It did come across as a bit snarky to mention that the developers were exhausted trying to fix as many bugs as they can before release day. It implies that perhaps the game is being released too early. He could have just said, “Best wishes to the team for a successful launch.”
In support of the exhausted developers, I won’t buy this game. I hope it sinks into obscurity.
You the true socialist.
To be fair, I wasn’t buying it anyway. Too many smokers, and drug use. Give me a Mario version. But if I can blame my non-purchase on exploited workers, so much the better.
It doesn’t seem especially snarky for the guy who literally wrote a book about crunch in the video game industry to call out a video game studio that’s currently requiring their employees to go through mandatory crunch after previously saying on record that they wouldn’t require their employees to go through mandatory crunch.
Poland lol
:(
It’s Twitter. If you’re not being snarky, you’re probably dead. And even if you’re dead, you might have a team running your account to continue being snarky.
We should just ignore it.
Branded Content editor Will Fulton and senior social producer Ashley Oh tweeted about the layoffs today, with Oh tying them to the pending acquisition of CNET Media Group (which includes GameSpot, CNET, Metacritic, and Giant Bomb) by Red Ventures.
A Red Ventures representative told GamesIndustry.biz , “As part of Red Ventures acquisition agreement with ViacomCBS, Red Ventures will retain a vast majority of CNET Media Group employees and assets under the Red Ventures business umbrella. The deal has not closed and to protect the privacy of our employees we cannot release additional information at this time.”
I assumed Gamespot had been on a skeleton crew already.
More layoffs for Gamespot:
Wonder if Giant Bomb got hit?
GaneSpot is becoming a YouTube channel basically. That seems the MO of IGN as well - find a photogenic and appealing young woman to front it and flank her with some nerds to talk shop.
I’m sure the women they hire could still beat half-asses like me at every game we play, thus earning them street cred.
Nine years and 12 years is a really long time in a job these days. Congrats to them for managing that and good luck going forward.
I guess the future of reviewing games is just a bunch of streamers? Bleh.
As far as I’m concerned, IGN is basically web 2.0 GameFAQs now. Haven’t looked at anything but guides there for years.
I’m with you @Ginger_Yellow - and I’ve found the IGN wiki guides to be getting less and less complete recently. Sad.
Abby Russell is leaving Giant Bomb. She made it sound like it was voluntary, but also it doesn’t sound like she has anything lined up, so I’m not sure. I’m wondering if they offered people voluntary redundancy and she took it.
TIL Chris Thursten looks weirdly like Matt Berry. Not sure if it’s lockdown hair or if he always has.
RPS linked this by their former writer Brendan Caldwell. I liked it more than any of his RPS writing, which was generally on the better end of that publication.
Wow, great article. Thanks for posting it. It’s pretty much an explanation for why Polygon (and virtually everyone else in game journalism) doesn’t produce interesting writing anymore.
Video game hatred has infected reality, or the other way around, it is hard to tell. Life and its digital counterpart has become the thrall of fandom, and yes, we journalists, Paxman apologists or not, have played our part in the ongoing limescaling of democracy. Even if all we do shake our heads at our peers in anti-solidarity because of a perceived disrespect directed at our favourite starlets. Even if all we do is encourage a fellow wage slave to buy this fun game about shooting more soldiers in the knees, and to think no more about it. Don’t get me wrong. I love to shoot a soldier in the knees. I’m from County Armagh. But even I must reconcile my place in the degenerative disease currently fingernailing its way through the gut of the body politic. Even I get tired of the endlessness of it all.
The quitting of my full-time job came from a long way off. The sentiment had bubbled away quietly within me. The burnout had a long tail. I long ago made the decision, on a terrible, sober summer evening during which I glimpsed at that endless ticker tape of internet and saw the phrase “Kingdom Hearts 3 will have 80+ hours of content” and knew that I wanted out.
I didn’t know what my goal was anymore. If I took that itinerent executive’s cloudlike advice to heart, the only admission I could make now was that I no longer wanted anything to do with this ultrastrange sideshow of an industry, that could produce both wonderful namazus and life-threatening DM rodents with the same colourful breath of code, crunch and community.