There's been a situation..

Now I will watch the Crimson Desert video, okay? A lot of people asked me to look at this. This was, I guess it was about IGN making a review for Crimson Desert, saying it was terrible. Let's watch it.

This video apparently is really, really popular. I haven't seen it. We're gonna look at it right now. You gave up? I did, I didn't know what the hell I was doing.

Okay, let's go. Not even a week after publishing what is probably the most consequential bad review in recent gaming history, a review that crashed Pearl Abyss' stock 40%, that was substantially written about things patched away in-

I don't think that the bad review is why their stock went down. I don't think that's the reason why.

72 hours, the 3 million people ignored with their own money. Yes. IGN just published another Crimson Desert piece. And this time, they called the developers naive designers. I want you to sit with that for a second before we go any further. What?

Naive designers.

Is that true?

The studio that spent 8 why building one of the most technically complex visually extraordinary seamlessly handcrafted open worlds this medium has ever produced it's huge it is designers written with complete confidence by someone who has never written a line of code never designed a single game system never taken one creative risk in the medium they've spent their career evaluating.

Someone whose entire professional existence, whose platform, whose audience, whose institutional power exists precisely because Pearl Abyss did the hard work, and three million people wanted to experience it. Yeah, of course! Without the studios building and us consuming, there is no IGN. There is no platform. There is no Metacritic score.

There is no institutional authority. The whole apparatus is entirely downstream of the thing it's condescending about. And they called them-

He is completely right about this, by the way. He is totally, 100% right about this. Is that the people that make content and constantly patronize these developers rely completely on them. It's absolutely true.

Those developers, naive. So I want to ask...

It's very obnoxious.

Nobody at IGN seems to have asked before publishing this. What exactly is this confidence built on? It's very obnoxious. Uh oh. Sure. Mmhmm. Yeah. Exactly. YouTube before buying. You couldn't pull up a Twitch stream of someone 200 hours deep in a game.

You couldn't read 10,000 Steam reviews from actual players who bought it with their own money. YouTube and Twitch, you already have a way, like, basically, written video game reviews are like, kind of, you know, like video killed, or sorry, yeah, video killed the radio star. I think that's basically what happened with this too, where basically the medium of writing a review of a video game is just simply inferior to a YouTube video.

It's just worse. The information gap was real. The institutional access was real. It was. Review copies, preview events, publishing infrastructure, the ability to reach

millions before anyone else could. Yeah that was another thing is they had a lot of systematic advantages like they had access to earlier builds, they had access to developer interviews, everything like that. True. The authority had a lot of systematic advantages, like they had access to earlier builds, they had access to developer interviews, everything like that.

True.

Big true. The authority had a genuine foundation and it earned its place in this ecosystem.

Yes.

But what is that foundation in 2026?

It doesn't exist.

YouTube exists, Twitch exists, Steam exists. The entire information monopoly that justified 20 years of institutional authority has been completely democratized. Exactly. The gap that made IG-

And I think I like that word too, by the way, about it being democratized. Because the fact is that like nowadays, there's no real reason for you to give a shit about what some reviewer thinks, because there's some YouTuber that's much more popular than they are. And also, here's the truth. Video game reviewers might not like this, but I'm just going to say it.

Every YouTube reviewer could be a, uh, a-a-a written, like, article reviewer. Every single one of them. It's easy to do that. You can literally have AI generate the articles for you That's how easy it is Every single writer for these different, you know, like publications could not be a YouTube reviewer And how do I know that for a fucking fact? Because if they could they would because you can make 20 times the amount of money

And necessary they necessary is long gone. And here's what gets me on a personal level. Gamer to gamer. Every game referenced in this article. Cyberpunk, Elden Ring, Valheim, Red Dead Redemption. I've played all of them.

Thousands of hours across most of them. So have most of you. So have the three million people who bought Crimson Desert. We've experienced everything he experienced. We know everything he knows. We've lived in every world he's drawing on to make his comparisons. There is no enlightenment the badge confers. Yes. No insight invisible to us that becomes visible to him by virtue of working at IGN. No asymmetrical

information. No technical expertise. No game development experience. Gamer to gamer. He thinks he's more qualified to evaluate this game than the people who bought it, played it, and loved it.

