The Epic Brutality Of Unchecked Capitalism (Jimquisition) - Videos for the 97.4%

https://youtu.be/USrdUXH3iqg Also featuring Jim going overboard with his intro and questioning his life choices

Alright Jim's back on the right team, he goes HARD on Epic.

Lord and Savior Jim Sterling enlightening us about the terrible evils of capitalism. Not actually doing anything about it - I mean, that jobs for other people, cuz uh, he's just a messenger. Funny how reports of Epic crunch-timing his workers makes him flip from "Epic storefront is great! Fuck steam!" to "They're Tri-Pul-Ay! Here I'll post a picture of Scrooge Mcduck to show how greedy they are!" Everyday man Ross Scott meanwhile finds a single issue that he has a severe issue with in the industry and tries to rally lawyers and law students into helping him solve it.

Why do you have a problem with him? Denouncing the company and making their evil deeds known to as many people as possible is not good enough?

Well, for one, yeah. Comparing him to Ross Scott - a guy who's only concern is "I don't want games to die" is probably a bit unfair (because it's really hard to dislike Ross) but fuck it, Sterling really grates on me. For another, it's his holier then thou attitude - I know, someone's going to say that he's just doing it for the show and initially yes but he's kinda moved this overly smug memelored attitude to his twitter as well. But perhaps most importantly is how he's beating a dead horse - the same dead horse he's beaten for years - with the same stick. Always using the same images of cartoon characters holding fat stacks of cash and making analogies that don't make sense. Like in the last video he did about the same topic, he gave the audience a scenario where you, the viewer, made a product everyone wanted and then said that your board would demand you find a way to monetize your product further with things like forced obsolescence or something of the like. It's a shit analogy, because you know what I'd do in such a situation? I'd fire the board and garnish their wages for myself, because it sounds like they arn't pulling their weight. Someone might post that shitty comic by Bors where you have someone saying "We should improve society somewhat" and then some annoying dip comes out of a barrel responding "AND YET YOU LIVE IN THE SOCIETY! INTERESTING!". Well no, in here you'd have Scott working in the backdrop to improve society. He reaches a hand to Jim for him to come along, and Jim just crosses his arms. "No! I'm a messenger about the evils of capitalism! You can't expect me to actually try and fix it! That's for other people!"

He really never said this, he was just complaining about steam's issues on the developer side and said that it's no small wonder that some devs want to jump ship and epic seems like a pretty sweet deal for devs by comparison, though he pretty quickly qualified that with a long video about how shit epic is for consumers. This shit about "Why aren't you doing anything about it if it's so bad huh??? Why are you talking about something on the internet instead of DOING something about it" has never made any sense, I could just as easily say "Why are you posting on facepunch you lazy fuck, there are sweat shops in China you could be shutting down". Raising awareness about bad business practices is helping in a small way, and it's his fucking job. It's how he pays his rent. Not everybody can afford to quit their job and go fighting legal battles against mega-corporations. Ross Scott is fighting against a shitty business practice that would only slightly inconvenience big businesses to do away with. It's a feasible thing to fight. Sterling is talking about fundamental industry and societal problems that make billions of dollars. Some average joe on the internet doesn't have billions to lobby the government with to fight that, or an army of lawyers to fight them in court, when the corporations have such a massive vested interest in keeping the status quo.

i think the fact that this discussion is about "teams" is probably why the discussion has been absolute shit you don't have to be in "team steam" to think that EGS is shit, and you don't have to think EGS is a godsend to think there's things that steam does that are shit

Anyone that thought his fuck steam video was an endorsement of Epic missed the point dramatically.

I'll be honest with you, I have no idea what you're rambling about. I don't even know who Ross Scott is and I googled him but I can't see what he's done for the game industry. But mostly, I don't see how you can think that it's not worth denouncing things awful deeds and awful people, even if you use bad analogies (and the one you mentioned was actually accurate and I'm not sure your economics 101) or the same format over and over again. I don't care if he uses the same stock images a thousand times because his message is not worth looking at, it's worth listening to. Whatever is on screen is just a quickly-edited rubbish to have something happening on screen instead of a static image, it's not worth criticizing.

do you mean how he changed his opinion of EGS as more and more shitty news about how they operate came out aka, he actually updated his opinion in line with facts

I didn't watch last weeks episode, so I don't know exactly what the scenario was, but I assume that you weren't the majority shareholder in the company you were working for.

