Football Jock Games vs. Drama Nerd Games (The Jimquisition)
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ก.พ. 2025
- / jimquisition
www.thejimquisi...
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Some games get all of daddy's love, and some simply don't. There's a clear hierarchy of games in the "AAA" industry, with some getting more publisher support than others.
As BioWare continues to flounder in this rut of an industry, it's time to look at which studios are the drama nerds and which are the football jocks. Because this is a football town, not a place where drama gets the resources.
Also, The Faculty.
#EA #BioWare #Frostbite #JimSterling #Jimquisition
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Twitter: / jimsterling
Facebook: / jimsterling0
Jim’s Big Ego (No Relation): bigego.com/
Bandcamp of the Sax Dragon - carlcatron.ban...
Nathan Hanover - / @nhsynthonicorchestra
Who needs single player games when you have a largely unregulated digital casino to run?
Substance D You know what’s interesting about single player games dying? People say that gamers are not getting screwed over but gamers love single player games. Especially when we get older and don’t have the time to play as much. They can start and stop without losing progression. So in other words gaming companies are pushing a narrative that many gamers do not want.
Except its not a digital casino, but why let basic knowledge get in the way of your feelings. That's how society operates now.
@@AntonShields Anton your second sentence makes no sense. "Nobody who plays games for real wants it." Wants them to die? want's singleplayer narrative driven games?
TheNoirMirror oh totally agreed with you. They’re just marketing kids which is self evident because kids have parents money and more time to play these Micro-transaction, Live serviced, now free to play games.
@@TheNoirMirror Fff, one of you guys who willingly wears the NPC meme.
Okay. Explain the functional difference between the slot machine that sits in a physical casino, and the slot machine we call loot boxes.
It's sad that we've gotten to the point where "no microtransactions" and "no loot boxes" is a selling point for a video game.
It sickens me.
"Hey, this time we're not trying to steal money from kids and people with ludopathy! Isn't that great?"
its not...and if you think it is your already lost.
@@psmt1234 like, spiritually?
@@guyshafor1320 like they have fundamentally given up on change and submitted to what the corps want you silent unwavering consent.
it really isn't tho, quite in fact i'd argue the other way around, that having mtx and loot boxes is a turn off for potential buyers
it's why people make fun of EA or ubisoft or activision when they come out with a game and say "hey this time we're not fucking you over" instead of giving them any praise, the selling point for the game is wether or not it's good, and then again even if it is good it still turns off people from buying it if it has scummy monetization, but the problem is that they don't need 7 billion sales to make the money they are making, they need that the whales buy those games for them to be profitable
Remember when everyone complained that all the games coming out were zombie games?
Yeah well now every game coming out is a broken, buggy, lootbox-infested money grab of a "service".
Soulless, lifeless and always hungry. Almost like.....
A zombie.
Its weird because am I correct in thinking Days Gone is actually not like? At least there the PS4 exclusives for AAA games that are not just broken loot box games.
@Adam Thompson You're not wrong. I think a lot of people are wising up though. Either that or they just can't afford every garbage game being spewed out by the "AAA" studios anymore.
@@TNTITAN Days gone looks alright so far. Although time has taught me to ignore any and all marketing for video games.
TheGrumpyBrit b
A good looking zombie engineered in a way that makes you forget the glaring problems.
It looks good, it smells good but the moment you let your guard down it bites your dick off.
Sorry, that “jock vs nerd” thing hit too close to home in terms of the high school/middle schools I was at. The gym got a fancy new redesign and fancy new lockers as well as a fancy new workout room while I was there, and the construction happened during the course of my time there. But the band, choir, and drama clubs were stuck in 30 year old buildings, the band and choir had to run fund raisers just to do competitions, and the band and orchestra were forced to make students buy and bring their own instruments, even big ass tubas and bass cellos, or they’d have to force the students to drop the class.
I never had any jock friends, but I can only assume that if there were competitions they had transportation provided to them. Uniforms were given to them, and on top of that they never had the shame of being the people in the class to not be able to provide to the class when it came time to competitions and someone either couldn’t afford or couldn’t raise enough money so either they couldn’t go or the entire class couldn’t.
It’s appalling to hear the games industry treats games like fucking high school faculty.
It was worse at my school. You see, it wasn't just the non-sports activities that were defunded. It was all of the classes, too. You know, the thing that ostensibly public school exists for?
Our superintendent got a huge raise every year (from the school board that was filled with his buddies) and was pulling $1mill+ salary within a few years of being hired. Meanwhile, every year a few more teachers were laid off and the teachers that remained got pay freezes, meaning that they had to become coaches or work second jobs to continue to support themselves as cost of living went up in the area.
None of our classes had in-date textbooks. The textbooks were all 10+ years old. Many classes couldn't afford enough textbooks for all of the students. In a small high school in a major US city suburb with a max of 200 kids enrolled at any time. So, not a big or unexpected expense for a school at all.
AP classes weren't offered. No classes teaching modern skills were implemented. We weren't taught coding or given laptops or ipads or chromebooks. We had a computer lab filled with 10+ year-old PCs that ran windows XP and we were only allowed to use them for touch typing classes or under teacher supervision to write papers. Yeah, touch typing classes in high school. When we were already taught touch typing in elementary school in the same district.
They budgeted so little for the school nurse that she had to split her time between 4 different schools (2 elementary, 1 middle, and 1 high school) and eventually only worked 3/5 days a week for the district. So 2/5 days she was "on call" but not at any of the schools.
Our school counselor was overworked and only worked part-time. There was one of her for 200 of us. Also, our health classes were a joke when it came to sex ed, and didn't mention mental health at all. More students got pregnant every year, and more committed suicide, got addicted, or dropped out every year.
We stopped having non-sports clubs unless the students wanted to run the clubs on their own with no budget. As you can imagine, these few remaining clubs were a joke.
Oh, and of course the superintendent decided to spend $100,000+ on a new football scoreboard for our pathetic football field. Even though we already had a scoreboard that worked just fine. I think it came out later that he was somehow related to the owner of the scoreboard company, but I don't know if anything came of it.
The best part? Our football team hadn't even won district since the 90s. In fact, the team is so bad that not enough people come to watch the games and this the team loses money for the school. And our school used to be great academically prior to the late 90s as well. We regularly used to send kids to ivy league universities. Some became CEOs of big companies.
