[Aurornis]

I respect his work, but I had to unfollow him on Twitter because he was so condescending to everything and everyone except his loyal fan base.

He’s in a category of influencers who post constantly about gripes and grievances and smug superiority. Some people like that content but I can’t stand it.

I really like hearing about indie development and small teams, but you don’t have to present everything as condescending superiority over the industry. That’s not the part I find interesting.

[cjbgkagh]

I think there is an element of audience capture that sets up a self reinforcing feedback loop that drives out the normies and ends up rather cult like.

[somenameforme]

Is it not also possible that there are an overwhelming number of problems with the big AAA type studios in games right now? I feel right now we're in sort of tale of two cities, because AAA games have turned into barely functioning uninspired parasitically monetized crap, while smaller scale development is in an absolute golden age. And it's likely that LLMs will only add fuel onto this turd burning fire.

[A_D_E_P_T]

In fairness, AAA games are practically over. They have grown too bloated, take too long to develop, and, with the culture wars raging in the background, almost every AAA game steps on at least one landmine and loses a large fraction of its audience before it is even released. Sad, really.

[somenameforme]

I don't think saying they stepped on landmines is entirely accurate. They jumped into the culture wars headfirst, and simply landed on concrete, as is the typical outcome. Why they chose to do that is an interesting question though, because if they just asked basically any 'normal' person the impact it would have on their sales - the answers would not be ambiguous.

[Aurornis]

There are real problems, but Jonathan Blow doesn't limit his criticism to those problems. He just indiscriminately criticizes everything. He's turned into the type of critic that is a broken clock that happens to right twice a day.

His criticism isn't limited to AAA game studies. He's a vaccine skeptic and is pretty heavy into far-right influencer garbage. All very surprising if you only know him from his games.

This Tweet is a classic https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1854708962462982465

Jonathan Blow:

> It doesn't help that all males currently under the age of 40 were raised to be supercucks

I started following him for his gaming work and talks. His influencer content is something else.

[wredcoll]

Anyone still following him after that needs to fundamentally reevaluate some life decisions.

[chadgpt3]

Maybe he's right on gamedev and wrong on some other things

[somenameforme]

The interesting thing to consider is that it seems fairly obvious from the outside that big game studios are killing themselves. But somehow, on the inside, there are people, of extensive qualification given the nature of our society, who think they're doing the right thing, and that "we" are wrong.

So it leads to the issue of perspective. Somebody has to be right, and everybody thinks that person is themselves, or they obviously wouldn't think what they do think. So in this case he could well be right on both things, or perhaps neither.

[cjbgkagh]

That is what makes it cult like and not a full on cult, there is a lot of truth to what he says. The problems is when the conclusions are extrapolated out to absurdity - it’s hard for me to listen to it. I didn’t take sufficient notes to give a proper recount here and it’s a bit too much work for me to go through it again.