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 um I guess it was about IGN making a review for Crimson Desert, saying it was terrible. Let's watch it. This This video apparently is really, really popular. I haven't seen it. We're going to 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 Pearls' stock 40% that was substantially written about things patched away. 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 that 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 years building one of the most technically complex, visually extraordinary, seamlessly handcrafted open worlds this medium has ever produced. It's huge. naive 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. Damn. Someone whose entire professional existence, whose platform, whose audience, whose institutional power exists precisely because Pearl Abyss did the hard work and 3 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 nobody at IGN seems to have asked before publishing this. What exactly is this confidence built on? Uh-oh. Because 20 years ago, sure, 20 years ago, IGN served a real and legitimate function. Mhm. You couldn't watch 40 hours of gameplay on YouTube before buying. You couldn't pull up a Twitch stream of someone 200 hours deep in a game. Exactly. You couldn't read 10,000 Steam reviews from actual players who bought it with their own money. See, this is the big difference, right? Is like back in the day, you needed game reviews because you didn't have any other way to access the medium. But now with 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 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 us. 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 [ __ ] 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 written like article reviewer. Every single one of them. And 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 uh you know like publications could not be a YouTuber viewer. And how do I know that for a [ __ ] fact? Because if they could, they would because you can make 20 times the amount of money. The end 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. Yeah. 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 3 million people who bought Crimson Desert. Exactly. Like they don't know what they like. Experienced everything he experienced. We know everything he knows. We've lived in every world he's drawing on to make his comparisons. Probably better than he has, too. There is no enlightenment the badge confers. 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 3 million copies, the very positive Steam rating, and the rebounding stock price are three dependent data sources all saying, not directly, but indirectly. 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 may have more credentials to be a reviewer but that uh 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 going to understand if a movie is better like how does 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. Mhm. 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 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." True. 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 manufacturingformational 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 uh like an idea about and they didn't. I I 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. Controls inventory management. Yes. Boss difficulty. Every complaint was The bosses were easy. The bosses are easy. Who the [ __ ] having trouble with bosses? What the [ __ ] Why? About surface level friction. The kind of stuff any competent studio patches away in the first week. Yeah, 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. The genuinely original design philosophy, none of the things that will still matter about this game in 10 years registered. Just the surface. Just the stuff that was gone before the review was even cold. 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. 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 redout. 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. Okay. Sure. But I want you to see the slight 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 uh you know like [ __ ] western critical themes against authoritarianism. it doesn't have uh you know different types of representation whether it's of women whether it's of uh 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 it's cultural racism where these people want to create a reward structure around following their cultural norms terms and basically adhering to them. So every single China game, every uh you know Korea game and to a lesser extent every Japanese game is graded on this harsh curve of adhering to western cultural values and and 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 what you think about the amount of games that are coming out of China and Korea especially that get [ __ ] on constantly by these developers or sorry by these reviewers. I think that they do it almost every single time. Believe 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 in They did the same thing to Blackm 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 uh 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 winds meet, that's another good example. You're right. Yeah, they do it constantly. It's a very 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. the kind of sentence that lets you condescend to someone while maintaining complete plausible deniability about having done it. Well, you're 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 fanfiction. 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. 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 expert? 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. What game development experience sits behind the confidence required to call the people who built this naive? Yeah. 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 room, 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. Uhhuh. 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 that's the 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 uh besides that. Also saying uh by the summer is implying it's not good enough, but it might make it good in a few 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 managing resources, grinding to get ready for a difficult fight. too much of a burden. Punishing. Combine that with the fact that you now don't need to cook up a thousand bowls of soup to get through Kirish the Slayer. I mean, yeah, it was kind of hard, but like, man, it wasn't that bad. What the hell are you talking about? What? 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 going to get these items while you're playing anyway. It's going to 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. Uh-huh. The reviewer made it sound like he had to stop everything and dedicate hours to farming. That's not the game. [ __ ] That's That's someone who didn't understand how the systems work together, describing his own confusion as a design failure. And this person called himself a hardcore Souls player. The only reason that before concluding with super long three-phase boss fights that includes some segments where you're just mercilessly sworn by the bad guy while 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 live souls like and I consider myself a tryhard. Holy [ __ ] man. Like, yeah, some of the boss fights have problems, but like Jesus. But here's what makes this particularly pointed. 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. Like, he was way harder than everything else. And they know what the completion rates for the game are on the back end. And when they see that completion rates drop off whenever you get to a certain boss, that's not good for your game. So obviously they're going to fix it. Obviously they're going to improve it. Duh. I think that's a good idea. 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. Nope. 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 too much. 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. Sure. Crimson Desert has a completely different conviction. And here's the thing IN cannot grasp. That difference is not a deficiency. It's a design philosophy. A deliberate, ambitious attempt to do something Western open world design stopped trying to do years ago. I didn't know you could open that door. I had no idea you could do that. That shit's crazy. 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. The shadows plate armor. Looks badass. Full Lich King aesthetic. put up black robes, massive execution axe. 