Now the school is a joke, because the current school board got into power in the late 90s, and they've hired superintendent after superintendent with only one purpose: to siphon money away from education and extracurricular and into their own pockets in the form of inflated salaries and sports-related contracts that are just a means to send money to a relative or friend. It's a clever scam to steal money from the taxpayers, but the kids' futures are sacrificed as a side effect. But the school board doesn't care, since they get rich. Good ol' USA.
I was the first person in over a decade to go to an ivy league university from my high school, because I worked my butt off academically and found extra education and extracurricular opportunities outside of my high school. My former classmates were not so lucky. I fear for their futures.
That's the sad state of public schools here in the US. The taxpayers are just wasting money on stupid stuff and school nowhere near prepares you for the real world.
No wonder so many people in the US turn out so stupid. You go to school to get fucking educated, yet their schools can't even get new fucking textbooks. That's some third-world level shit right there, in a country that's supposedly the richest in the world.
@@Leroset Christ, and I thought my high school was shit. I mean it was, but nothing compared to this.
This is really sad, man. But hey, that's capitalist logic for you. Whatever is more profitable will get more funding, regardless of the potential cultural, human or intellectual value of the other, less profitable activities that are left to rot.
I like the 'plug an indy' thing you're doing at the end of videos now. Keep it up!
+
Good to see him promoting hidden gems
Seriously. I was thinking, as he was talking about having to go to Indies for narrative, story-driven games, "So tell us some!" :D
Well done, Jim. :D
I agree as well! I normally don’t like TH-cam videos but I threw a like and a comment on this one specifically because of the plug!
Definitely keep finding those lesser known gems and promoting them mate, it's good for everyone!
Activision Blizzard. Great name for a company running blindly into a sh!tstorm.
You are allowed to swear
It's what happens when the shot barometer breaks
best comment today, thanks
@@jes3788 No, this is a Christian Comment thread. No cussing please.
More like actively running blindly into a shitstorm.
Oh noes, we only made millions instead of billions!
That's a big difference though.
If you can make billions instead of millions, who the fuck would not?
Well, shit hits the fan if you got more from you investors than you made back.
Oh noes, we only made billions instead of all the money in the world.
@@knavenformed9436
I think they'd make a lot more if they didn't throw incredible amounts of money at top level executives for doing literally nothing but join the company.
I'm not saying people shouldn't make money here. But people would make much MORE money for less work if these assholes cut their yearly jaguar purchases down from 12 a year to, say, 9.
Instead of a mansion with twenty bedrooms, five pools and ten kitchens, they could settle for ten bedrooms, three pools and three kitchens.
But, you know, that would mean letting other people make money too. Instead of laying off many percents of your workforce because you can't be fucked to give your workers a more fair paycheck.
Or hiring people as contractors, thereby bypassing having to offer adequate work environments or even proper compensation for their work.
Hell, they could pay their taxes so they at least give something back to the economy!
Fuck, I would settle for about a hundred grand. That would pay off my debt and I could go through life with a blank slate and a decent emergency fund.
Bear in mind that the whole "Frostbite was hard to work with" thing would have never come to pass had Bioware been allowed to use Unreal, which is the engine they were used to.
"We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective."
This Michael Eisner quote from the 80s is still relevant to every single company making any kind of corporate 'art' to this day.
EA doesn't buy RPG and story-driven game studios to make RPGs and story-driven games, they buy them because they see them as a threat to the time that they could use to milk money from their "recurrent spending" games.
They're happy enough to buy those studios, rinse what they can out of their IPs and discard them - because they are not interested in creating or nurturing sustained IP franchises that they can't heavily monetise. They only care about making all the money for as little investment as possible - never mind the fact that Mass Effect and Dragon Age have the potential to pull in revenue from extended media and merchandise, that's all too risky and too much effort for EA to consider.
When was the last time you bought or saw someone with a FIFA hoodie or Madden visual novel? The "drama geeks" may not be spending as much on in-game MTX but give us a good story driven game and we'll buy all the real world tat to go along with it - that's the "recurrent spending", and it takes up time and money that otherwise wouldn't be used for gaming anyway. I'm going to buy a hoodie because I need clothing, it might as well be related to something else I enjoy. And, if EA weren't so blinkered by squeezing money from whales, they'd see the other benefit of a merchandise-friendly IP - free advertising.
I had a whole big thing written, then I realized it could pretty much be summarized into the following; in a world where the companies are already going to spend a hefty chunk of change on advertising no matter what and customers are already more frequently buying digital "clothes" for their digital avatars than customers buy clothes for themselves why would any company produce real clothing when real goods have all the inherent problems and costs they do and sell less well as the digital "clothes" in question?
Of course, then there's all the other digital recurrent spending that isn't even "clothes." Simply put, the "drama geeks" that'd be happy to buy real world items just aren't nearly as good for business as are the "drama geeks" and other people that are willing to go completely digital for their "recurrent spending."
This is a common tactic by bigger businesses. Buy out a smaller potential competitor and then sit on their IP/goods/whatever and basically shut it down.
Then you're the only place people can go to.
I never thought about that--of course. Its just so difficult to remember they see stories and characters this way.
I have more Mass Effect bits and bobs than I’d like to admit. I don’t buy micro transactions but my god do I buy things branded with my favorite RPGs. I haven’t thought about it that way before but all my friends who are RPG fans are in the same boat. We have the collectors editions, the statues, the clothing, the bumper stickers that say “My other car is the Normandy.” We’ve spent a lot of money on merch. A LOT.
There's another angle for it: EA knows if they buy up these studios and just close them down, there's nothing stopping the devs from going to work for another studio making similar games and EA loses money. What EA's doing is far more sinister: they're looking at companies like Bioware and going "these people are a threat to our quest for money and market domination." They're buying up these studios for the express purpose of not killing the *studio,* but crushing the spirits of the *developers* working for them.
Think about it. Since being bought up by EA, Bioware's suffered so much from time crunch and lack of resources that Bioware's managers paint the abuse, massive turnover, and broken spirits that are required to even hope to make these games as "magic." EA's turned Bioware into a machine to grind up and spit out developers who might join similar studios and make games that compete with EA's own endless stream of electronic diarrhea they call "games." Once they're done with Bioware, they'll pick out the ones who actually have promise to be uninspired parasites, move them to other studios, and cast the rest out.
Don't invest in products that are less profitable, thus ensuring that they will stay less profitable and even decline as time goes on.
What a nice self-fulfilling prophecy that is! Makes an analyst's job much easier it does!
