Jim Sterling sheds light on The Escapist's previous parent company

[Drathnoxis]

I remember Susan Ardent from the "Good Old Days". I didn't realize she was so.....yeah.

I mean, I never talked to her personally or anything, just remembered the original escapist show/podcast and her doing some of the video reviews. I think she wrote some columns too. She seemed alright but I guess behind the scenes she didn't particularly like us.

I remember she chewed out someone for complaining about the new forum layout, and gave him a suspension. I think it was Fallout Jack.

 

[Nick Calandra]

I forgot where we were for a second and started thinking "Nick Cannon said that?"

But I actually paid for a subscription to the Escapist, once upon a time. That was when they were covering THE EVENT THAT SHALL NOT BE NAMED, and hosting interviews with people on both sides. Y'know. Actual journalism. But then they walked all that back, started banning users for having Vivian James avatars, deleted all their articles on the subject, lost all their content providers, banned discussion of the issue, and all that jazz (not in that order).

Maybe I'd pay for such a subscription again if they ever go back to that kind of hard-hitting journalism. That's what I want more of. That's what I'd pay to support.

I don't think we'll go back to hard-hitting journalism. One, we don't really have the resources to do that, and two we're more interested in providing interesting critique and commentary. I USED to want to do that kind of journalism, but it's super hard to get anything done because NO ONE will go on the record with things and PR is involved with everything.

So I'm more focused on us creating fun and original content, providing critique and commentary and telling stories via our documentaries and features. I guess some might see that as "shilling", but websites like Kotaku, Polygon, etc have a lot more resources than us to do that kind of deep investigative coverage and I don't think we can, or need to compete with that.

AKA going back to what I said about carving our own path. We're not gonna be another Kinda Funny, but more of an outlet for "interesting" stuff than hard-hitting journalism.

 

[BrawlMan]

AKA going back to what I said about carving our own path.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

I don't think we'll go back to hard-hitting journalism. One, we don't really have the resources to do that, and two we're more interested in providing interesting critique and commentary. I USED to want to do that kind of journalism, but it's super hard to get anything done because NO ONE will go on the record with things and PR is involved with everything.

So I'm more focused on us creating fun and original content, providing critique and commentary and telling stories via our documentaries and features. I guess some might see that as "shilling", but websites like Kotaku, Polygon, etc have a lot more resources than us to do that kind of deep investigative coverage and I don't think we can, or need to compete with that.

AKA going back to what I said about carving our own path. We're not gonna be another Kinda Funny, but more of an outlet for "interesting" stuff than hard-hitting journalism.

I like the idea of that, personally. I admit I don't read a lot of the content on the site and am here more for the forums. But if someone were to tell me "Hey, we're gonna do -insert thing-" and I looked at a laundry list of dozens of sites that already do that, I'd turn and ask "Ok, why though?" There's only so much that can be said or investigated with topics like that. So making the content more varied and original that adds to the norm sounds like a good way to take things. Maybe I really should give the front page a little browse. Or at least catch up with Yahtzee. I think I've missed more than a year's worth of content from him by now

 

[Trunkage]

I was here Gemmer Gete and swept up in that hard on the pro side and after I dipped out of that for a long winded reason. This information right here makes ALOT of things make more sense and its scary looking back.

Yeah. That was a shitshow. I remember normal reasonable user suddenly make outrageous claims. That being said, there were plenty on the.,, left say Feminist side who got really into doxxing etc. too. I don’t think they had a leader like Archon here but they certainly had elsewhere.

Also, if you know the history of the term Dirtbag, you realise your experience was VERY common

 

[Trunkage]

I like the idea of that, personally. I admit I don't read a lot of the content on the site and am here more for the forums. But if someone were to tell me "Hey, we're gonna do -insert thing-" and I looked at a laundry list of dozens of sites that already do that, I'd turn and ask "Ok, why though?" There's only so much that can be said or investigated with topics like that. So making the content more varied and original that adds to the norm sounds like a good way to take things. Maybe I really should give the front page a little browse. Or at least catch up with Yahtzee. I think I've missed more than a year's worth of content from him by now

I haven’t really watched Yahtzee since 2013. More because I got tired of his work and had a bad experience at his bar. But he really turned me off in 2014 over THAT incident.