More than that, that he's more qualified than anybody else. I think that one thing that these review websites should stop doing is they should stop the DEI representation of critic reviews. Why is somebody who's a critic review, why is that held separately as a separate score? All of the different views should be aggregated entirely. And if you want like Metacritic and these other websites should not have critic reviews in their own category.

And the three million copies, the very positive steam rating, and the rebounding stock price are three independent data sources all saying the same thing at the same time. That's what this video is about. Not just the bad review, we've covered that. Not just the face-saving follow-up piece they just published, though we're going through it in detail. It's about the specific quality of arrogance that makes

both of those things possible.

That's one of the big things, is like it's the arrogance and the assumed sense of authority that these people have. And I think that's one thing that people hate the media entirely for. It's not even just specifically about video game media, I think it's about all media. Where like you have people that are in these positions as news reporters or as you know an actor or like you know a comedian that think that they have the position that they can dictate to you what is right and what's not. Right?

Some people study journalism and may not have more credentials to be a reviewer, but that's more for movies than games. But like, what are those credentials? What really are those? Like, so you understand Shakespeare, so you're gonna understand if a movie is better?

Like, how does that- there's no- Like, this is a completely subjective evaluation. And I think this is one thing that people that have nothing better to do, but to create credentials for themselves do, is that they sit around in a group, and then they collectively decide why their opinions are more important than other people's. There's no actual objective value that's assigned to this. It's all perceived value that's created by the people that want you to perceive their value.

I think it's a little bit self-serving, isn't it?

The kind that only survives when it goes unchallenged long enough to stop feeling like arrogance and start feeling like authority.

Exactly.

Let's go through it.

I think this started with Gamergate. I think that was a big component to it, where like, they thought that they could talk down to their audience. And I feel like ever since then it's just gotten worse It's my opinion

The very first sentence of this article is love it or hate it There's no denying that crimson desert has suffered something of a rocky launch room. Yeah, rocky launch 2 million copies sold on day one. I played on launch day and had a blast. The only thing rocky about this launch was legacy gaming media manufacturing informational chaos and calling it criticism.

I disagree with this. I think that a lot of the systems and the controls were bad. And I think the fact that they didn't have storage was bad. I think that there were a lot of things that they should have had like an idea about and they didn't. I do actually, I disagree with that. I think absolutely it was problematic at launch. That's why they fixed it and they came out with an apology. Like they did that because it was broken.

And I want you to notice what was in the original review and what wasn't. Yes. Controls, inventory management. Yes. Boss difficulty. Every complaint was about surface level friction. The kind of stuff any competent studio patches away in the first week. Pearl Abyss did it in 72 hours. They did. It was great. What was never in the review? The artistic vision. The

sheer technical achievement of a seamless open world at that scale and beauty. True. The genuinely original design philosophy. None of the things that will still matter about this game in ten years registered. Just the surface. Just the stuff that was gone before the review was even called. And now, look at what this follow-up piece is actually doing.

It's like the IGN review, in a way, seemed like they were almost trying to punish Pearl Abyss for not giving them a more stable review build. Like, if you actually looked at the review itself, like a lot of them talking about it were just complaining about issues and friction points they had with

the review build.

The thing that dominated the original review, the controls, the inventory, the boss difficulty has been patched away. So the rocky launch framing has quietly shifted to the one thing patches can't touch. The story. That's what's left. That's the last redoubt.

We've covered extensively in previous essays why that argument falls apart the moment you actually engage with what this game is trying to do. And we'll get into it again. But I want you to see the sleight of hand clearly first One patch cycle invalidated the overwhelming majority of their professional criticism

True actually and I think more people should talk about that like for me for example like at the beginning I thought the game was pretty shitty because of the controls and the way that you moved around and then they made a patch that Made the game less shitty. I know sounds crazy, but they just made it better. And guess what? It worked! It worked really well!

And rather than acknowledge that, they reframed it. Rocky launch. Still standing. Still confident. As if the ground beneath them hasn't completely shifted. Then we get to the paragraph that made me stop reading and just stare at my screen for a moment. It's unclear if the development team has had to break their backs to do this.

