Jim used to be a relatively big name reviewer back in the Angry Trillby Reviewer Days until they suddenly âquitâ their job with the very prominent games journalism company they worked for and were summarily blacklisted by the entire AAA industry.
Why? Because a massive scandal broke at the major game publisher Ubisoft revealing a culture of systematic sexual abuse, including high-ranking officials within the company that would regularly drug and rape female employees, which management and HR seemed fully aware of and would protect and move around the perpetrators Catholic-church-style. Reviewers were told not to talk about it and, when it became impossible to contain, to not talk about it where itâs âirrelevantâ â that is, never mention or hint at any such stuff when actually reviewing and promoting Ubisoft games, because itâs a separate thing, see, no need to distract from the game (Ubisoftâs goal here was to be able to continue to advertise their games to players who hadnât heard about it, and wait out the scandal until those who had just assumed everything was dealt with and forgot, which worked).
Jim refused. They knew this would tank their career, they knew they were throwing away an incredibly promising future. They did it anyway.
James Stephanie Sterling in one of a very small number of game reviewers out there with an actual fucking spine and a moral code made from titanium. Theyâre still effectively blacklisted from the industry, because since then theyâve refused to reform and play Good PR Robot like reviewers are supposed to do (because the AAA games industry thinks âreviewerâ and âcriticâ are synonyms for âPR person in a gig economyâ), shining light on repeated abuses and scandals in the industry, both internal scandals like this (discrimination, worker abuse, fraud, the normalisation of crunch culture and not paying workers) and ways at which the AAA industry scams players (abuses of early access, loot boxes and âpay to winâ mechanics that used to be the realm of free-to-play games now dominating paid titles while the prices of those titles also go up, abusive subscription models and âalways onlineâ services, fun little tricks that companies love to pull with âremasteredâ games, and lately NFTs). Jimâs usually a good six months to a full year ahead of the curve on spying out this bullshit, able to see and warn about it before it becomes trendy enough for other reviewers to touch, and the result has been being continually silenced by game companies and passively buried by algorithms due to illegitimate DCMA takedowns, incorrect copyright strikes spurious lawsuits, being frozen out of gaming news, and whatever other nasty tricks people can pull. They came out as nonbinary very shortly before hitting a million subscribers (despite the forces agaisnt them) and then suddenly lost a lot of subscribers over a short period of time. Which was surely a complete coincidence. Yep. Just a coincidence. Have they backed down on literally anything? No. Because they decided to do this properly despite the cost and they are NOT fucking around.
They also call out particularly bad bullshit of indie developers (weâre talking the con artists and bigots in indie development in particular), not just AAA, which once hilariously resulted in a tiny no-name developer attempting to sue them for TEN MILLION DOLLARS. (Well, I found it hilarious after the fact. It was incredibly frustrating and somewhat stressful for Jim at the time, if one of the more ridiculous silencing tactics.) You can see them report on that here:
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