Also they still are profitable and the consumers there won't necessarily buy your big titles. They're actively losing money on this.
th-cam.com/video/zqjQDP9KX6E/w-d-xo.html
So don't follow basic, economic logic. I can really tell that Jim's audience runs successful businesses.
And then we can finally enjoy games one day blending in to one soup of the exact same experience over and over again.SatisFaction
@@TheNoirMirror "Less profitable" is not "not profitable". You can make money without making ALL THE MONEY, you know? But you don't seem to consider that. Talk about basic economy.
“Single player games didn’t die they were murdered!”
-Jimprincegaming
Lol
AnberlinRoxxforeal or JimprinceSterling?
@@akaimizu1 JimprinceFUCKINGSterlingsongaming... Fixed it for you
Aka one of the worst youtubers
@@JLRedPrimes at least he's better than prank invasion or Ali a
I disagree. He has improved. But I respect your opinion. Maybe see if he's changed. @@JLRedPrimes
To quote bowling for soup:
"Highschool never ends."
Ubisoft/Activision, they're the prom queens
Capcom, captain of the chess team
Bethesda, a clown, EA, the quarterback
Seen it all before, I want my money back!
@@sintanan469 Perfect.
That song is applicable to so many things.
Especially if you get an office job. Get ready for basically the same high school drama/cliques/talking behind backs/backstabbing/internal politics/etc you had to deal with in high school all over again, yet done by "adults" who want to pretend they are more mature than that while most hypocritically participate in these mindsets and behaviors nonetheless.
Sin tanan Well played.
EA: "No microtransactions. No loot boxes. And no, we won't be adding them."
Really think about that tweet, and know what a slimy organization EA really is. They need to reassure their potential customers that they won't try to screw them up front, or sneak around and use a patch to pull a bait and switch. How fucked is that? Lets all pat EA on the back for making video games, not a "recurring spending" machine. (rolls eyes)
All I'm reading from that tweet is that Disney has a gun at the back of EA's head, telling them if they screw up this game, they're going to take Star Wars away from them and let everyone and their friends know they're crap business partners. If this game sells 'below expectations', EA will be lucky if they can even get fucking Bubsy to play with.
Happy with Jedi: Fallen Order?
"You don't invent a problem, fix it, and then let the praise roll in."
And this is why we than god for Jim. Dude has a brain and knows how to use it.
Governments are run that way.
@@funkyweapon1981 Depends on the government. There is nothing intrinsic about government that would make your statement true for all of them. It is an extension of the will of the people.
I would agree with you on the war on drugs.
Weird that Game Publishers hate government regulation, but continue to do things that would eventually require government regulation
That is why they hate it, because they want to keep getting away with what they are doing.
@@SpoonieMcspoonington Their capitalist greed blinds them from seeing the consequences for said greed.
It's a lack of discipline and lack of foresight common to all humans. Like overfishing. Or speeding down the highway. Even if one knows it's bad, they don't usually change their actions until something catastrophic happens. Basically, game publishers are in their "teenage years." :D
It's the same with criminals, I wonder why
Foxes in a chicken hut.
"Shrouded Isles: A combination of *Darkest Dungeon* and Reigns"
You have my attention.
he just thought he'd pop it in there......
...or is it merely a trick of the light?
Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer
I loved Darkest Dungeon. 99% Wayne June and 1% dying horrible deaths because you missed a hit and were on your last torch.
Good times, good times...
@@jotabeas22 Just 1% horrible deaths? You're clearly much better at that game than I am.
You don't splatter us with an Audible, Nord VPN or phone app game you will never play at the end of your videos, so an indie feature segment is quite perfect to be honest, keep going with that!
He makes some $13000 per month on his Patreon. Jim doesn't need to shill to make money.
Check out Consolevania fr good indie reviews too
Smaller youtubers need to rely on those things to get by. I don't like em either but I don't begrudge them.
I may just be one audience member, but I for one mostly do not even bother with AAA any more. I re-oriented myself towards Indie and AA games, I would find it pretty stellar if they got more coverage.
It’s a relief to not see those ominous yellow markers on Jim’s videos. TGFJ
The logical end-point is to have Star Trek Holodeck technology games by one studio, while another uses pencil and the courner of a flip-book. SOMEHOW IT SOLD BELOW EXPECTATIONS.
Except both end up below expectations, because the p&p project didn't sell a single copy, but the holodeck project was expected to sell 123735716235124713587123 copies.
Indy recommendations are good. More of that please.
Mine: hard west
"Hard West" is cool and it's also on sale right now on Gog.
Shrouded in Sanity
2d Bloodborne-like.
Hard West was neat. I should get back to it one of these days. It's Wild West XCOM, for anyone curious. Not quite as in-depth as far as I've seen, but still fun if you''re a turn-based tactics nut.
Weird West Xcom. Something like a Lovecraft RPG, set in cowboy times, xcom mechanics and each campaign has its own quirky mechanic to make it different. That last aspect is the best part. You're never ONLY working your way through the story. It's also a resource management, or a choose your own adventure.
@Imba Game sure, I'll check it out. I'm not usually into lovecraft. But there are games i don't dislike that fit the mold.
I know this series is super repetitive, but this point needs to be hammered in again and again and until the industry listens we cannot afford to forget. Thank you Jim Sterling for doing this.
The day Jim gives up is the day I will quit this hobby. Because at that point it is just too toxic to continue.
Recurrent Truths from Sterling
But the people he’s talking about ceos etc who run the shows and make decisions aren’t out here watching this.
At least in the case of only us common folk watching it, for those of us who don't always have the time to bother keeping up with the news, we can find out from Jim who to worry about being blitzed by EA, which games to avoid, etc. Even if its repetitive in overall perspective, the monster of the week changes.
@@NunayahBuisness yeah but if he can reach the masses who buy games(namely the people who have no clue about what's really going on in the industry), and in turn they start to realize it's all bullshit and start to NOT buy the games, the sales will go down, and the only way to hurt these assholic corporations is in the wallet
7:16 Singleplayer games are not just dying, they're being murdered!
Nerd Slayer reference?
I understand that reference!
It’s a reference from that dipshit from Clearprincegaming.
To be fair the answer is "stop partnering with EA".
@@magnolia549 Way to be a dick for no apparent reason....
A few years ago we were complaining about games being exclusive to certain platforms but these days they're becoming our last line of defense against the "live service" war machine. Now I say thank god for Mario, Spider Man, God of War, and, umm, whatever Xbox is doing!