The reason why groups like IGN participate in the character destruction and the media destruction for something like Crimson Desert is because Crimson Desert doesn't represent what they want video games to push a message about. It doesn't have, you know, like fucking Western critical themes against authoritarianism. It doesn't have, you know, different types of representation,

whether it's of women, whether it's of, you know, gay people or black people or something like that. And I think that's the reason why they rate these games down. And I think that fundamentally what does it come down to? What really is that? It's racism. It is. It's cultural racism where these people want to create a reward structure around following their cultural norms and basically adhering to them. So every single China game, every Korea game, and to a lesser extent, every Japanese game is graded on this harsh curve of adhering to Western cultural values. And they're not even really Western cultural values,

they are extreme Western values from a small subset of people that want to force that culture into everything else. Think about the amount of games that are coming out of China and Korea especially that get shit on constantly by these developers or sorry by these reviewers I think that they do it almost

every single time. Leave about yourself to write that sentence. Pearl Abyss a studio whose stock crashed partly because of a review substantially written about things they then fixed in three days, came back, listened, worked, and turned the entire conversation around in under a week. And the response is to one that, in print,

They did the same thing to Black Myth Wukong, they did the same thing to Wu Chang, they did the same thing to Stellar Blade, uh they did that to a lesser extent to Lost Ark as well, um they've done this to like every game. Like every popular eastern game that comes out, they always want to frame it around the fact that these eastern games aren't looking at their social issues in the right way. Where wins meet, that's another good example, you're right, yeah they do it constantly. It's a very common thing. Whether they had to work hard to do it

that's not neutral that's a power move dressed up as a throwaway clause. They're trying to yeah they're trying to make it look bad. It's the kind of sentence that lets you condescend to

someone while maintaining complete plausible deniability about having done it.

Well you're poisoning the well, right? You're implying that them making, like, basically... Okay, so they're wrong for not having it, and they're also wrong for fixing it fast, because that could make people have to work too hard. Which is like total fan fiction.

They're inventing this themselves.

Then, assuming that's true, it would also mean that Pearl Abyss didn't see the glaring issues in Crimson Desert's design Yeah, be that a result of poor internal testing naive designers or simply not seeing the wood for the trees naive designers

What technical background what engineering not seeing the wood from the trees is the same type of like that to me that is theater kid vocabulary and like diction like that is that is what a theater kid talks like where they think that they're speaking like you're writing like an essay for like AP English or something

tease what game development experience sits behind the confidence required to call the people who built this naive. The answer, as far as anyone can establish, is a media degree. That's it. That's the foundation.

That's what matters.

Something happens in the middle of this article that I think is the most revealing moment in the whole piece. After walking through the patches and grudgingly acknowledging that they worked, fast travel improved, storage box transformed the crafting, boss difficulty adjusted, they write this sentence. If you already like Crimson Desert's approach, I think there's a genuine possibility that it could be a contender for your game of the year by the summer. Sure, yeah. Your game of the year. Not THE game of the year. Yours. As in, for people like you.

People with your particular taste. People who enjoy this kind of thing.

True.

Read that again and feel exactly how much condescension is packed into one word. They didn't correct the six. They didn't reconsider. They just graciously extended permission for a certain type of player to enjoy a certain type of game. The hierarchy is completely intact.

Well, they'll never go back on what they think. And the reason why is because the real reason why they downvote and they like negative review these games is because of that value system. That's the main reason why they're doing it. It has nothing else besides that. Also saying by the summer is implying it's not good enough but it might make it good in a few weeks. Yes, exactly, right? The authority never moved. They're still above it.

They're just acknowledging that some people, with some tastes, might find value here.

Still patronizing, exactly.

First, they condescended the developers, naive designers. Now they're condescending the players, the very people their entire existence depends on, written with complete confidence and zero self-awareness that without us, none of this exists.

They complained in the review and again here that having to prepare for bosses was a design failure. Cooking food.

What? What?

Managing resources, grinding to get through Kiresh the Slayer? I mean, yeah, it was kinda hard, but like... Man, it wasn't that bad! What the hell are you talking about? It's not hard at all! Man, it wasn't that bad! What the hell are you talking about?