Well, I don't see you doing much about it other than complaining. It's still better to point something out even if you don't actively try to solve it than do nothing period.

But changing your opinion in accordance with new facts is just a weakness of your will

Well yeah, Ross going after something is feasible as well as reasonable and that's why he will likely succeed. We meanwhile see Jim here DEMANDING that Tri-Pul-Ay companies STOP BEING GREEDY AND REMOVE ALL LOOTBOXES AND MICROTRANSACTIONS THIS INSTANT! RIGHT NOW! NOW! NOW! So imagine you're an evil Tri-Pul-Ay. Who the hell would you rather listen to? A guy arguing for something beyond reasonable and laid out who also has a few lawyers, law students and bits of the law itself on his side or that fat bloke who calls your games shit? Cuz you know, the first might cost what, a single thousand dollar stack at most? The other costs your revenue stream. I don't know guys...

Literally all I can say to this is "Hyuck sure you would jimbo". It's like you close your eyes to the reality of things like forced obsolescence, or exponentially growing profit models that are fundamentally unsustainable(And actively in place in our work places). Just simply saying "I would fire them" is a pretty clear indication of how idealistic and uninformed your view is of the subject lol.

Just so you know, Humanabyss, I actually outright avoid debating you because of how angry you come across, as if you just want some guy to take cheap potshots off.

That's fine. I'm not angry. I point out things, and you can take them as personally as you want, despite there being no indication of it being personal at all. I literally bolded things, because you bolded things lol. But sure, you can be apply different rules to how you talk, versus how others do and give yourself the benefit of the doubt you don't apply to others

Also, to be fair, Epic has somehow managed to sink their reputation several magnitudes further since this whole damn thing began. Between Tim Sweeney trying real hard to break Randy Pitchford's record for the number of lies told by a gaming CEO over a short amount of time; it becoming extremely apparent that most of these exclusivity deals were being made by publishers, and often behind developers' backs; and of course, the recent news about how Epic treats their own damn employees like shit... well, it's hard for anyone to stan for Epic's supposed "developer friendly" business strategy at this point, without looking like a massive hypocrite. Even games "journalists" are doing a 180 ever since the Fortnite developer news broke. Tim Sweeney has no friends at this point, other than other rich gaming executives, and a few morons in the gamer community who are still blinded by the 5 foot long hate boner they have for steam.

I'm sorry but we're in this position because Jim Sterling lead the charge to massively misinform not only the gaming public but the clearly naive Indie Developers as well. Jim Sterling has been leading the 'Stema lets too much trahs in' completely ignoring his own internal biases and the fact that when you look for garbage in an algorithm system; you're going to find garbage.

Yes I'm sure that all the games that epic has been courting, the ones that already have a massive following, decided to take enormous amounts of money for exclusivity deals not because of all the money, but because Jim Sterling said that steam makes it hard to find really small developers. Jim's whole shtick of complaining about asset flips because they crowd out other games doesn't really have anything to do with epic as far as I'm concerned, because everybody epic is courting is too big for Steam's New Releases page to matter as far as exposure goes. He might think otherwise, but I think it's hard to argue that Pheonix Point would have lost sales because somebody saw some waifu visual novel with stolen art assets crowded it out on the New Releases page, and I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that any devs big enough to get picked up by Epic are dumb enough to drop steam because of that. The idea that people are going for exclusivity deals that prevent them from releasing on platforms like Itch and GOG because of something Jim said about Steam, and not because of, say, thousands upon thousands of dollars of Epic money, is complete nonsense.

I'm sorry; did I touch a fucking button? Because this has been a long time coming and many of the people defending the Epic store use the same tired arguments that Jim Sterling helped popularize. That helps create a ground swell of support that many people put forward. And like I said before, Jim has been doing this for years. He hasn't once stood his foot in the waters to even try doing advocating outside of the pissing contest that is the insulated youtube gaming world. The market has been increasingly going to shit and the only thing Jim Sterling has done is, complain and then feed off the attention, which we both know he loves with that undeserved grandiose attitude he has.

While im not Jim and his misinformed flipflop opinions and not understanding of what an algorithm is, thinking that just because he sees shovelware on steam, means everyone sees it. His videos have blatantly misinformed hundreds of people making them think that steam is the king of trash, and scaring indie devs by thinking their game will be buried under shovelware, when the only reason he sees so much shit on steam is because hes been looking for it.