Oh and thank god for Jim.
Yeah this is one reason it sucks to be a PC gamer or even an Xbox gamer if you like SP games. The PC because it's entirely dependent on third party developers and publishers who are busy chasing the money and Xbox because MS was at the forefront of pushing "live services" this gen. To be fair about the PC, the HUGE number of quality indies + AA kind of games does make up for the lack of big budget quality SP games somewhat...
"whatever xbox is doing", nothing... i say that as an xbox exclusive player, i'm still waiting for MS to give up on the propped up corpse of the gears of war series and to release halo infinite and hopefully bring a dignified ending to one of my favorite series so that they can finally move on and do new shit
That's what emulating is for. >:)
But in all seriousness, I was pretty tempted to get a Switch just for Zelda. Nintendo's always been so true to their fun for fun's sake philosophies. Gotta give them that much.
@@Spike2276 I am genuinely unsure of what to expect from Halo Infinite. On the one hand 343 has said that they've learned a lot from Halo 5, especially campaign-wise. This has always been their strongsuit.
On the other hand, 343 has been pretty bad in the writing and storytelling departments. Halo 5 has Chief back with his old friends in Blue Team, a MAJOR story advancement in the grand scheme of things and it isn't even addressed in-game. If you wanted to know how they got back together you had to read a web-comic series, but even that doesn't help much unless you read Fall of Reach, First Strike, Ghosts of Onyx and the Kilo-5 trilogy books to know what the hell they've been up to this whole time.
If 343 can just ditch the old writer(s) and bring in some new ones with actual experience in writing science fiction I think we'll be good.
“Vandalize games as an art form to exploit games as a business”- the wise Jim 2019
AAA is actually an acronym.
All
About
Avarice
Now you know.
Or Atrocious Avaricious A-holes. Both work pretty well.
"Thank god for me..." *goes into a body spasm* "Because I'm worth it...like L'Oreal..."
Made me snort so hard when I heard that XD
EA: We want a game that has as much content as current WoW. Jim, Bob, and that new intern, make it. Your budget is 10k dollars and if you fail to meet our expectations and get a 100 on metacritic you'll be banned from the game industry and we'll murder this box of puppies.
Oh wait, the box of puppies is getting murdered regardless. So instead it's a box of kittens. Oh and you have a year to do it starting last month. Good luck.
"Oh and the kittens die regardless too.......good luck,"
7:10 Yup, they try to force the future that they want to see, and then try to shrug their shoulders like "What? It's just the natural future of the market, nothing we're doing..." lol.
Dragon Age 4. Anthem with Dragons. Wow.
And this is after, according to the Kotaku report, Anthem got it's start as Dragon Age in Space.
I thought that was Mass Effect.... Dragon Age in Space....
Mass Effect was 2 years before Dragon Age: Origins
@@KeyBladeMaster-Dan fair point.
Jim your writing has been amazing lately. The RPG company needs to make a saving throw? That's friggin funny bud.
And this is the reason why I have zero confidence in the upcoming Jedi game.
i'm not particularly excited about it (i'm not huge on star wars to begin with), but i give respawn the props it deserves and it probably hasn't been sucked dry by EA just yet
On the other hand, everyone knows Star Wars, so there's at least a chance it'll get good resources for development.
Jesse Williams-Fuller like Battlefront 1&2? Sorry to say, but many thought those were watered down Battlefield games with a fancy Star Wars color job over it.
Hope? Yeah. I'm a sucker for Star Wars games, though it's been a LOOONG time since that hope was justified.
Confidence? None.
Much like Mass Effect 2, Fallen Jedi was being worked on before EA ate the company up. Which means it'll probably be a mostly good game with a few weird clunky always-online attachments from EA.
It bugs me how many people blame all the problems Bioware have had on Bioware. I'd say their problems have been about 70% EA's fault, 30% Bioware's. They clearly had an unhealthy corporate culture before EA ate them, but it got way worse after due to the way all gaming companies EA eats and shits out get treated by EA.
Even here we battled to get funds while our Rugby team was sent overseas on special training camps.
Nick Armitt who hurt you? Do you need to talk about it? Did a goth boy break ur heart in school?
The Goth King which country is this in?
@@nickarmitt4722 seems you could've used drama club to explore your emotional range
Sociopathy/Selfishness vs Empathy/Understanding/Analysis/Art... a tale as old as time.
Nice comment
More relevant to this, though, it's a story that started at the first cities when the first person became more powerful than any other group of people. More specifically, this is an effect of high levels of organizational structure and social stratification.
The possibility of natural empathetic response in these systems is eliminated by having several layers of separation between a powerful individual's decisions within a highly organized systemic structure and the creatures and physical reality that are affected by those decisions.
It creates a type of systemic, artificial "psychopathic mechanism" that creates the behavior even in those that may not otherwise be capable of it. It's present everywhere operating on the modern civilizational model, but it's amplified in positions of elite power.
@@SolarScion Now THIS is (podracing! I mean.. uhh..) an awesome comment. Thank you for sharing. :) 👍
Love the Indie Spotlight at the end. Please keep doing them.
You can start calling it: "Premium Games Companies". They are not AAA anymore they just ask premium prices.
Premium Price Companies, as their intent is to make as much money as they can on as little game as possible. Premium Games Companies implies that making video games is the companies purpose.
Yeah I'm not sure if Jim realizes AAA is a rating like perfect 10, and has nothing to do with publisher size...
I vote to start calling the triple aaaaaeeeey industry the premium price industry.
I agree with calling them Premium Price Companies, or PP Companies, for short. Yes, I'm that immature.
@@chilldudie242 I believe it's not actually about size or quality, but originally comes from the level of relevance the games have to the public.
What kind of resources are needed to remake a soccer game for the umpteenth time?
Player licenses, probably.
Exactly the same question I have
It's been proven to be next to zero after that game was built once within a generation. That's why EA got into a lawsuit with the EU over FIFA 12 or 13 because the assets sold in the game were the exact same as the previous years with some basic stat info shuffled around.
You would think they would just make one FIFA every x years to update graphics and shit and just patch the player stats and stuff between iterations
@@barryward2128 But that means not selling millions of copies at 60 bucks a pop every single year.
"Have you been living under a rock?"
No, just in Europe, where that nonsense isn't a thing. Nobody except the parents would ever go watch a school sports match.