It's not hard at all!

And honestly, I had to laugh. Because the preparation in this game isn't a separate grind you stop and do. It's just what happens when you're actually playing.

Exactly, yeah, you're gonna get these items while you're playing anyway. It's gonna happen on its own.

You're exploring, picking up ores naturally, buying mats from NPCs on the road, upgrading gear organically. By the time you reach a boss, you have more than enough if you've been engaging with the world at all. The reviewer made it sound like he had to stop everything and dedicate hours to farming. That's not the game.

That's bullshit.

That's total bullshit. That's someone who didn't understand how the systems worked together, describing his own confusion as a design failure. And this person called himself a hardcore Souls player.

The only reason... Before concluding with super long three-phase boss fights that includes some segments where you're just Mercilessly sworn by the bad guy. Well, you have to dash around destroying totems Oh, he's talking about the reed boss The only reasonable way to get through it is to have a ton of healing items on hand and to eat by the fistful while You whittle down the enemy's health bar. I love souls like and I consider myself a tryhard

Holy fuck, man. Like, yeah, some of the boss fights have problems, but like, Jesus.

But here's what makes this particularly pointed.

Yeah.

Pearl Abyss listened anyway. They nerfed the bosses. They fixed the inventory.

Well, because the boss was too hard. I mean, like he was, he was too hard for like the point in the game. They added the storage

they responded with extraordinary speed and genuine care and ign and also since this they've also responded to the criticisms of the story too they did that today they actually are listening to

the players a lot it's quite surprising still standing by the six. Because institutional arrogance doesn't update when reality pushes back. It just keeps going. Still certain. Still confident. Still writing think pieces about whether the patches were enough, rather than asking whether the review was.

Man.

Man!

And then we get to the part that I think most completely exposes the limits of how these outlets actually think about games. Their argument is that Crimson Desert's story is a fundamental creative failure. Not technical, not a launch window issue, but baked into the bones. And to explain why, they invoke cyberpunk 2077 I've played thousands of hours of cyberpunk that's cyberpunk is a cinematic experience

first and an open-world second that's the design philosophy held completely and executed brilliantly every decision serves that vision when you're in a cyberpunk cutscene you're not being taken out of the game. You're in the deepest part of it. That conviction produced one of the greatest games ever made. Crimson Desert has a completely different conviction.

And here's the thing IGN cannot grasp. That difference is not a deficiency. It's a design philosophy. I didn't know you could open that door.

I had no idea you could do that.

That shit's crazy.

Playing the game?

I'm going to get that gold. Looks badass. Let me tell you what I was doing while this article was being written playing the game I found out there was an armor set somewhere in the world. I'm gonna get the shadows plate armor It's bad. Oh lich king aesthetic hood up black robes massive Alex badass Nobody sent me to get it. No quest marker. No objective. No waypoint. I Just heard it existed and decided I wanted it

What followed was genuinely one of the best gaming sessions I've had in years. I rode out with just a direction. Scaled mountains that looked like the Canadian Rockies. Genuinely vertical. The kind of climb where you grip the controller tighter because you're not sure you'll make it. Stumble-

Dude, if you can't climb in this game, you're garbage.

It's so easy. Into a witch's hideout built inside an ancient tree trunk in the wayward woods. Yep. Found it completely by accident because I'd gone the wrong way. Accidentally rode through a black bear camp and got chased halfway up a mountain by what felt like an entire civilization of absolutely furious barbarians.

Dropped into desert canyons with waterfalls hidden inside them. Found border cities that weren't on any map I'd looked at. Still on Chapter 4. Main story untouched for hours.

I think that's another really good indicator of whether a open-world game is good or not, is if somebody can play the game all day and Not progress the main story because I feel like if you can do that It means that the extra like mechanics and the world building is good enough for you to figure out There's something that's more engaging than just simply sitting there and doing the MSQ, right? Like I felt that way with Oblivion a lot.

Like, okay, yeah, I would do the main story quest, but, you know, it's not— that's not the main thing I'm going to focus on, right? I'm gonna go and do the Dark Brotherhood quest line or something like that. And I think same thing with Where Winds Meet, I think it's another very commonly are the bad ones.

