Is there any merit to it or is it just more gamer seething?
I dunno about :reddit-logo: gamers, but I hate them because they too often act as public stenographers for whatever the billionaire publishers state, give them glowing reviews, and never question their awful labor practices and workplace abuses. I also hate them for not taking awful devs and publishers to task for their awful takes, like when the 6 Days in Fallujah devs said the warcrime simulator was not political and they left it at that, or when they interviewed the CoD MW4 devs about what politics the game was advancing and they couldn’t be bothered to press them harder on what they meant by their “apolitical” game. This keeps happening over and over again, and the meain fault is that gamer press doesn’t criticize or analyze the industry’s own practices as a whole instead of focusing on their product output.
There was one instance where the devs of CoD WW2 made the confusing decision to include black Nazi soldiers in the multi-player and when confronted about how bizarre that is, rather than offer a historical explanation or get into the politics of a decision like that, they instead side stepped it entirely and were like “it’s just a game, bro. You can make your own character.” (yes I know there were black German soldiers in the North Africa campaign it was still really weird)