Yeah, outside the US (but inside the OECD, can't speak for developing countries) this whole jocks vs. nerds thing more or less doesn't exist. If anything, there is a much bigger focus on "nerd" activities, because sports are seen as useless for anything other than general fitness. 99.9999% of students won't become professional athletes and there is no need for college sports stipends.
So no one watches Soccer over there.
@@chasejackson7248 They do, but not school teams.
Same in South America, I was a basketball player in the academy of a second division team, but in school there were no sports other than general gym class.
I'm kinda with you but in Scotland there is almost no support for any sport outside of football, rugby and golf. Hell one of the few scholarships they do is a golf one but if the education sector supported more diverse sport we'd have a booming sport scene so it's not all "sport bullies"
"We don't want to make a little extra money on the side while already making piles of money. We want every single little aspect to make us ALL the money! We don't want some of our FIFA-money to finance smaller-scale projects like Dead Space or a single-player Star Wars game to make a bit more money because that means we have less money!"
-AAA CEO/CFO/President/Investor/Shareholder/Boardmember logic.
You mentioned indie games, but Japanese publishers have been putting out some great single-player experiences this gen as well. That's where most of my time is spent gaming nowadays.
You reminded me of a King of the Hill episode in which Peggy is trying to get more funding for the garden class she is teaching and principle Moss wont give her any of his attention. She then says "What if we could grow healthy snacks for the football team?" Moss then spins around from the window and says to her "Football! I'm listening!" and sits down at his desk to hear what she has to say. A lot of the things you said just reminded me of the episode.
ah yes, those _NERDY_ RPGs that no one plays, like """""Final Fantasy""""" and """""Skyrim""""" and """""""""""""""""""World of Warcraft"""""""""""""""""""
to be clear I'm not making fun of Jim, I'm making fun of EA for their stupid ideas about how THEIR OWN INDUSTRY WORKS, when they brand 'RPGs' as the problem because their insane business practices make creating a rich, complete, RPG experience essentially impossible for their studios to achieve and then claim that the genre doesn't make as much money as others
@@KevinJDildonik Also with FF15, apparently nearly every piece of clothing worn in game (minus any ridiculous armor) was actually high-end premium fashion items you could actually purchase in real life at the time as well, lol. I thought that was funny too and something a lot of people didn't notice.
To be fair EA already fucked over Dragon Age with the last game, at least for me personally. I loved the dragon battles in Origins, but in Inquisition there were a) too many of them and b) because of the Open-World-ness it was far too easy to level past them which turned them into pushovers. I just got bored after the fourth dragon fell over before I even realized I was actually fighting it. Never finished that game.
I mean I thought Origins was the bee's knees, even though some of the DLC wasn't all that great. I even didn't hate 2, which probably makes me some kind of unicorn. But Inquisition was just ... boring, I guess. Too watered down, too much busywork, too formulaic, not enough focus (IMO narrative games need at least some kind of handholding to work, fite me): All of that sounds like the publisher checking the "popular" tropes for RPGs at the time without knowing (or caring) why they were popular. BioWare not having the necessary resources to develop a game of that size didn't help, of course, but again, I put the blame for that firmly at EA's feet, as well.
I haven't played ME Andromeda, but I guess it's similar to DA:I in that respect.
@@Wraithfighter That's the problem with "Live Services"/MMO type games: People rarely play more than one of those at a time because _they consume (almost) all your free time_ , kind of like a second job.
Not many people are going to spend time and money starting from scratch in a new MMO that's essentially "WoW but slightly better" when they have already spent a lot of both in WoW for far longer. Thus, the newcomer MMO never grows a sizeable enough playerbase to maintain an active and healthy community, and eventurally dies.
And now publishers want to turn pretty much every game into a live service model.. it's not sustainable. They should learn from the "WoW Killers"'s mistakes. Heck, they should learn from all the League Of Legends wannabes that were popular for a while: Remember Heroes Of Newerth? Heroes Of The Storm?
@@KevinJDildonik better examples would be Dragon Quest, and Xenoblade
I'm a huge FF fan but let's face it: the only main series FF game they made in the last 10 years that was great is the remade FF14, which is a live service by its very nature. (It's a MMO.) FF13 was awful and FF15 was good but not great. I still respect Square-Enix way more than EA or Activision (they're probably the only independent publisher I still respect) because they still publish great uncompromised single-player games like Dragon Quest XI, Kingdom Hearts 3, Bravely Default and Octopath Traveler, but they dropped the ball on my favorite series (FF) and they still publish some cynical garbage from time to time. (I think they published The Quiet Man for example.) They're absolutely not without their faults.
Also, by the way World of Warcraft's playerbase is melting like snow under the sun because Battle for Azeroth, their latest expansion, is a dumpster fire that was obviously designed for player retention and play time metrics rather than fun. In a really cynical move, they gave away a really cool mount that was likely intended for BlizzCon attendees if you subscribe for 6 months when it became really obvious that players were quitting, and BlizzCon attendees got nothing in-game for WoW.
Skyrim is 8 years old, and given what Bethesda has done with Fallout I find you rather optimistic for the future of the Elder Scrolls franchise.
As a drama nerd in High School, the analogy is dead on.
Also, Bioware should take a page from Orgin's book and make their next RPG villain a thinly-veiled take that at EA. Because even in 1992, EA was buying up creative studios with long histories and destroying them.
I remember the article that talked about how EA took the code from its collaboration project with Bethesda Software (yes, the same Bethesda that made The Elder Scrolls series) and released it as the very first Madden game with no credit given to Bethesda. This lead to Bethesda suing EA for copyright infringement sometime in the late 80s. Bethesda obviously lost and the microtransactioned nightmares that are the Madden games still lives on. Oh, and the original Madden game was originally a fantasy football game not an adaptation of actual NFL football.
jim should write a book titled 'Android Wilson and EA's disgusting release'.
it could either be documenting stuff about EA and the triple-A industry OR just be a complete work of fiction.
'Android Wilson' and the people crushed by the tyranny of business trends would probably read like classic Franz Kafka dystopia.
Sounds like the name of a porn parody.
You could also make mention of how even putting the jocks forward above all else can be harmful to the jocks, too. The football players become worked to death by coaches who see them only as cash machines, and any way to cut corners even within the football team is taken. This results in the players getting severly injured and being horrifically traumatized, to the point where they either get a gamebreaking injury and are thrown out, become brain damaged beyond functioning normally in society, or just keeling over. Same goes for the "jock" game devs; they are forced to work overtime, creating drivel made specifically for user spending, and do so at the cost of their health and sanity. Sure, that's more college ball than high school, but the analogy works. Hell, it's probably an even better analogy, with the mindbogglingly MASSIVE industry built around the NCAA and it's monstrous practices.