 

[Dreiko]

I don't think we'll go back to hard-hitting journalism. One, we don't really have the resources to do that, and two we're more interested in providing interesting critique and commentary. I USED to want to do that kind of journalism, but it's super hard to get anything done because NO ONE will go on the record with things and PR is involved with everything.

So I'm more focused on us creating fun and original content, providing critique and commentary and telling stories via our documentaries and features. I guess some might see that as "shilling", but websites like Kotaku, Polygon, etc have a lot more resources than us to do that kind of deep investigative coverage and I don't think we can, or need to compete with that.

AKA going back to what I said about carving our own path. We're not gonna be another Kinda Funny, but more of an outlet for "interesting" stuff than hard-hitting journalism.

I think it's shilling only if you have a personal horse in the race. If your acquaintance is involved in making something or you stand to earn money if it does well or something along those lines.


If a thing is just cool and you're positive about it that's just a normal good thing that we need more of. If anything this is what I spend all my online time doing, just being hype about games and books and anime and manga I love. I don't have time to bother with anything else cause there's so much cool stuff to gush over out there.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

The story was meh, despite me liking it okay enough, but I can see where she was coming from on the controls. Before the patch Naughty Dog decided to change the control set up for no reason, and a patch came in a couple weeks later to make it more like Uncharted 2.

Uncharted 3 aiming controls to be patched

An upcoming Uncharted 3 patch will offer a fix for those unhappy with the game's refined aiming controls.

www.eurogamer.net

I remember that, I didn't play the game until the patch came out. Naughty Dog also massively fucked up the multiplayer of Uncharted 3. They had a summer beta for the game that played pretty much as good as an Uncharted game could play online, and then they listened to all the fan complaints that know nothing about balance. Also, the game was so rushed that a couple weeks before going gold, it wasn't even running on fat PS3s.

The story was so nonsensical, it was the perfect example that Naughty just tries to make cool setpieces and then they try to link of all together somehow. Here's an excerpt from a post on made on the old forums about the boat chapters.

"And, oh my god, those boat chapters literally make no sense whatsoever. Ok, so the main pirate thinks Drake knows the location of the treasure or whatever. So his plan is to say he kidnapped Sully, get Drake to chase him from boat to boat to only reveal he doesn't have Sully and then Drake will tell him everything? Worst.Pirate.Ever."

 

[Dalisclock]

I remember that, I didn't play the game until the patch came out. Naughty Dog also massively fucked up the multiplayer of Uncharted 3. They had a summer beta for the game that played pretty much as good as an Uncharted game could play online, and then they listened to all the fan complaints that know nothing about balance. Also, the game was so rushed that a couple weeks before going gold, it wasn't even running on fat PS3s.

The story was so nonsensical, it was the perfect example that Naughty just tries to make cool setpieces and then they try to link of all together somehow. Here's an excerpt from a post on made on the old forums about the boat chapters.

"And, oh my god, those boat chapters literally make no sense whatsoever. Ok, so the main pirate thinks Drake knows the location of the treasure or whatever. So his plan is to say he kidnapped Sully, get Drake to chase him from boat to boat to only reveal he doesn't have Sully and then Drake will tell him everything? Worst.Pirate.Ever."

Yeah, when Uncharted 3 comes up, I tend to think about the fucking boat chapters. If you chopped them out completely, you wouldn't even notice a hole in the story at all because it has nothing to do with the rest of the game. It's pretty much ND deciding "We want to do a set-piece on a sinking ship. How can we work that in?" and trying to justify it after the fact.

 

[Dalisclock]

It's perfectly reasonable for people to bring up an event that had major effects on them and others.

I won't go further down this but I wanted to say my peace (My notifications missed this for some reason). I'll leave the topic of Sarkeesian there.

Wait? Waaaaaa?

I'm trying to figure out how her lackluster "Tropes vs Women" series was a turning point for anyones life other then hers.

Nevermind, we don't need to go down that road again.

I remember she chewed out someone for complaining about the new forum layout, and gave him a suspension. I think it was Fallout Jack.

Damn, I missed that somehow. Yeah, that's pretty shitty.