Nothing locked me out.

It's about getting distracted.

The world just existed.

Vast.

Yeah. Basically like, yeah. If you don't feel yourself getting distracted by spontaneous things that you come across when you're playing an open world game, it's probably because that open world game is bad because that's the reason why open world games are special. It's because you can go and play the game and have this experience that's totally different

and it's spontaneous and unique. Witcher 3? I actually think, this is going to be maybe an unpopular opinion, I think this game has a better open world than Witcher 3. And by the way, I don't even think it's close.

Alive and completely indifferent to whether I was following the plot. That's mediocrity. That's what I'm supposed to endure to get to the good stuff. And then they compare this to Starfield. Starfield. Oh my god. Starfield is procedurally generated emptiness connected by loading screens. Crimson Desert is a handcrafted world you traverse seamlessly on horseback for hours,

watching biomes change around you in real time. Putting them in the same sentence isn't analysis. It's proof the framework has broken down so completely. It's producing conclusions that make no sense to anyone who has actually spent real time in both worlds.

There's another thing too where whenever you're playing a game like Crimson Desert, stop trying to make it Witcher 3. When you're playing a game like Witcher 3, stop trying to make it Skyrim. When you're playing a game like Breath of the Wild, stop trying to make it Elven Ring. At the end of the day, each video game is going to be different.

They're going to be totally different. legendary not the end game not the raids riding through Elwynn forest for the first time with no idea where you were going in a world that felt like it had

been you've got a grind constantly in those games yeah you do that's just the

way it is long before you arrived and would continue long after you logged off yeah think about what made Skyrim legendary not the main quest but the feeling that over that mountain there might be something worth finding. And the world making good on that promise often enough that you kept going.

Neither of those games opened with their most accomplished moments. They opened with a world and trusted you to find it. That trust was the entire-

It's also like you don't even, cause I think that one of the coolest things about a game like Crimson Desert or Elven Ring coming out That trust was the entire... sword out of like a giant's mouth at like the top of a mountain. That's like in this game, right? And like or like there's some special way to unlock a puzzle that allows you to do this really cool boss. Like that group discovery and community discovery with a game is the reason why so many people

want to play new and most. It's because whenever everybody is experiencing it all simultaneously, people can share, trade, and enjoy the basically communication of information of the game. And I think that that makes a meta-level community much more interesting. And I think the same thing happened with Elden Ring. It happened, it's happening now with Crimson Desert.

Helldivers 2 is a good example. And so that's one of the magical things about a really, really good video game like this is because its scope is so vast that you have everybody that's playing the game that's kind of making their own inroad and understanding a different part of it and they can share that with each other. And I think that makes the experience of it where it's truly more of like a community adventure and I think

that that happens like you know like the old Warcraft puzzles that they used to have where it was like figuring out how to find Kossamoth or uh that one nightmare steed that you're able to get in uh what was it the Karazhan crypts and all these little things like the I think it's called Lucid Nightmare um all those things I think were amazing. They were great. And the reason why is because the community was taking part in it together. Like for example, I remember the days whenever people figured out, oh my God, this is how you summon this boss. This is how you do this thing. And then everybody

was going and trying it out. And I think that's what was so cool about it and the fact that also like those things are just put in the game there's like maybe like a you know flavor text or something like that that indicates this is you know like something that could happen but there's not really like a long-term like thing that's like telling you you have to go do this you have to go do that a point it's like it's just out

crimson desert is doing something much closer to what the great MMOs understood. That in a world this big and this alive, heavy narrative doesn't deepen immersion, it works against it. Every cutscene that locks you into a specific emotional experience reminds you you're watching someone else's story, rather than living in your own. The short, well animated story beats give you just enough context to feel the weight I think this is actually very true. that even an imperfect story lands differently than it would in a smaller space.

I think this is actually very true. It's kind of like how the original WoW devs said the world was the main character in World of Warcraft Classic. And I do think even the existence of a main story quest is kind of almost antithetical to what an open world game is. Now, I think that you can still have it work well, kind of like with Elven Ring, for example. But, overall, like, I would say that this is absolutely true.