Yeah... That makes the comparison even more scarily accurate.
I'm gonna love it when AAA publishers come crawling to the government for a bailout package when they fail because you best believe I'm calling my representatives and senators to deny them.
It's a very bad thing that this comment doesn't have more likes, i know that politicians are hard to trust, but if there are a considerable number of voters that hate on something, any representative would try at least to bring the matter to the table, they need the votes so the will try to apeace the ranting somehow so the can get them. It's important that people know how democracy works (barely) and use their representatives to push for their believes. PD: This is also dangerous, cults and other kinds of fuckers can do this too.
This is honestly one of the few intro songs I don't skip.
"Publishers pump money into games."
No, Jim, no. They obviously aren't pumping money into the games. They're pumping money into the MARKETING for the games. There's a difference. If they cut the marketing budget by half, and used that instead to hire more developers, even temporary ones, not only would 'crunch time' be a thing of the past (or at the very least would be spread over more people, easing the burden on them), but they would also probably get out better, more consistent products without nearly as much negative online press as they seem to get. Throwing titanic amounts of cash into marketing is, frankly, IMO, a waste. There is that point where more money thrown into marketing and ads doesn't make a profit back, and that's why we see so many games hitting 'below expectations'.
Tbh it goes to show the ineptitude of most big AAA game publishers that they are so damn wasteful, even as they rake in more money, they could in fact have more money to begin with if they actually self-audited and maybe, just maybe, thought about what the most efficient way to spend their money on new/ongoing projects is. Oh wait, they do that, but only when it comes to laying off tons of people to please investors and those at the top, but never audit any other ACTUAL wasteful spending.
Sounds just like Hollywood!
@@Slugbunny Tbh it's really how the entire corporate culture works here in the USA.
People who like actually good and interesting games are no longer the target demographic for large video game companies. Games like Fifa, Fortnite and CoD have shown publishers where the money are really at
And it's clear we need to start regulating these companies and their actions that are negatively affecting the landscape for video games.
@@danielramsey6141 I don't give a shit about the video game landscape, I'm more worried that companies are being allowed to target people with gambling addictions to milk them for money and lawmakers are sitting there saying it isn't gambling because you don't earn money from it, like THAT was why we regulated casinos and the like.
Capcom said "Hi".
A few decades ago gamers wished that the public would recognize gaming as a form of entertainment, and a form of art, that wasn't just for kids and nerdy losers. Now that wish has been fulfilled, gaming is about as mainstream as television, but as a result it's in its shittiest shape since the crash of 83
When most indie games are a third of the price there's no point.
The Shrouded Isle has been one of my favorite mellow, darkly bleak games of the last few years. Everything has a wonderful sense of dread, and I'm thrilled you're enjoying it. I don't think it'd make a compelling video (it's all turn based menus), but I'd still watch one!
Highlighting good indie games at the end of episodes sounds like a very good idea. I hope you keep doing that. And don't worry about whether they're new or not, it's always interesting to hear about good games.
Graphics dont make a game good.
Gameplay does.
Thats why people still dedicate massive amounts of time to TF2, solid amazing gameplay
One of the first high-profile games with paid lootboxes. Critics doubling as humorists knew the boxes were a problem even then.
@@MathewHaswell The first. Valve started lootboxes, sadly.
@@tennoskoom9282
I still remember when VGCats rightly mocked what is now the Trippel Ayyy industry standard.
www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=300
That comic is from 2011, long before the mocking of lootboxes became as common among Jim's ilk as the boxes themselves became in AAA games..
Except the grind. I play so little of games with such slow progression, and I love TF2
I'll play the one in Orange Box on XBOX One. Everything is even. You don't got better guns than I do because you can't buy better ones while I, not spending the money, have to grind for them. So many FTP games will never stop asking for money, even after you've given them $60, or $400, or $1500. Ugh, ads are annoying enough a it is. I'm not investing time in that.
Typos, yes, but edit button isn't working
Remember the early 2000's when ratchet and clack was coming out and the nº1 priority for a video game company was creating the best video game possible. I miss those days. Its like when youre in college and you start remenicing back to the days of middle school and how few shits you gave back then
The thing is, if your game is gonna be a nerdy game with limited appeal, you lower the production values to accommodate that. You make a larger number of lower-budget games aiming at specific niches.
Except EA won't let them do that because every game needs to be the biggest thing ever, small projects need not apply.
So yeah.
Blame EA.
While Shrouded Isle doesn't sound like my cup of tea, I do really appreciate you taking a bit of time to talk about it. Honestly, I think it'd be really cool if you did little indie recommendations more often. I don't have as much time as I used to, so I'm always on the lookout for quality indie games.
While we're at it, I've got one for anyone who reads this. Super Hydorah. If you're into old school shmups like Gradius, it's damn well put together.
know what it is, I've had images of that movie coming into my head for a while and couldn't remember what it was. what a classic
As someone currently in a high school drama department, I find all of this to hit too close to home
"Where have you been to miss this trope?" -> Europe...
@Ash Kitt "As soon as we find oil in Europe..."
You say to the European guy. Sure, he lives in the USA now, but its not where he's from. Listen, he's not saying this happens in real time in Europe, he's saying it happens frequently in major motion pictures so even people from Europe should be aware of it. They DO watch major motion pictures in Europe, right?
@@DarkWillUser Yes, we do watch major motion pictures in Europe. But you shouldn't form an idea of how life is like in a country through just movies. Usually when I watch an American TV show or movie that uses some kind of trope, e.g. nerds being beaten up by jocks, I tend to say to myself "this can't possibly be how life is like in the US. It has to be unrealistic."
@@blobbem OK...but its the motion picture caricature that he was referencing.
@@DarkWillUser Alright... I'm lost. Are we just talking about how could people in Europe miss a trope in movies? If so, we haven't missed the trope. We are aware of it.
Didn’t think I’d see seaman today.
Always a welcome surprise
always expect seamen on the walls when Jim's around
Needs more Leonard Nimoy narration.
Same
A welcome surprise, right in the eyes.
I know right?
I shall get my seaman on pornhub.
Nice to see youtubers branching out!
Keep tacking on more of these mini-indie game sort of showcase things at whatever point in time you want to in these videos, because I really like them.
