It seems like a lot of the "Baldur's Gate 3 is causing developers who hate their audiences and want to make dogshit titles to panic because now they can't be lazy!" stuff is coming from one specific op-ed piece at IGN by one Destin Legarie. I've put a few of his YouTube thumbnails above to give a sample of his work.
And who could have foreseen that a pundit who has spent the past few months on his personal YouTube channel defending the Activision merger seemingly at the exclusion of all other content would have some dogshit takes about video games?
To be clear: he doesn't seem like a hardcore culture war reactionary dude. He's not out here openly posting hate speech, and he's not overtly evil in the various ways YouTube video game people can be. It's not like IGN gave a platform to The Quartering or something, and I don't want this rant to be conflated with that sort of thing.
Instead, giving Legarie a platform sucks in a much more quiet, passive, insidious way. He makes bad arguments designed to stoke outrage based on his shitty, incurious worldview and then takes no responsibility for it.
If you haven't been paying attention to The Discourse, this was all started by a tweet thread by Xalavier Nelson, Jr (an indie developer who has worked on titles like Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator) concerned that not every game developer making an RPG has the money or resources to achieve what Larian was able to. He points out that BG3 had a shockingly long 7 year dev cycle with 3 years in early access, was built on top of an engine and tech made to support two prior (also successful) games that do incredibly similar things, the benefit of both the Baldur's Gate name and D&D IP, and even then took hundreds of developers across multiple studios to finish. Basically: the game is an impressive feat, but not one easily reproduced or one that should be viewed as easily achievable going forward. You need an army of devs, a mountain of money, and some incredible luck to pull off this kind of thing. Additionally, it should be noted, Nelson was talking about the scope of the game, especially its budget — not its stability or quality.
Legarie ignores that entire conversation and builds up a strawman to attack instead. He pulls the first tweet from Nelson's thread out of context, frames it as if Nelson is a AAA game dev begging for people to accept mediocrity and lowered standards, and smugly scoffs at the idea of an argument no one actually made. He then points to the Red Dead Redemption re-release not having 60 FPS or multiplayer support, the buggy condition of Jedi Survivor and Cyberpunk at time of release, and the monetization in Destiny 2 as egregious insults that underscore why "consumers" should be "a little upset right now."
Now, tossing around 'consumers' in the context of why you should be angry sets off alarm bells for anyone who's been around for more than a decade. It smacks of that specific strain of aggrieved, disgruntled audience sentiment that so easily curdles into reactionary outrage we've seen unleashed on developers and critics alike time and again. And that sucks, especially when you remember he's evoking that sentiment while attacking a point no one made.
But then he goes on to be upset about developers who point out that Nelson was right, claiming that he simply doesn't like being told that he's wrong:
Xalavier's tweets were well intentioned and he went on to add a lot of important context, but I think it misses the perspective of the consumer! We don't know anything about game design or how hard it is! We just know that Destiny is deleting hundreds of dollars worth of expansions when they feel like it, that Diablo is constantly reminding us to buy skins in their store, and most PC ports have been abysmal lately!
Remember, that tweet was made nearly a month before Baldur's Gate 3 blew up, and it was still contentious with fans speaking up about their frustrations and developers chiming in to say what felt like, "game development is hard, you don't get it, be quiet!"
And like... yeah, dude. Game development is hard. You don't know what you're talking about. And developers who do know are telling you to shut the fuck up. Or at least, I presume they are - he doesn't actually show any specific tweets here, so who knows what exactly he's referencing when he says he's being told to stop complaining. No one I've seen has actually told people to shut up, just that Nelson is correct - Baldur's Gate is a rare alignment of tailwinds that would be difficult to reproduce in a realistic or reliable way, and we should celebrate it for its accomplishments but not let it burn so brightly that it hides valuable smaller titles that will come in its wake. But hey, if you're gonna misrepresent one tweet thread, why not make up some unseen tweets to get mad at too?
Again there's this undercurrent of the anti-intellectual anger we've seen so much of in certain circles in the past decade. He plays the irate, wounded consumer who cannot or will not recognize that there are systemic issues that cause their games to turn out this way. He's Doug Walker's Nostalgia Critic firing guns in the air in anger over a Batman credit card while ignoring (or incapable of asking) why the card is there to begin with. Instead of asking the developers questions about why they feel that way (you know, like a journalist writing for IGN should probably do) he retreats to being outraged that his ignorance is discounted by people who know better. He doesn't like being told to 'shut up' when he's making a wrong point very loudly.
Look: games end up releasing when they do in the state they do because to a number of corporate, cultural, and financial pressures. "Is it the best experience for players?" is but one of a myriad of factors that drive this stuff. Teams run out of money. There are contractual obligations to fulfill. The license for the game's IP is going to run out. "We have to hit the Christmas window for this to make financial sense." The game needs more work but the publisher refuses to move the release because it's the only thing they have in Q4 and it's the CEO's ass if they don't ship something. "We can't release after Bigger Game X, so we either come out first or not at all." Sometimes it's plain old hubris. Sometimes the publisher is great to work with but the project manager and/or creative director are incompetent and reboot the project 14 times in new directions until the publisher has had enough and draws a line in the sand. Sometimes Game X is going great, but the studio is also funding a bigger gamble with Game Y, and Game Y starts to falter and suck resources from Game X until Game X releases with an emaciated, exhausted team that couldn't get it to where they wanted it given the deadlines. There are too many reasons to count. But none of them are a moustache-twirling executive (let alone an entire moustache-twirling development team) eager to release broken, sub-par titles and publicly telling players to be happy to suck their shitty product down on Twitter.
Acting like this isn't the case is at best a position of profound ignorance (which he clings to like a shield) and at worst a disingenuous attempt to play dumb to stoke outrage. Why are games released in a bad state? Because "they" are money grabbing conmen out to steal from you, and you should be outraged. Who are "they?" They're "the devs" - here a nebulous term that encompasses anything from rank and file developers at a studio to publisher execs who greenlight projects and handle the money stuff. Rage at the evil bad actors in the system singularly responsible for 80% of games coming out in bad shape this year, but never question the system itself. It can't be astronomical game budgets that make each release a massive gamble with a million moving parts but whose release can't easily be moved. It's astronomical game budgets make Baldur's Gate 3 possible! No, it's the grifters and conmen. Lazy devs. People who accept mediocrity. Lesser men who want charity for their inferior product, who exist only to hold back true visionaries. Real Andrew Ryan/John Galt shit on display here, which tracks with the YouTube thumbnails from the past few months.
And I just cannot believe that in 2023 I have to point out that games aren't bad because game developers don't want to make good games. Anyone who thinks otherwise just shouldn't be writing about games, full stop.
It also must be noted that this isn't just a YouTube video on a random channel: a big platform like IGN giving him a freelance piece like this comes at a time where other more progressive voices are getting slashed. Waypoint is gone, Fanbyte was gutted, Launcher barely got off the ground (no pun intended), and jobs are getting slashed at other publications. I know a lot of writers that are looking for new opportunities (and in fairness, several looking for fresh starts away from this wretched and underpaying industry). So why this young dude, with his hard-on for seeing Bobby Kotick take home a load of merger cash, who's so eager to stoke gamer outrage in ways that proved disastrous ten years ago? What editor approved this, of all pieces, and what does that say about the state of the site's editorial positions?
