out the layoffs is justified and it’s worth reporting.
What’s not worth reporting is what Twitter is saying about any of this, and then going on some soapbox trying to counter it. Thus, promoting this idea that the general public gives a shit about whatever fight this is, when in reality, they don’t even know it exists. He’s literally reading off one of this articles, that goes off on a tangent that a few people on Twitter said something about games being “too woke” and tries to counter that.
Fuck Twitter. Stop reporting on Twitter. It’s a shit platform that is a tiny, tiny microverse of actual people doing actual things that don’t see any of that. Obviously, nobody looked at a game and thought “oh, well, that’s too woke, so I’m not going to buy it”. They didn’t buy it because it was a shit game with shitty microtransactions.
And if you check the comments, his fans definitely heard the whistle too.
I checked the comments. I read the comments on most YouTube videos. I saw nothing of the sort. Most of them are praising him for what he’s saying.
Ideological soapboxes are very real things that games “journalists” push on a daily basis. It’s manufactured bullshit that gets echoed only because they report on whatever some dude on Twitter said. I don’t know why you would mistake that as some dog whistle.
“As a customer I’m going to be honest, I just don’t care or feel anything for any of these internal struggles that these companies go through.” (7:10 in the video)
Right, instead of talking about the discussion as a whole, let’s take some out-of-context quote he said in the video and use that as evidence that he doesn’t care about the industry.
You didn’t even quote the entire sentence: “…especially when it’s mismanagement to blame.” I guess that bit didn’t fit your narrative?
But, it’s been mostly the AAA studios that produced massive, massive high-budget flops, and then they laid off a bunch of their staff.
Those are still failures on the publisher’s part. This isn’t 30 years ago. Most game studios are not independent, they’re owned by the publishers, and the publishers have immense creative control.
No, but when developers and the rest of the teams see that it’s “live-service schlock”, they should start looking at their resumes, instead of thinking “well, my job is safe because it’s a large corporation”.
Really easy to say, but, believe it or not, during a time where the tech industry is actively shedding 10s of thousands of jobs, looking at your resume doesn’t actually do anything for you.
Honestly, you seem to be saying “it’s developers fault because I refuse to understand power dynamics”. You may as well just scream “bootstraps” over and over.
Really easy to say, but, believe it or not, during a time where the tech industry is actively shedding 10s of thousands of jobs, looking at your resume doesn’t actually do anything for you.
Are you just proving his point by saying that the whole industry is laying people off, instead of it being specifically a gaming industry problem?
Obviously, nobody looked at a game and thought “oh, well, that’s too woke, so I’m not going to buy it”. They didn’t buy it because it was a shit game with shitty microtransactions.
Except these people are out there, and we’ve known this since GamerGate happened over a decade ago. One of the top Steam curators is called “Sweet Baby Inc detected”, and exists to identify games that are “too woke”:
I didn’t really want to have to watch any more of this dude, but I wanted to make sure I gave him a fair shake… and hoo boy.
Just look at it for what it is, and realize it’s going to fail. And then plan accordingly.
This is just victim blaming, bruh. Even if a developer sees a project is going badly, it’s not like there are infinite jobs out there that need filling. Changing jobs is not fast and easy, some of the workers are likely on work visas that don’t allow them to just change employers, game companies aren’t all in the same small area such that it won’t require moving homes which is a huge expense, and there’s no guarantee that the project you’re moving to will be any better.
This is a failure of worker protection laws. Framing it as workers just needing to hustle smarter, while executives run companies and families into the ground, is peak corporate apologism.
He’s literally reading off one of this articles, that goes off on a tangent that a few people on Twitter said something about games being “too woke” and tries to counter that.