I'm liking this thing you're doing where you plug indie games at the end of your videos. It's a good idea!
I always look forward to Monday so I can be filled with resentment and distain for the video game industry :)
I think I'm beginning to understand how the gaming industry works, time to implement this knowledge to Game Dev tycoon!
I can't remember if it was Game Dev Tycoon or Mad Games Tycoon but eventually the absolute best way to make money was always releasing MMO's. Patch it a few times, release a sequel, patch and continue. Kind of sad though that those two games are some of the best game simulator I have ever seen and their both super old. I haven't heard of anything new in that Genre worth anything.
I never play simulators, I play fps mainly, but Game Dev Tycoon is one of my favourite games of all time and I don't know why.
"Oy You, You Little Fucker" is how I'm greeting everybody now.
I like the recommendations of games you're enjoying at the end. Please make it a regular thing!
The dedication of saying "triple A" with the weird voice is unreal
I think at this point it's stuck that way.
Ah.. at least we got Dragon Age Origins. Rip BioWare.
I played the Shrouded Isle, because you mentioned it in another video and it´s an amazing game.
Even if the AAA industry goes to hell in a handbasket, I still have a lot of great indie games to keep me entertained.
Also Nintendo and Sony still release quality titles and should all else fail I can weather the storm by playing games in my backlog.
I played The Shrouded Isle. It was the most stressful game I've ever played until I started playing Beholder.
I adore both of them send help.
It was too hard for me, at some point I just gave up. But I almost loved it
I only reached two separate endings (not including typical game overs) in The Shrouded Isle before putting it down out of sheer burnout from just TRYING to get to an ending at all. I still plan to give it another go, but oof it's a lot.
Jim single handedly keeps the Boglins franchise alive.
*"P!ss King of D!ck Mountain"* I'm going to be giggling to myself with this one all night, Jim. lmao
I'm old enough to have seen The Faculty in theaters...now where's my cane and prune juice?
I remember Josh Hartnet... do I get a date scone?
"They can't be bargained with. They can't be reasoned with and they absolutely WILL NOT STOP... until Bioware Studios is dead."
Ea:"ICANNOTBEBARGAINEDWITHICANNOTBEREASONEDWITH"
BioWare is already dead. The body just hasn't gotten the signal that the brain is dead. Yet.
It's actually interesting in that you have Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft pivoting towards publishing the lesser games since they need to move units in order to support their platforms rather than try and bet the platform's survival on a CoD or Fortnite.
Especially since Nintendo and Sony seem quite willing to have their tentpole franchises take as long as they need to be good. To continue the theater analogy, the famed playwright Eiji Aonuma is working on his next epic. Nintendo Drama Productions dropped in on the early rehearsals, and it looks like the play will be as wildly successful as his last one, packing theaters for years to come. The cast just needs a few more months to polish their act. This is all well and good, but NTP still needs to show something to keep the lights on, hence the rotating schedule of smaller amateur productions. They aren't as spectacular as that bombastic Spider-Man play going on three theaters down in the Sony Hall, but they get folks in the door and lining up for the snack bar.
eh microsoft hasn't been publishing much of anything lately, they have been acquiring and founding some studios so hopefully they are planning to have a next gen release with some meat around the bones, but right now xbox feels like the sahaara fucking desert
I've come up with several analogies for the industry and yet none so appropriate as a football town.
Thank the gods for Jim!
I reached a point in my life where I dont even care about games or the videogame industry anymore, but I still watch Jim's videos once in a while, coz hes awesome
The solution, get rid of the publishers and don't publicly trade your games development company
that's hard to do now because the advantages of having a publisher backing you are actually quite worth the risk of eventually getting fucked, hopefully bungie can fulfill the dream of breaking free from the grasp of publishers to deliver an actually good game that is noticeably profitable so that others will follow suit
The real solution? Abolish capitalism
@@Spike2276 What advantages are those exactly, giving up proper funding, control over who you hire or dont, and making something you don't know how to make under a limited deadline without enough people isn't advantageous in any way.
I worked and slept under my cubicle at EA back in 1995/1996. Studios being favored was a thing back then. The EA _Kiss of Death_ where EA buys an independent studio and then shuts it down in 5 years is well known.
I don't think they care if we stop playing the game after the 1st week we buy it so long as we pre order it + DLC and they get their money.
Well they care, just not a lot. New customers are always more important than loyal old ones to Live service game companies. After all people who have nothing are far more likely to buy MTX than those who might of already done so. A lot of games release cosmetic items so slowly that you can actually build up enough in game currency to get them (if possible) between releases if you play the game regularly.
Exactly. The _only_ thing the capitalists trying to run the game industry care about is your money and how quickly they can part you from it. Remember: They don't just want _a lot_ of money, they want _all of_ the money.
Of course they care if you stop playing the game after a week. If you're not playing the game, you're not being psychologically programmed to buy microtransactions and their microtransaction profits stop.
@@JustaGuy_Gaming there they're rewarding the long-term players for keeping the game relevant.
I did take in everything you said Jim, but my god. It was hard to concentrate with that freaking adorable Grub plushy on your shelf :D
Your theme song is stuck in my head
Yes! THE FACULTY! John Stewart is so great in that XD
Well ,if they don't want to fund the "drama" games, fine.
But I won't be funding them then.
To them, this isn't an issue. It's all just a major calculation. The 5 people that won't spend any money on the "jock" games are a meager loss in comparison to the enormous profits they receive from the brainless masses. The investment always has it's profits.
Not giving them money isn't the solution. Giving them money certainly isn't either. This is an issue on the level of state-wise economic policy. There are nations in which certain projects of a less profitable nature receive funding regardless, because of the cultural and intellectual value it has.
Naturally, this isn't the case for video games. But that case could be made. Minimum investment in less-profitable video game franchises could be a requirement once said franchise has been bought by a massive corporation. That this is not the case is simply down to an unwillingness of the American citizen to call out these companies, actively demand that politicians apply fair rules across the board, and actively withdraw support for libertarian capitalist schemes. And no, writing an article about it and yelling obscenities on 4chan isn't "calling them out". That's nothing more than the wishful thinking of the millennial meme-lord at work, and has no actual lasting effect on the scale of real world economic issues.
I understand that's not the point of the video and Jim only brought it up for comparison purposes, but by God am I glad I didn't go to an American high school. Speaking as a Frenchman, the obsession with sport teams in high schools just looks ... bizarre. And that clip from The Faculty is downright chilling.