Totally disagree with the story part. I think the story being, like, the story was like, kind of, I think it was kind of mediocre. And it was confusing, right? Like, having a main story quest it should like I mean Oblivion had a main story quest and that's an open world game and it was fine so I don't think that having a main story quest is bad it's not good either but what I think Crimson Desert doesn't really do very well is that they don't

have very good continuity I think if there was a continuity with the storyline that people would like it more but it feels like it's very disjointed.

Not mediocrity. That's my opinion. That's a design philosophy that requires a different vocabulary to evaluate than the one IGN is working with. And calling it mediocrity with that confidence from that position is the arrogance made completely visible.

The vocabulary doesn't exist in their framework. And rather than acknowledge that the framework might be the problem, they call the thing the framework can't evaluate, mediocre. So here's the question this whole article forces me to ask, and I think it's the most important one we've raised in this entire series. What is IGN's arrogance actually built on?

Systematic advantages, institutional privilege, and a grandfathered in sense of basically, you know, entitlement that people should be listening to them. That's the reason why people take IGN seriously. And it's like all of these different publications and these news people and these different like,

you know, groups access. Yes, exactly. So much of this is basically just, just totally unearned. It's completely unearned.

Because arrogance with a foundation is at least coherent. Yeah. A surgeon with thousands of successful operations can be confident. Yeah. An engineer whose bridge of successful operations can be confident. Yeah. An engineer whose bridge is still standing can be confident.

Even a critic with a long track record of being demonstrably right can earn institutional confidence. Yeah, of course. The arrogance has something underneath it. What's underneath IGN's?

We've played every game... I do also think that it's a huge component that Western video games are way more accountable to game developers, or sorry, to game journalists and to the game journalist media. And because of that, they give those Western developers more positive feedback versus Eastern developers that are not accountable to them.

I think that's a huge factor. Because most of us have spent significantly more time in these worlds than any reviewer on a deadline ever could. There is no expertise gap. There is no insider knowledge. There is no technical foundation.

I wish more people talked about this, by the way. I do. I wish there were a lot more people talking about this. The fact that the people that are writing these articles have no better understanding of it than you do.

What they have is institutional capital. 20 years of accumulated authority that went unchallenged long enough to start feeling like competence. The IGN badge doesn't come with expertise.

No.

It comes with a Metacritic score that moves stock prices. And for 20 years, that's been enough to crash valuations.

I still disagree with this premise. I don't think that IGN giving Crimson Desert a bad review meant that, that's not the reason why it didn't do well. That's not the reason. I mean, the game did have a lot of flaws at the beginning. Like, and these flaws were legitimate,

real, and actually problematic what gets greenlit call korean developers naive completely certain of its own authority and gamers are not an easy crowd we are the most cynical hardest to please most forensically critical audience in entertainment we tear games apart for a bad frame rate. We spend hours in forums dissecting single quest design decisions When we defend a studio rather than tear it apart That means something I

Don't I don't agree. I think people with sunk cost will defend bad games because they've already played them a lot I think that happens constantly. It happens especially with MMOs. Like, people have already bought the game, and so they don't want to feel like they were stupid for buying the game, so they will come up with excuses for why the game was actually good. I think that's what would happen.

Means the studio passed a test that very few pass. Three million of us independently decided with our own money that Crimson Desert was worth it. That's not a mob. That's a verdict from the hardest audience in entertainment. And the data makes the institutional failure undeniable. Three million copies despite the

review. I would say Black Myth Wukong is an even better example of this. I think Crimson Desert getting low review, like Black Myth Wukong in my opinion is like objectively like a 9 out of 10 or higher game. Like it's just insanely good. Like the graphics are amazing, the combat's amazing, there's character development, the cinematics are perfect, there's good flow of the story, everything is great.

So why is it that it got so many bad reviews and also Black Myth Wukong, not in a week, but in like two or three days, sold 10 million copies. That was when I realized that there was a real legitimate problem.

Going very positive in direct contradiction of the critical consensus and most tellingly problem. IGN's verdict on Crimson Desert told you more about IGN's framework than it did about Crimson Desert. Exactly. The one thing they were supposed to do, they failed at completely. And the market is learning to price that failure in.