If you don’t think that alt-right-lite is a huge problem in gaming circles, I don’t know what to tell you. Go play literally any multiplayer game and you will find plenty of gamers spouting anti-DEI/ anti-woke/ right-wing talking points in no time flat. And yes, they absolutely do avoid games based on it. And the problem with just ignoring this is that you’re ceding the narrative to them. Young white men have seen a shift rightwards precisely because alt-right-lite chuds like JonTron capture them via gaming-focused content, and then shift them over to politics-focused guys like Tate/ Shapiro/ etc. It’s a pipeline, that often starts in gaming spaces.
Ideological soapboxes are very real things that games “journalists” push on a daily basis.
He wasn’t talking about ideological soapboxes in reference to journalists, he was talking about developers. And he is using that as a direct euphemism for “DEI”/ “woke” content.
And yes, the comments are agreeing with him, that’s the point of a dogwhistle. There are a bunch of comments being anti-diversity/ anti-woke, referencing another video of his about game companies hiring people who supposedly despise gamers.
Here is a video of his called “The Real Impact of DEI in Gaming”. He uses rainbow/pink/diversity-washing being bad to then ultimately conclude that DEI is a net negative that he (no joke) BLAMES ON OVERREGULATION by the government. He then goes on to suggest that DEI actually is about dividing people in order to (also not a joke) feed a DEI-consulting industry.
“They’re hiring in people that don’t have the merit, that don’t have the skill” (8:40) Classic. He then goes onto blame “DEI hire” developers for games being buggy or releasing too early, as though that is their choice (once again, he clearly doesn’t understand what developers do or do not control).
It’s frustrating seeing these chuds get wiser about the number of levels they couch their ultimate anti-diversity rhetoric in, because clearly it’s working on some people. Instead of saying, “diversity in gaming companies bad”, he says, “regulations force execs to hire diverse devs who lack merit (which is bigoted bs on its own), who then over time lower the quality of games, ** and also** evil DEI consultants intentionally push devs to make diverse games without being sincere about the portrayals and stories… so in the end we should stop pushing devs to be diverse and make diverse games, and just let each group of people make games for themselves (which is back to square one where big companies just hire white guys).”
He’s literally just taking all the Republican anti-DEI rhetoric and applying to to gaming.
Steam reviews and only possibly, in only very rare cases, although disappointingly-often not - YouTube video reviews, can be a good source.
The idea is… to not to listen to people who don’t play games the way you do.
A friend, potentially a random Steam user, a Reddi- Lemm- ahem, sorry,a… social media user, a… person who has played the game in question thoroughly and pointed out what they liked - and you know they’re like you, …and they played for similar reasons as you; these are the people to listen to. People who play games, like yourself.
Only they can tell you if the game is totally worth your own time!
Most of them have no idea what they’re talking about, and sometimes those who do, are making a video just for entertainment purposes or got paid (in getting a free game key) to not say anything too bad about it.
There are a bunch of flying/gliding/wall climbing characters, but a lot of characters don’t have tools to deal with enemies who are not grounded.
The game has been fun, but I’ve given it up now mainly because of balance and match making issues. >80% of the games I play are completely one-sided. One team will never be able to touch the objective or will be completely confined to the spawn point. Even if I’m on the winning team, such one-sided steamrolling is no fun.
I would assume that most people are just just listening to their favorite game reviewers as if they were listening to a friend talking about games. It’s a parasocial relationship and it’s more important what a certain person seems to be thinking about a title than how well-founded this opinion is.
This is exactly what I do, and I think it’s honestly a very healthy way to engage with that kind of content. If you find someone you like, and/or who has a lot of overlap on preferences, then that’s a great way to get an idea for how much you’d like a game.
Hell, even if you don’t tend to prefer the same things, if the person reviewing is sufficiently passionate or entertaining, you can still develop an appreciation for why someone else likes what they do. I’ve absolutely struggled trying to get into Fallout: New Vegas for a variety of reasons, but I still respect it a lot because Hbomberguy had a very compelling video on what he liked about it.
I’m pretty sure people have, in this age of “let’s play” videos. You can see the gameplay play out in real time instead of listening to a brief, curated summary.