Small town American schools are often a bit dependant on income from sport ticket sales to locals. Sad but true as each local school district has to get funding from local property tax on homes.
I'm 100% convinced they buy these studios with the deliberate intention of disgracing and ruining them in order to eliminate competition. It makes too much sense.
!! I played the original game jam "prototype" of Shrouded Isle, The Sacrifice, didn't know they had made it a full game! I thought the unsustainability of it was part of its charm, but I'm actually happy to see that they finished and polished it, I'll have to check it out. Thanks, Jim!
Tbh, as long as gems such as God of War, Sekiro and soon Octopath Traveler's PC release (i don't really care to own a switch), keeps trickling in, i really don't care anymore about the rest of the industry, even if i'm now part of a niche. After dabbling through virtually everything and also wasting boatloads of money into live services and micro-transactions during the booming period of all that garbage. I learned to avoid burning myself with them repeatedly. So they can go to hell :D
Better late than never I guess.
Man, you're missing out on the Switch's goldmine.
But for how long? GoW, Sekiro and such take LOADS more talent, time and money to make than these cheapo microtransaction cashgrabs, so why would anyone make the former? It's not enough to say "don't buy microtransactions and don't pre-order". What we need is legislation to criminalize in-game gambling and unions for the games industry.
@@Isnogood12 Well, it's less desperate. Think of it this way: As a developer, would you rather work at a studio that has a smaller but loyal following with management that doesn't have to pull bullshit stunts to make sure profits are as high as possible and works you to the bone before kicking you out after the end?
Publishers and developers like FromSoftware don't have to worry about getting their money back, they know that if they make a good game, they're fine. That same mentality is held by the developers as well, and you're going to get a better game for it. Sleep deprived, depressed and burned out developers work slower and produce lackluster product, so the publisher compensates for it not by easing off on the pressure, but by attempting to make the gamer the cattle to please their real customers, the shareholders. That is not sustainable.
The shareholders are going to be turned off eventually since this way of creating something is eventually going to burst like the bubble that it is. Developers flock to good, ethical publishers, shithead publishers like EA die out and we all collectively urinate on its grave.
@@Isnogood12 This happened really because of demographic change around the Xbox era. Before gaming was a geek haven where games like GoW, Sekiro, Mass Effect and such where the majority and the ones rewarded. Once the Xbox arrived and the studios relized the "fratbro" demographic would buy the cheap cashgrabs and that the "fratbro" demographic was now the majority thats when things changed.
Honestly one thing fixes this. For the "Mainstream/Normies" to go back to ignoring/hating on video games and it becoming a Niche hobby again. Because when it was a Niche hobby games like GoW,Sekiro,Bioshock,Fallout flourished.
Jim's right.
And that's the problem.
gamers all over the world eagerly await the prophecised day when Jim Fucking Sterling Son is wrong and the industry finally starts to correct itself
"Anthem with dragons." One of the only instances in which adding "with dragons" does not result in something objectively better.
I like the idea of a kind of Indie showcase of an indie game you played recently that you enjoyed at the end of the Jimquisition. I think its a great idea.
Having followed the Co-Optional Podcast for years, I have found that my own preference for hearing about obscure indie games that I might like is to hear them briefly described in the other content I'm already watching.
What I am saying is, doing these short plugs at the end of Jimquisitions is perfect for my viewing habits. I'm also a fan of compilation-type videos which showcase 3-5 indie games in videos that are digestible sizes (like 15-30 minutes).
That being said, I generally only follow content creators for one or two things they do, and for you, I follow your Jimquisition and Industry Bullshit videos (also Commentocracy whenever it's around). I very rarely watch any of your gameplay videos, unless they get referenced elsewhere, or the gameplay-adjacent videos like OMGH, because I'm never as entertained by them and I still follow like 100 other channels.
I doubt you'll see this in the sea of comments, but you have my sincerest gratitude for what you do as well as my apologies for my own viewing habits being part of the problem.
I choked on my chili cheese dog when i saw Freedom Crunch Cereal. America is hilarious.
'Freedom' and 'crunch' are two words which should never be used in the same sentence, let alone right next to each other.
rEApers : The pattern has repeated itself more times than you can fathom.
Great developers rise, evolve, advance, and at the apex of their glory, they are extinguished.
Bioware wasn't the first. They did not create profit maximization. They did not forge the stock market. They merely found it - the legacy of our kind
The cycle of destroying talented studios must continue - it is EA's solution. Without it, talented video game developers themselves would create corporate groups, which would destroy all studios."
bioware tried to warn us all along...
Never thought "Unfuck" will be an accurate expression but well...
Your intro is such a banger. Your outfits are on point. Love your content, Jim!
Hey Jim, I'm loving how you're "popping in" plugs for Indie games. Keep up the good work!
I'm currently playing Warframe, Path of Exile, Grim Dawn, and Terraria. I don't currently need more games. Live Service games erode the playerbase of active buyers. I don't even care about new releases anymore unless nostalgia hits. Even then, I can wait for a sale.
Most of my buying decisions now are to purchase games I think look good and want to support. Not whether I will actively play them 'right now'.
Hell, Kingdom Hearts 3 is going back on the shelf because the overarching plot wasn't going anywhere. I don't need another twenty hours of treading through Disney world rehashes while the main story treads water. The basically frame accurate 'Let it Go' CG did me in.
Jim is so right all the time, there should be a way to salute His greatness. idk something concise referring Him and its jurnalism genius yet something simple. Maybe thanking Him... oh wait XD
Thank god for Jim
cAAApitalism makes me so sick. Also how is it, even in the nerdy hobby of gaming, many of us are still swept off away to the nerd corner?!
Take the sickness you feel for this industry, and apply it to ALL corporate entities in America. This includes politics, which have been corporatized. The shit needs to stop.
@@jong2359
THIS
TRAIN
HAS
NO
BRAKES
@@vienlacrose lol
If you are recommending lesser known games, I suggest giving Lobotomy Corporation a shout-out. You are basically the manager of a facility, similar to Cabin in the Woods. Be it a brain-eating scarecrow or a tree that sends everyone to heaven, there is plenty of awful to go around.
Speaking of Lobotomy... I wonder when Nightdive are going to re-release Powerslave/Exhumed
Hey Jim, just wanted to say that using Indie recommendations as the stinger on your videos is a GREAT idea and it really helps the medicine go down. Keep it up!