 

[deleted20220709]

DELETED

 

[Hades]

The bombshell exposé about rampant sexist behavior, harassment and flat-out criminal assaults at one of the biggest video game companies in the world, which includes but is not limited to the creative heads imposing their sexist views *on the games themselves*, will hopefully be a turning point for the games industry and maybe even a change in attitudes in the overall community. But after reading some of the comments here about how "politics" and feminist critics somehow ruined the former Escapist and poisoned the collective discourse around games, well....I'm thinking that's not very fucking likely.

It won't change anything. This is easily the biggest and vilest gaming scandal of the year but I don't feel it resonates as such with the gaming community. Its certainly talked about but its not all over the web, and people aren't racking Ubisoft over the coals as they should. All in all it seemed the deflection of ''Hey look at these games!'' seems to have worked pretty well for Ubisoft.

 

[XsjadoBlayde]

It won't change anything. This is easily the biggest and vilest gaming scandal of the year but I don't feel it resonates as such with the gaming community. Its certainly talked about but its not all over the web, and people aren't racking Ubisoft over the coals as they should. All in all it seemed the deflection of ''Hey look at these games!'' seems to have worked pretty well for Ubisoft.

The sad fact of the matter is too many male consumers just don't see sexual assualt, harassment and rape as important as their precious videogames potentially being lied about (aka, given more postive coverage than they believe is deserved) in the press.

 

[Agema]

While he was SVP of Defy Media and running the Escapist as GM, Achron, aka Alexander Macris, was also the CEO of -- and I shit you not -- "Milo, Inc." , which was Milo Yiannopoulos' now-defunct media company. And for the record, this was 2017 -- AFTER Yiannopoulos was fired from Breitbart for those unfortunate comments.

If we want to think about the ills of the Escapist under Defy Media, we might merely consider who its high ups were happy to get into bed with.

Milo Yiannopolous is scum, just the sort of scum who frequently manages to float because he's sufficiently privileged, confident, witty and entertaining, and creatively intelligent enough to find ways to trick people into giving up their money for very little in return. I have no idea what he's doing these days (thank god, because it means no-one's paying attention), but I'm willing to bet it's still some form of con.

 

[Trunkage]

I think there's a good reason for the rule about not discussing it. It was a terrible time and a lot of people on all sides acted like total ass hats. I saw quite a few posters I liked (and agreed with) get bans, but they also absolutely deserved it for how much they dragged discussions down.

It was hard to keep a cool head in those days

It was the final straw that really got the whole "gamer culture war" going. Before that you had had stuff like "Gamer Girls are not true gamers", "Felicia Day is an attention whore not a gamer" and similar points of conflicts. TvW and Feminist Frequency really allowed the anti-feminist, anti-inclusionist mob to set their target and rally in a way they had not done before. It would have happened sooner or later, so TvW didn't really have a unique quality that made it the sole catalyst, rather it was just the wrong work at the right time.

For what it is worth, TvW also brought a lot of the common criticism of games' portrayal of women into the semi-public consciousness. It deserves some credit for making that discussion an established part of the gaming mainstream and influencing game devs into taking actions to avoid many of the tropes TvW discussed.

I think that Anita did one major mistake above all else. Saying that these troupes don't effect men like they do women. If 'talking' to Incels have taught me anything, all those troupes are pretty damaging to a male psyche. A lot of it is unobtainable nonsense that has no relation to genes anyway.

Also, another precursor was Depression Quest

 

[BrawlMan]

In the latest Jimquisition video Mr. Sterling starts out with a tangent where he explains his reasoning for leaving the Escapist in 2014.

Apparently The Escapist chose not to publish a review of his of the then latest Assassin's Creed game Unity due to their parent company Defy Media having sponsorship opportunities with Ubisoft they didn't want to risk.


I just thought people here might be interested to hear this.

Since then, Defy Media has gone defunct and no longer exists. I believe the current Escapist leadership has nothing to do with the previous Defy Media, though I would appreciate them laying out what the case is in this thread.

Here's more about Ubisoft for those interested.

 

[Exley97]

If we want to think about the ills of the Escapist under Defy Media, we might merely consider who its high ups were happy to get into bed with.