I don't even agree with that. I think that their goal is to enforce an ideology or enforce a point of view. And that's what they really try to do more than anything, is they try to force that point of view and that ideology into everything. That's the reason why like certain people gave games like, I remember Ark Raiders had this happen, where they had two, like there was this one reviewer that gave it like a really low score because it had AI in it. Like, I'm sorry, but people don't care about that. They don't give a shit about that. So why are you doing this? Like, why are you giving games bad scores

for things that players don't care about? Well, the reason why is you want to force your views on everybody else. Yes, or in Expedition 33, I care. I don't think that you actually do, though, right? Like, you don't actually care. I don't think that you actually do though, right? Like you don't actually care. You're not going to make a purchase decision based off of AI. I don't think that it's true. And I think that it's proven repeatedly that it is not true. It's proven with Crimson Desert that used AI, nobody cared. Exhibition 33 used AI, nobody cared. You know, people

was the third one I was thinking of. Oh yeah, Ark Raiders used AI, nobody cared. Um, you know, people was the third one I was, when I was thinking of, oh yeah, arc Raiders used AI, nobody cared. Uh, the finals used AI, nobody cared. AI actually isn't something that people care about. And the reason why is because there are games that are successful that have it and everybody ignores it. I care if the AI is bad. Yeah. But that's not about AI though. Right. That has nothing to do with it. Like if the if the actual characters were bad, or if the human design was bad, the game would be bad. So like, is that really AI? That's the problem? Or is the quality of the problem? You see

what I'm saying?

That's the collapse of institutional trust made visible in data. And their response is this article.

That's what I think.

Not an apology. Yeah. Not a reconsideration. A face-saving piece written with the same unbroken confidence as Greenlight.

I'm gonna read after this.

I'm gonna look at this.

Because the arrogance only survives in the absence of accountability.

Yep.

Well, they've already faced accountability. Like if you look at their influence now, they're like probably 10% of what they were 10 years

ago.

Like they've almost completely gone extinct. They're an endangered species.

Leave you with a question I've been sitting with since I read this piece.

Is it a time-saving tool? It is.

If IGN doesn't represent us, the gamers, and they don't make games, and the information gap that once justified their existence is long gone. Why they exist. And the YouTubers covering these same games have larger audiences, more hours played, more skin in the game, and are held accountable by their communities in real time. What exactly is justifying their existence in 2026?

Why do they exist?

True.

What are they actually for? I don't have a clean answer yet But we'll explore it properly in a future video What I do know is that the fact the question is even worth asking tells you everything about where we are

That's it from I think this is something that's happening to all types of media and it's not exclusive to gaming media. I think that overall a lot of the institutional advantages that print media and other forms of, you know, I guess legacy media had are now basically non-existent and because they're non-existent why would somebody want to watch Fox News or watch CNN when they could just watch the creator that's on YouTube that is not, you know, beholden to billionaires just give their opinion on something. I think that's what it is.

But before I go, once again, thank you to everyone who showed up for this one. The comments,

the shares, the support. Remember IGN apologized about Stellar Blade? It means everything. No,

I don't remember that. And it keeps this going. Yeah, I don't remember that it keeps this going yeah I'll remember that all genuine thank you to enjoy GM a longtime partner who has supported this channel through thick and thin if you're playing where winds meet mothering waves Genshin impact or any other gacha enjoy GM lets you top up at better rates than you'd normally get. You mean whale? No account login required. Nothing sensitive shared. You enter your UID, pick your amount, pay, and you're done.

Link is in the description. Community Discord and everything else is down there too. Until the next one, peace.

That's what I say. So I think this is actually a pretty good video. It is. I like the video. And overall, I think that asking the question, why do these different developers or not, I always, I don't know why I always get it wrong.

I always say the wrong thing. I'll link you guys to the video, give it a like. I think that was actually a pretty good video and ask you a question why do these reviewers, journalists, and the media people, why do they actually have a better insight into this than you do? Because this is the main thing that I think that a lot of people are starting to realize is that a lot of these different institutions have no actual real authority at all. Like they don't really mean anything,

they just mean that there are people that had this ability, or they had this privilege at a certain point in the future, in the past, I mean, and then they were able to take advantage of it. Yeah, it's credentials, exactly. I don't believe in credentials. Unless you are a neuroscientist and you're doing surgery,

or you're designing a rocket ship, I don't believe in credentials. I think there are tons of people that have an education in something that don't know a fucking thing about it, and there's a ton of people that know a lot about something, and they've never been educated in it.