And I don't want to read any more of the crap you pull in every single thread involving the Epic Game Store while coming off as an arrogant knobhead towards everyone that disagrees with you.

I don't think Jim has ever defended the shit Epic does. He discussed what Epic was doing better than Steam, namely the 12% and the benefits of not having a store filled with garbage. Can you give an example? Because I think any indie dev who wasn't releasing shovelware would've done the research and concluded whether this was true.

Oh yeah for sure. Though I don't mean the pro-steam team, I mean the pro-consumer team.

They are teams. Epic and Steam are football teams, and I, the consumer, am the football that gets kicked around by both teams.

Yeah so I actually want to inch in a comment here because I think it gets lost in translation: I actually want Valve to be the ones who end up kicking Epic to the curve so hard that they have to sigh, accept this as a pointless gamble and put their games on Steam to save face. I kinda get the idea that Borderlands 3 might not be as successful as 2k, Gearbox or Epic hopes... not "a flop" but not as successful as 2 was. Which in the industry means it did terribly.

Jim Sterling is a fucking moron and has no idea of what he's talking about anything other than the times he's saying "bad company doings are bad" in a plethora of different ways in an english accent. For starters, he finally started biting the bullet and realizing "hey wait a minute, maybe Epic isn't doing this to save PC game development", and if they "are" (they really fucking aren't), they're doing it to try and reel in more people into their development kits, because why would you get into pc game development with their engine if the best option for publishing won't suck your cock aswell? Basicaly "sell your soul to the devil and he'll erase half of your problems if you do as he says", but I guess we're only supposed to think about it after we get 110% visual confirmation from a sattelite in a very clear day of people being tortured on the roof of their HQ by chinese agents with a Tencent logo on their hats. Secondly, Jim, and I guess nobody for that matter, realizes the ammount of dumb it is to ask Steam to change the 30% cut into Epic's deal. Why you ask? Sweeney himself said the practice wasn't ideal. It wouldn't be feasible to do this forever. Do you REALLY think Steam would be doing this to every single thing landing on it? Think for a moment, ye of so much faith, whoever you shall be... You're giving out your services of cloud storage, DDOS protection and a bunch of other things, to thousands of software developers, and you ask for 12% of whatever they make. That money then will be used to pay the people you employ, and everything that needs to be payed. Bear in mind, you're providing services to THOUSANDS of different softwares, which need a whole lot of digital infastructure to work properly. Now imagine. You're Epic. You have what, 10 games in your store? Your launcher has less than half of the features in everyone else's DDP, you have a game that prints money by the millions a day if not by the hour, a chinese multi billion dollar company with stakes in you, and you just have to provide services to those. AND YET, the plan you have right now, you yourself will say "it isn't sustainable". Jim Fucking Sterling himself mentioned this. How can he be so FUCKING DUMB and still think "oh Epic is bad competition, but maybe Steam will do something now". Third and last... Jim. Are you fucking saying Valve has to release L4D3/update TF2/announce HL3 to beat Epic?.. Are you... Are you for real?

I mean, what else does Valve have that Epic can't make happen by sheer force of throwing money at it?

Supporting Linux and Mac like: Buying out and maintaining MoltenVK, a Vulkan to Metal wrapper for Mac. While making it open source and free of price (Formerly it was closed and ya had to pay to use it). Hiring top contributors to keep their projects going. Such as DXVK (Direct3D 10/11 to Vulkan), improving open source driver library for GPU called Mesa (Since 17.0 it gained a very large performance boost and to this day on AMD, it outperforms AMD's own driver for OpenGL and it's on par with Vulkan performance) while working with AMD and Intel. Creating Proton by forking Wine and upstream their code to CodeWeavers, devs of CrossOver, Wine and co-creator of Proton Making some of their projects open source (Seems that Valve wants to open source GoldSrc if there's any demand on it) Creating and maintaining Steam Audio and Steam Input API Contributing to SDL2 and Vulkan while at the same time promote Vulkan to others Making their own hardware like Steam Controller That is a lot of stuff Valve is doing and Epic so far seem to have only Unreal Engine (and that one network project they made open source) and despite being open to support other systems, they don't even want to support Linux at all and it's not even in their roadmap.