There's been a big debate regarding poptimism in music criticism, and I'm wondering if the same trends apply with other mediums? Like are some games more likely to get a "critical pass" just because they are popular? Are reviewers just generally less negative than they were before?
I mean it generally depends on who you're listening to these days. I find Jeff Gerstmann to retain his edge.
I think -- and this is a problem I'm noticing with Jeff now in particular, is that the concept of a "review" is kind of fallen by the wayside. Jeff has written reviews of games on his Patreon, but there is no place where he's collected his written reviews. Instead, his patreon is an endless firehose of stream vods and podcasts. You really have to sit down and listen to many hours of his stuff to really get a sense of what he thinks of a specific thing.
Like, do you want to know what Jeff thinks of the Steam Machine? Here's a two and a half hour podcast where he probably dedicates 45 minutes to it somewhere in first half.
It took him mentioning it, but Patreon did not immediately surface his written article on the Steam Machine for me. It really felt like you needed to sift through this giant podcast in order to understand his view.
And to Jeff's point, this is the way games journalism is now. Establishments like Gamespot and IGN are old and busted and increasingly people are turning to individual "influencers" for news and reviews, delivered via video and word-of-mouth. And maybe he's right, I dunno. He's been in this business longer than most. Certainly, if his 10,000 patreon subscribers are all paying the $5 minimum, his money is where his mouth is.
But it is annoying, in the sense that it creates a sense of you-had-to-be-there. Jeff's opinions are ephemeral. Maybe they should be? Opinions change all the time. Should this stuff be so set in stone? I do like to look backwards in time, and the increasing rate at which everybody is creating something makes that a difficult job to reliably archive.
Anyway, that's a big digression. My point is: critics still exist, but they're harder to find because the way the public finds opinions is changing.
I also generally think a lot of games are just sort of a bare minimum of quality. We hear about the really bad ones, like Mass Effect Andromeda or MindsEye. But I think the nature of video games as an industry has reached a point where corporations are spending such gigantic, ridiculous amounts of money that they are largely producing a lot of stuff that is just "good enough." Not bad, but not really outstanding home run smashes, either.
Like, Star Wars Outlaws, right. Ubisoft made that. I played the demo. The first PS5 game I remember playing that felt like a PS5 game to me. Didn't seem so bad. But it wasn't so good I was rushing to throw it on my wishlist, either. And I think that's true of... a lot of games now, from Electronic Arts, Activision, Ubisoft, you name it. Nobody wants failures, but very few want to risk truly big swings, either. So we get a lot of B+ games.
I also think it's just harder to find games than ever. The floodgates have been open for years now and any given day 20-50 (even up to 100, if you know where to look) games get released every single day. That probably goes for music, too. We are in the era of anyone being able to release anything and it can be a success, but that means every creative industry is crowded with wannabes.
And the big names, your Taylor Swifts, your Ubisofts, they aren't just making music for one market or even one region anymore. Everyone is on the global stage, everyone is spending the big bucks, everyone wants a return on investment. You do that by being safe, and I think there are a lot of smaller creators who try and follow that example to their detriment.
Cutting edge art still exists, but you gotta go looking in darker corners for it. You gotta get away from the light pollution of the mainstream, in more ways than one. In that way, maybe Jeff was right.
