This has always been my thoughts too. People would tell me he was a hero and shit for bringing attention to scams with his greenlight videos, but you'd have to be a fucking retard to not see 99% of those games for what they were. And all of his constant bitching about AAA was stuff that was very apparent as well
It was very strange watching someone rag on
for hours about obviously rushed out asset flips that no one would buy even in a Bad Rats so-bad-it's-funny sense. TB usually had one-notes at least, rarely returning, but Jim would have entire months worth of content dedicated to the stupidest drama imaginable. The main issue with Digital Homicide was that they were also Lolcows, and decided the response to bad reviews was a DMCA and subsequent lolsuit. Dedicating hours to playing an obviously shit game just to unironically say "don't play" is like Linus Tech Tips spending 40 minutes reviewing shit he finds at the local Chinese dollar store, as if anyone paying $15 for a uPhone would a) watch that and use it to inform their purchase and b) influence the industry to change those products. I think a lot of the audience stayed for as long as it did because they viewed as filling a similar to Ashens, sarcastic reviews of tat, but it wasn't and TB would probably get
extremely irate if you thought it was. Jim was just chasing easy content, far as I can tell.
Anyone that thought Jim was a hero for making fun of asset flippers is retarded. It was just funny to see the duo scramble to try and make up excuses for their scam being unraveled.
It was a little bit with Digital Homicide because it was more related to the gamer side of Youtube fighting back against DMCA and copyright claims, it was just treated like they were fighting Nintendo, and then they rode those coattails as if they'd done so.
That was such a weird time. JS and TB would both rail about how shit AAA gaming is and how they're ripping people off, that there needs to be more indie games, then scream bloody murder that Steam wasn't gatekeeping their precious video game garden well enough. A common phrase bandied about was that Greenlight was "cluttering" Steam's storefront. It always seemed like such a "eat my cake and have it too" argument.
TB and JS always reminded me of an airsoft gun, while someone like Jeff Gerstmann was an actual gun. Sure, they may look and even feel the same, have many of the same features and actions, but one is the real deal and the other is not.
Gerstmann always tries to give a fair shake and will give praise even in badly scored reviews that deserve it, but TB would actively seek out shit he knew he wouldn't like just to rag on it.
I understand that Greenlight lead to a lot of crap, but the review and refund system had solved that issue. It's almost like reverse-shilling, instead of reviewing Skyrim-hype games TB and Jim review games where no one would defend them, it was patently obvious what the faults were, and there was a huge audience so the developers would immediately get swamped by tweens. I remember one of them reviewing some shitty crafting survival game circa ~2015 and the reviewer left a comment on the Steam discussion board saying they were a student who wanted to sell their one-man game for a buck to fund future projects as they learned. It was probably the worst way to enter the industry and share your work, but at the same time it put a face to the crap they reviewed and the scorn with which they did it. Someone just wanted to share their work with enthusiasm, and instead they were hounded and shit on because some famous personality picked them out of crowd and said they were personally responsible for fucking up Steam and the games industry.