Yeah, I agree. I’m not at all interested in what score they gave the game; I’m more interested in what they liked/didn’t like and, more importantly, why they felt that way. Then I can get a sense if the game will match my tastes/interests.
This solves nothing if the goal is engagement. Any engagement in corporate properties is a form of engagement which promotes the media being presented. A corporate sponsored video is a corporate sponsored video, regardless of the platform.
Ideally it wouldn’t be, but corporations will use whatever video platform is popular to pump out videos designed to increase engagement because to them it’s advertising. They will try and sponsor their content on whichever content creator is on said platform with a large audience.
I’ll stop you right there: I don’t give a shit if they pirate every single game they play. It doesn’t matter. Because, even amongst the streamers, you are looking at hours of prep per game (to dial in settings, weird streaming hiccups, etc) and on the VOD side it is generally accepted that you have hours of footage and editing for every minute of Content.
And all of that costs money. Being able to stay up late to write a script to make that Dark Souls run really cool? Doing insane after-effects editing to do a stupid joke star wipe? Or just playing the same cutscene over and over so that you can get the right background NPC for your gag. That takes time.
And you know what helps with time? Money. Which comes from revenue and “engagement”.
And this is very demonstrable. Plenty of youtubers and streamers have very clear differences from their early work to their new work. A great example is Michael Reeves (who I assume is not cancelled just yet but…). His early videos are awesome. They also are incredibly low budget and often rushed. Whereas his newer videos (even the one where he just drives around in a sandstorm for a while…) have ridiculously good production values and involve some real feats of engineering. The difference? Before he was part time flunking out of school and tutoring for a living. Now? He… nobody is really sure how Michael Reeves makes money but I assume OTV pays him a good salary for showing up a few times a year?
Also: People vastly underestimate how much storage and bandwidth is required for video. Which is why peertube and the like basically exist for proof of concept one offs and for companies to fork and use in their own products.
But I point it out because a lot of these decisions to create freer platforms without advertising puts the cost of creation on the creator without a way for them to make money. People want their high quality content without paying for it.
The only gaming videos I’m ever likely to put out are tutorial videos.
Now that I think of it, for consistency, because I have posted game tips on the Fediverse first and nowhere else before, I might actually post to Peertube if I make it a video. But for someone else just hoping to help out their fellow gamers, they might want to make sure the widest audience would be able to actually easily access their tutorial. If I make the world’s best tutorial, but it is never indexed by search engines, I’m probably not going to help many gamers looking up the problem I try to show them how to solve. How many eyeballs will possibly see the content isn’t always a “how much money can I extract” concern. Here it is a “how accessible is my help to other people?” concern.
I used to enjoy Gmod/SFM animations, but that content naturally takes months of work for people to put out. That was okay because there were dozens of amateurs always releasing their own things; but now, the trend is for weekly or even more frequent videos, which means animators need to rush to put out trendy 8 second shorts, switch to low-effort mediums like Let’s Plays, or just stop getting visitors entirely.
Every so often, I find a great animator that’s sitting in the last category getting their detailed animations quashed, and I get to see the 3 videos they’ve put out in the last 5 months; still wish YouTube could put them in my recommendations.
“Gaming Youtube” is the same as any other form of media.
If you only watch trash reality TV then “Television is dead”. Whereas, if you only watch prestige TV on FX and AMC you’ll complain that “the sitcom is dead”. And if you only watch NBC or whatever the fuck… you’ll wonder why tim allen hasn’t had his legs broken by the dealers he narced on. Err, where was I?
Anyway. It is the same here. If you just watch whoever has the most views you are going to get the bottom of the barrel trash entertainment because it is specifically designed to cater to people who are browsing, watch for five minutes, then leave it on while it is still going.