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. Stumbled. Dude, if you can't climb in this game, you're garbage. Pulled into a witch's hideout built inside an ancient tree trunk in the Waywood Woods. Yep. Found it completely by accident because I'd gone the wrong way. accidentally rode through a black bear gap 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 uh openw 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 uh 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 going to 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 good open world game. And games that make you feel like you have to do the main story, I think very commonly are the bad ones. Nothing locked me out. Stop getting distracted. The world just existed vast. Yeah. Like 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 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, try stop trying to make it Skyrim. When you're playing a game like Breath of the Wild, stop trying to make it Elden Ring. At the end of the day, each video game is going to be different. They're going to be totally different. There is this line. The one that I keep coming back to. To unlock Crimson Desert's more accomplished facets. You have to dedicate hours to mediocrity. Oh my god. Think about what made World of Warcraft legendary. Not the endgame. Not the raids. Riding through Elwin Forest for the first time with no idea where you were going in a world that felt like it had been. You've got to 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. 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. Mhm. 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 cuz I think that one of the coolest things about a game like Crimson Desert or Elden Ring coming out is the first like month of the game releasing where people are discovering new things constantly. And there's a new YouTube video where somebody found a sword and it's like you can get a 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 MMOs. 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 uh it's happening now with Crimson Desert. Hell Divers 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 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 like 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 Kasimoth or uh that one nightmare steed that you were able to get in uh what was it the Karazan 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 there. 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, wellan animated story beats give you just enough context to feel the weight of the world of Pywell without taking that weight out of your hands. By chapter 4, Cliff's journey had already given me enough to feel genuinely invested. Not because the writing is flawless, but because the world around it is real enough 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 like even the existence of a main story quest is kind of almost antithetical to what a openw world game is. Now I think that you can still have it like work well kind of like with Elden 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 that if there was a continuity with the story line that people would like it more, but it feels like it's very disjointed. It's 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 Systematic advantages, institutional privilege, and a grandfathered in sense of basically um you know, entitlement that people should be listening to them. That's the reason why people take IGN seriously and it's the 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 the foundation is at least coherent. A surgeon with thousands 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 demonstrabably right can earn institutional confidence. Yeah, of course. The arrogance has something underneath it. What's underneath IGN's? We've played everything. I do also think that it's a huge component that western uh video games are way more accountable to game developers, 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. They reference. We've lived in Cyberpunk, Elden Ring, Valheim, Skyrim, World of Warcraft. We know exactly what they're drawing on and we can evaluate those comparisons as well as they can, probably better, because most of us have spent significantly more time in these work than any reviewer on a deadline ever 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 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. 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. Shake. I I still disagree with this premise. I don't think that IGN giving Crimson Desert a bad review meant that that that's not the reason why it didn't do well. That's not the reason. It 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 green lit, 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 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. 3 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. 3 million copies despite the review. Steve, I would say Blackmth Wukong is an even better example of this. I think Crimson Desert getting low review. Like Blackmth 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, Blackmth Wukong, not in a week, but in like 2 or 3 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 the stock recovering. Yeah, of course it did. Because even institutional money is now recalibrating. The market itself is figuring out what gamers already knew. That 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 uh I remember Arc 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 [ __ ] 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. Oh, yes. Or in Expedition 33, I 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. Expedition 33 used AI, nobody cared. Um, you know, people, what was it was the third one? I was one 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? It has nothing to do with 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 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, not a reconsideration, a face- saving piece written with the same unbroken context. I'm going to read I'm going to read after this. I'm going to 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 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 202? 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, uh, 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. Me. But before I go, once again, thank you to everyone who showed up for this one, the comments, the shares. 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 at all. And 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, weathering waves, Genchin 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, um I I think this is actually a pretty good video. It is. Uh I like the video. And overall, I think that asking the question, why do these different developers or not I I always I don't know why I always get it wrong. I always say the wrong thing. I'll link you guys the video. Give it a like. I think that was actually a pretty good video. And uh ask you a question. Why do these reviewers, journalists, and then 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 they don't really mean anything. They just mean that there are people that had this ability or they had this privilege at certain point in the future uh 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 [ __ ] 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 going to find this. Okay. So, where is the new This is Wait. Oh, they wrote another article. Chaotic combat is the best kind until bosses show up to get the reset. Uh bosses review locked on one v one. Also clunky duels. What the [ __ ] took me? It took me about 10 hours before I properly started enjoying most basic fights. What? What bosses have you squashed your tool sket forcing you into specific play styles? I I What are they talking about? I follow the same pattern against the crow caller. Stay out of range for the uh 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 [ __ ] It wasn't even that hard. I one shot him. it. What are you talking about? This is insane. I 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 de 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 Antonumbra sword. I actually wanted to I was going to do the next version of that today. I'm probably going to do that in a bit. And uh I base the games off what to buy off your take. Honestly, you're my demographic. And 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's no reason for you to want to play or use it this way or, you know, 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 stock fill. A further Thank you once again for your for younger generations people. I just Dude, I I I don't know why you would even say this. It's cuz they're [ __ ] Yeah, I guess so. I just watched you play them and make up my mind. Yeah, exactly. You're very fair. I try to be very fair. I tried to do my If you already like its approach. Yeah, this is just again story slog. I mean, Jesus, guys. Oh my [ __ ] god. Yeah, I think that they're way too negative about this. It's very [ __ ] annoying, man. Uh 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 uh look at the comments. What do the comments say? The way this title is written is makes the makes the game seem like it's a complete failure. Yeah. And uh if you have reasonable expectations, the game's very fun. It's not the one part of the game I'd consider bad, except for the story. Uh 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 uh cultural cultural values, right? I think that's what's happened. What the comments article say? 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. Ignore the IGN review score. I mean, I have been playing this game pretty much non-stop. Like, I'm going to be honest, like, I've been playing the [ __ ] 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 100