When developers are treated better and crunch less, they often do produce better higher quality games like Supergiant and sometimes manage games better like Insomniac.
and when they do crunch employees and psychologically abuse them by having them watch snuf films for research, Jason and his ilk will shower the game with praise and give it endless GOTY awards. look at the endless praise heaped by the "people super concerned with crunch and abuse" on TLOU2. the only reason the plot leaked was a disgruntled employee! yet it appears worker's rights only matter to Jason, etc. when convenient.
that's the problem with journalists like Jason, he thinks he is an objective observer, but he is not. he has his biases. he and the entire industry was willing to overlook Naughty Dog's corporate abuses all year long, while hounding other companies for similar issues. even now, we see Jason and his friends fanning the flames, platforming the aggression towards CDPR and amplifying it. Jason himself is even writing directly about the devs, centering the conversation on them. this is not the best time, a week before Christmas, to suddenly throw Bloomberg's billion dollar spotlight on these embattled devs. but Jason will never have to read those death threats. he can and will just blame them on "toxic gamers" and youtubers like The Quartering.
see, these journalists are the first to "speak up" about "toxic gamers", which is a way for them to cowardly refuse responsibility for the very reach of the platforms they are so privileged to use. for some reason they don't think of themselves as gamers, they don't see how their own actions and pettiness influences the culture at large. they fail to take responsibility for their positions as media gatekeepers, promoters, and evangelists. in Jungian terms, the "toxic gamer" is their shadow, and they project all their own toxicity on them, using them as a public scapegoat. it works wonders on MSM devotees.
TRUTH: their real job is selling product, luxury goods, which are entirely unnecessary. they do not make the world a better place. but they hate this, because they are self-hating hyper consumerists LARPing as socialists. video games, Hollywood films and the entertainment industry as a whole is a great pointless drain on resources. look at California, the home of Hollywood, how their energy system barely holds together, and how poorly they are steward to their environment, resulting in yearly massive wildfires and even fire tornadoes. that's these intellectuals, they spend all their time convincing us they are so smart and have everything figured out and we are morons for not letting them dictate all of law, culture and society. while at the same time they themselves produce very little. deconstructionism is not producing anything, it is merely commenting on things others have made. "representation in media" is similarly based on iteration, repetition, of taking something that came before and changing it. having a new POC hero isn't enough, it has to be a known property, it has to be a reference to something that already exists and has a following. journalist activists hijack these followings. that's the postmodern trick, you don't make anything new, you just stand to the side and say that in your ideal world it would have been done "this" way.
you notice all these people are mere critics, they don't make anything themselves. they are not artists. they are sideliners. history will forget them entirely. if Jason writes a story of any consequence, we will see it in the real world. they famously covered crunch at Naughty Dog and yet the entire industry gave that game tons of awards. so when they complain about crunch, they are being disingenuous. they are fine to ignore it when it occurs for a game they like. this alone makes them less than journalists. they are mere consumer advocates. no better or worse than The Quartering.
