Scott

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.

It's funny you should mention that cause Destin used to be part of Screw Attack which before its acquisition by Rooster Teeth had a very close relationship with That Guy With The Glasses/Channel Awesome.

He also thanked two youtubers who, let's say, have a less than stellar reputation with the gamedev community with their "reporting."

I'm not as inclined to be as charitable with someone who's inviting Colin Moriarty to talk to about videogames tbqh. The best case in that circumstance is that he's simply too ignorant to have a coherent take on anything in the industry, but more likely he's an intentionally malevolent force on the discourse

I literally just chosted about a video I saw where the “games pundit” said without irony that “nobody expects this” and “why don’t more developers do this” again and again.

The way this has all played out is a bummer because I think Baldur's Gate 3 is a really interesting example of this trend of critically and commercially successful games that are seen as at least somewhat groundbreaking for the AAA space and that are in many ways defined by their huge scope, or at least would be fundamentally different with a smaller scope (alongside titles like Elden Ring and Tears of the Kingdom) and I think there's an important conversation on how to square the value of these titles with the importance of building a sustainable industry (and would love to see any examples of people having this conversation).
And it's an important opportunity to provide the context on how unsustainable AAA development has become to those who don't know this stuff - if you're saying "the average consumer doesn't know what goes into making a game" as a GAMES JOURNALIST shouldn't your instinct be to try and answer that question for your readers, rather than using that knowledge gap as a way to bludgeon people trying to talk about a problem?

It's really disheartening to see how a small number of bad actors can convince so many people of things clearly incompatible with observable reality.
This whole time I've been reading the "lazy dev" takes and thinking "wait, what? None of this happened, nobody said this. This is mad.".
It is indeed quite mad.

"If I were a game developer, I would simply not make bad games"

(In all seriousness though, great post)

I swear Hard News and Screw Attack in general is cursed.

While Legarie is an intellectually lazy hack, it's pretty silly to dismiss all criticism along these lines. To start with, I've seen very few people suggest that small or medium game developers can or should try to replicate Larian here.

Any anger I've seen has been pointed very squarely at the largest AAA developers. BG3 had a long development cycle but this is an argument for games to have longer development cycles! We've seen the development cycles of AAA games consistently decrease and the industry move toward a model of charging the most possible money for the least amount of value.

Yes, this is just capitalism. Some people realize this but most do not. Instead of saying that their complaints about the changes in the industry that they have seen with their own eyes are wrong or ill-founded we should explain what that driving force is. It's not developers, it's their bosses.

Destin has worked at IGN since 2008 and has been their director of video since 2020. Surprisingly enough, this was not a freelance piece.

co-host is an extremely good website because i can click on a random post about videogame development and not be barraged by the most horrific takes of all time

thanks for the write up