Milo Yiannopolous is scum, just the sort of scum who frequently manages to float because he's sufficiently privileged, confident, witty and entertaining, and creatively intelligent enough to find ways to trick people into giving up their money for very little in return. I have no idea what he's doing these days (thank god, because it means no-one's paying attention), but I'm willing to bet it's still some form of con.

I like to slam Archon over his affiliation with Yiannopoulos and his stunningly idiotic decision to hitch his wagon to an obvious grifter with Milo, Inc., and I think with good reason.

But the bigger, more relevant issue is that Defy Media, for all its supposedly high-minded principles, was blocking a negative review of a Ubisoft game to protect its business relationship with the publisher (and at the expense of one of its popular staff members). It's the worst kind of journalistic sin in this business -- putting the advertisers over the readers, and manipulating content to serve that agenda. And they did this while watching an absolute firestorm erupt over journalism ethics and practices in the games media that raged for *years*, knowing the whole time that they were corrupt hypocrites and doing their level-best to hide that fact. I hope whatever else is said about Archon, Defy and the Escapist during that time, that NEVER gets lost or overshadowed.

 

[Bedinsis]

I wasn't expecting there to be so much activity in this thread. Granted, I only started it because I thought it would be interesting/highly relevant for people to read without giving much thought to whether it would start much discussion.

Regarding Archon: I just remembered that this is not the first time I've heard of him conducting breaches of good journalistic practices. I did post about it on the v1 version of this site:

https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/for...meFront-is-Finally-Launched-and-Live#24216910

where I linked to the following tweet:

https://twitter.com/russpitts/status/911978909083762688

Sadly, that tweet seems to no longer be present, but if anyone knows how Internet archiving works maybe is can actually be recovered. I do remember the gist of it.

The tweet was part of a tweet chain where former Escapist employee Russ Pitts laid out how he was planning on highlight something called "[something] marketing" which is a strategy of doing something with the responses to an article in order to put it in a way that is beneficial to a particular product. (I really wish I could write out exactly what it was instead of this incredibly vague description). When Mr. Pitts turned this over to Mr. Macris, he was turned down since that was one of The Escapist's biggest secret source of revenue. He finished the tweet chain with an "Oops!".

 

[Agema]

But the bigger, more relevant issue is that Defy Media, for all its supposedly high-minded principles, was blocking a negative review of a Ubisoft game to protect its business relationship with the publisher (and at the expense of one of its popular staff members). It's the worst kind of journalistic sin in this business -- putting the advertisers over the readers, and manipulating content to serve that agenda. And they did this while watching an absolute firestorm erupt over journalism ethics and practices in the games media that raged for *years*, knowing the whole time that they were corrupt hypocrites and doing their level-best to hide that fact. I hope whatever else is said about Archon, Defy and the Escapist during that time, that NEVER gets lost or overshadowed.

Yes, but that is the point, isn't it? Morality is for rubes, and amoral people like Milo and Macris exist to con rubes for their own profit. At least, both seemed to be pretty good at not paying their staff.

 

[Drathnoxis]

I wasn't expecting there to be so much activity in this thread. Granted, I only started it because I thought it would be interesting/highly relevant for people to read without giving much thought to whether it would start much discussion.

Regarding Archon: I just remembered that this is not the first time I've heard of him conducting breaches of good journalistic practices. I did post about it on the v1 version of this site:

https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/for...meFront-is-Finally-Launched-and-Live#24216910

where I linked to the following tweet:

https://twitter.com/russpitts/status/911978909083762688

Sadly, that tweet seems to no longer be present, but if anyone knows how Internet archiving works maybe is can actually be recovered. I do remember the gist of it.

The tweet was part of a tweet chain where former Escapist employee Russ Pitts laid out how he was planning on highlight something called "[something] marketing" which is a strategy of doing something with the responses to an article in order to put it in a way that is beneficial to a particular product. (I really wish I could write out exactly what it was instead of this incredibly vague description). When Mr. Pitts turned this over to Mr. Macris, he was turned down since that was one of The Escapist's biggest secret source of revenue. He finished the tweet chain with an "Oops!".

Right here.