It is very, very common. And what I think has happened is that the increasing fixation around somebody having some sort of authority, the reason why they want to have that is so they can talk down to you That's the reason why and dictate what your opinions are to you IGN crimson desert. Let me go back. I'm gonna find this

Okay, so where is the new? This is wait. Oh there. They wrote another article Chaotic combat is the best kind until bosses show up. Take a look at the reset tree. Bosses review, locked on 1v1, also clunky duels. What the fuck? It took me about 10 hours before I properly started enjoying most basic fights?

What?

What? Bosses, have you squashed your toolsket, forcing you into specific playstyles?

What? I- I-

What are they talking about? I followed the same pattern against the crowcaller, sat of range for the red attacks, okay? A specific and unfamiliar character whose skill tree you've ignored oh my god it was one boss it was one boss holy shit it wasn't even that hard i one shot him it what are you talking about this is insane i i don't even know what to say about this. Jesus Christ. This is embarrassing

And so they had another patch about this. Let me go and search for crimson desert. Okay Crimson oops, just a second Let me go and see if I can find it. So no, that's not it. I was looking for No, this isn't it either Crimson desert. Let me see here, Patch. I don't know really whether that's true or not. And this is IGN that's pushing this narrative as well. Yeah, I think it's ridiculous. Which is the boss that you crashed out on? Uh, the Antenumbra

Sword. I actually wanted to, I was gonna do the next version of that today, I'm probably gonna do that in a bit. And uh, I based the games off what to buy off your take, honestly, you're my demographic. And the thing is that I think that a lot of these different publications like IGN, The Gamer, Eurogamer, etc. They are just an antiquated media type. That's really all there is to it, they're antiquated media. There is no reason for you to want to play or use it this way or have any kind of like, why would you want to read an article for a video game when you could just watch a video

of the video game? Videos are just superior media. And so you have these writers that are trying to like enforce this stuff and I don't know why. Let me go and find, oh God, yeah, this is, will Crimson Desert patch its way to a Cyberpunk 2077 style victory? But there are some things that can't be fixed. This is it, mixed reviews? Oh my god.

What's up everybody, Damon here and in today's gaming news, a new patch is in stock, Phil. A further thank you once again for your catches.

For younger generations people- I just dude I don't know why you would even say this it's because they're retarded yeah I guess so I just watch you play them make up my mind yeah exactly you're very fair I try to be very fair I try to do my if you already like its approach yeah this is just again story slog I mean Jesus guys oh my fucking God yeah I think that they're way too negative about this it's very fucking fucking god yeah I think that they're way too negative about this it's very fucking annoying man guy does game ranks used to work for

IGN well that's the thing is that and I've said this before I'll say it again every single video game reviewer on YouTube could write articles every single article writer on these websites couldn't make YouTube videos that's the real reality it's that one of them pays infinitely more and is way more successful, and you can make tons more off of it.

So anybody that has the ability to do that is going to take advantage of it massively. And so if they're not doing that, there's probably a reason for it. And look at the comments. What do the comments say?

The way this title is written is makes the game seem like it's a complete failure. Yeah, and if you have reasonable expectations the game's very fun. It's not the one part of the game I consider bad except for the story. These guys really don't want the game to succeed do they? No they don't. They don't want, I think that what they want to do is they want to create a pseudo monopoly where these Western, sorry, these Eastern game devs have to continually follow their Cultural cultural values, right? I think that's what's happened with the comments articles. This is what they're saying, right? So even the comments of the article are pretty much negative about it, which is true

The game is excellent ignored the IGN review score I mean I have been playing this game pretty much non-stop like I'm gonna be honest Like I've been playing the fuck out of this game Like I've been playing the fuck out of this game Usually a lot of these games like I'll play them for just a little bit I have been obsessed with this game like I've already put in as you can see over a hundred hours