I'll give some credit, he's still able to surprise me. I absolutely did not expect a live service rant this week given all the far more pertinent stories in the news (the Insomniac layoffs were perfect for one of Jim's copy-paste rants).
It really is beyond me how he decides what the JQ is going to be about, now. He must be using the South Park headless chicken method.
Its very much noticeable how he seems to regularly miss or avoid very important stories that you think would be right up his alley to do with questionable goings on by big game companies that screw over both players and developers. Like here's a few topics that are currently relevant he could, or should, cover now:
-Yuzu being shut down, there's a lot to say about Nintendo's furious war on emulators alongside their lack of interest in actually making their old library easy to play.
-Warner Bros completely fucking over a massive slew of indie developers by destroying Adult Swim games, this really pissed me off this week and solidifies Warner Bros as probably the worst major media company currently in operation, alongside all of the other tax write off shit they have been doing.
-You don't even have to stop there to shit on Warner Bros, since they had that ridiculous statement that the AAA market is 'Too volatile' (ie, Suicide Squad was an unholy abomination and nobody bought it, its the players fault for not buying their terrible games), and that they were going to focus on exploitable mobile games and try and turn the Hogwarts Legacy sequel into another GaaS nightmare, just make a whole special on everything WB games have been doing wrong and you'll have enough content for 10 Jimquisitions.
-Embracer group essentially ransacking a major chunk of the European videogame industry because a hairbrained scheme to pile up a massive amount of debt to buy up a bunch of studios and IPs didn't work out when the Saudi investor group they were trying to court pulled out, its one of the worst instances of corporate malpractice I've ever seen in the videogame industry and also really pisses me off.
-As you say, massive lay offs across the industry, even in major studios that seem successful on paper like Insomniac, you could say a lot about the fundamentally unsustainable AAA model especially with the revelations of how much of a bloated monster budgets have gotten for things like Spiderman or Grand Theft Auto, and how this process is recreating a lot of the problems in the videogame space we have seen in the movie industry for years.
-Failing all of these things he could just make a relatively easy and funny video on the latest overblown mess everybody loves to shit on like Suicide Squad or Skull and Bones, but I think some of his recent videos have been about that already.
Now in fairness to Jim, maybe he'll surprise me and he has a video about one of those topics in the works, but its just ridiculous how much he misses talking about the kinds of topics that he has said are the important things he wants to cover as a major crusader for the little guys in the videogame industry which seems to be going in a progressively worse and worse direction. Its just amazing how much he does not justify the runtime of his own videos since he doesn't talk about interesting or relevant topics enough. At least Skill Up or someone has a rundown of major weekly news like this and hits upon these points regularly as a result.