Whereas you can also put a bit of work in. Find creators you do like. Yes, there is a massive discoverability problem (that gets worse with every major update…) but watching a VOD that appeals to you and maybe googling to find out if they were “cancelled” yet goes a long way. And, in that regard, people like Mortismal and Iron Pineapple are WAY better than anything we saw a decade or two ago.
Which is no different than TV. Nobody expected the TV show about the dad from Malcolm in the Middle becoming a drug dealer to be one of the greatest shows ever made (in that it gave us Better Call Saul but…). But people watched an episode or two and then listened when everyone else on the planet said “the first season is weird but it gets REALLY good by like episode five or six”.
Or… we can just do clickbait “Everything new sucks except for me” content.
All shit like this does is indicate how little the creators think of their viewerbase… And the fact that people think this is “true” means said creators are right to assume the worst.
You mean the prick who was one of the biggest voices legitimizing the Gamergate crowd who couldn’t even be bothered to speak against the harassment toward devs and games media? The guy whose entire claim to fame was screaming about “lazy devs” in an era where it was still kind of a miracle to even get a PC port of most games?
Regardless of him being a piece of shit, his content creation style was still very much “yell into a camera” similar to Sterling but with a lot fewer skits. That is still a popular style but plenty of youtubers outright build up scripts because they want to tell a narrative about the game they are playing or reviewing. Mandalore is a great example of that.
Which is similar to the old single camera sitcoms. There is a lot of charm to it but there is a reason the vast majority switched to multi-cam setups. And a lot of that is a mix of budget and just being able to do cooler stuff.
So for 1, here’s a pretty explicit quote where he does speak out against the harassment “I call on everyone to reject harassment in all its forms.” @cynicalbrit (first comment).
Definitely unfortunate that while he was attempting to champion the cause for a discussion on ethics (which he had been involved with for years when that all happened), the mantle got co-opted by a bunch of terrible people. But at best I can only blame him for thinking he could right the ship at that point, and that’s not a large enough mistake for me to define him by.
He definitely didn’t “yell into camera”, both because he was just projecting his voice (I’m constantly confused when people can’t distinguish loud from yell) and most videos didn’t actually feature a camera shot. He was known for a lot more than his criticisms for devs for things like 30 FPS locks: he was an excellent color commentator for SC2, he prolifically provided coverage for indie games and was a huge consumer advocate.
As he relates to the topic at hand, he was a giant reliable source of gaming recommendations of his day and it’s disingenuous to suggest there haven’t historically been highly influential, reliable and quality creators to assist people in discovering games.
Yeah. That is, and was, some “All lives matter” bullshit that then proceeds to insist that people who had received documented threats in the past and were seeing the exact same attacks occuring were 'inserting themselves" and then insisting the real problem is people is… people who are angry they are being doxxed and threatened constantly?
say, we cannot talk about ethics because you won’t stop talking about us allegedly harassing people. What is the first law of the internet? DON’T FEED THE TROLLS. By pushing this harassment narrative, you are giving these awful people victory and marginalizing the moderate majority who do want a serious conversation to happen about journalistic ethics.
Also: This was not a video on his channel or even his podcast. This was a comment in a relatively low impact video that basically only content creators watched
Yeah. Fuck that bullshit. If Bain hadn’t died he would be right there with the asmongolds of the world right now.
And while I won’t talk about the personal experiences of my friends who were formerly in games media and dev (because nobody believed them back then and sure as hell won’t now…), I will point out that a few outlets, when talking about the current “DEI is the real problem in the world” stupidity have alluded to Bain being the reason they initially stayed quiet until it was too late. Because when you have someone with that audience insisting that all old media is fundamentally evil and lying to you? You don’t pick a fight that will just lead to you getting fired.
Major difference is that TV and your examples aren’t a firehose free for all of content. There is at least a minor barrier to entry. Which helps stem some of the tide at least.
You take the role of a single character to explore the whole world. You can take quests, follow rumors, explore fortress mode forts that you made, etc. Combat is controlled directly, you can target individual body parts with wrestling or weapon attacks. And more.
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