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.
it’s wild how Gamers are at this strange intersection of capital, meritocracy, and consumerism.
the highest quality bar a videogame can reach is a combination of how much money, time, and labor can be shown at once on screen, and a justification for the excessive technology purchased to render it. but within the game, it must be Fair, in that to spend money to increase your power within it is gauche, meddling, and disastrous to its social fabric. but Content for the game must be a never ending treadmill - predictable, deferential, but also cannot use the same asset or clone an idea from anywhere else. a Gamer understands the violent inequality of the society they live in, because any replication of that inequality in their game is met with anger. Every Gamer's ideal game without gambling, microtransactions, DLC, needless remakes, or free of bugs is the ideal of a socially and economically equal and just society. But in the real world of capital, the consumer's demands supersede all others, and so the brain worms chew on
the consumers demands supercede all (from the consumers pov) because very often they have that expectation hoisted upon them.
I used to work in the hospitality sector, and I've now had a medical professional drop his nerves on the ground like a bunch nervous school students because I worked on a game his friends play that he's bad at
it felt wildly uncomfortable because a decade ago I was Just Like Them, now I work in an industry that is, imo, incredibly banal and unexciting, and the degrees of alienation it's created is wild.
this is their outlet, their power fantasy, it's their one bang-for-buck thing they devote a lot of their free time to because capitalism doesn't let them have enough free time at all. And the weight of the grind is so harsh they forget it's a system, not the people in front of them to blame.
we wanted to make video games, not make the salve that soothes the psychic wounds of everyone from nurses to waitresses, from financial workers to farmhands. the little decisions we make determine the psychological well-being of millions for better or worse, and we're just trying to work on a cool thing!
the responsibility, the impact, it's far too much..I have to wonder if this same kind of discourse erupted around Hollywood films in the 90s when escapist fantasy wasn't just a niche but became mandatory to ensure the alienation of our daily lives.
people are being squeezed to death for nothing, they feel the profound pain and the heat is cranking up in every possible meaning and they have zero agency. the one thing they get to do is yell at us because someone at a cafe, an auto shop, a warehouse, an office yelled at them.
