We watch a fair amount of gaming content creators, and I just marvel at some of the streamers who do the exact same thing, every day, or seek out the most grindy content and do something no normal gamer would ever find fun, such as seeing how much you could progress your character by standing in just one spot, for instance.
A huge portion of these streamers, at some time or another, go absolutely bonkers in their enjoyment of the mobile gacha game “RAID: Shadow Legends”. They say it’s the best game ever. If you have a phone, you need it. They have so much fun. They list their favorite characters, talk about all the cool things you can do, and then they go back to their usual content, standing in one spot and hitting a button or asking strangers for money, or whatever their content of the day might be.
I wonder what’s keeping them in their game of choice when they could be streaming all their fun in the game they actually prefer — RAID: Shadow Legends?
So while I was doing research on game streamers who are obviously lying about how much they would rather be playing R:SL, I found out that Linus of Linus Tech Tips fame had once made the terrible mistake of talking about R:SL.
In their WAN follow-up video where they talked about the controversy, one of the co-hosts went on to talk about his favorite characters, but he may have been being sarcastic.
The only reason I really bring this up now is two-fold: First, it’s been long enough that it’s no longer all that controversial when someone shills R:SL. Everyone knows what kind of game it really is. A very perniciously grating gacha game constantly urging the player to buybuybuy. The game has two modes; one, where you auto battle along a corridor to a boss fight, which takes a few minutes. Two, where you merge your units to make a new unit. The best units have recipes of specific lesser units that need to be expended as ingredients. Acquiring these lesser units is where most of the money comes in.
Second reason is that Linus is having a very bad week. A competing tech review channel, Gamer’s Nexus, called out one of his recent videos for being full of errors that might cause people to make a decision on hardware to purchase based on bad information. Adding insult to injury, LTT auctioned off a prototype GPU cooler after absolutely trashing it in the video. Developer Billet Labs was livid, as this was one of their only prototypes, cost them a lot of money to make, and was expecting it to be returned. They also had sent LTT a video card that worked with their cooler, but Linus opted to instead use a different video card for reasons, and then later said that they could have gone back and done the review over with the correct video card, but that that would have cost them $200-$500 to do, and wasn’t worth it.
But there’s more. The work environment was so toxic and so high pressure that one of their social media managers slashed open her leg to get a day off.
So LTT is taking the week off to work on all these issues, and when it comes back, I imagine there will be a lot of changes. I’m not too concerned with how it all plays out. I don’t really take comedy channels like LTT or Mythical Kitchen seriously as tech reviewers or chefs, respectively. They are making so much effort to be funny, I find it hard to take them serious.
My real point here is this: these people don’t know what they are doing. They start out passionately working alone in a basement somewhere, then they go viral, blow up huge, and it’s still the same people, now CEOs, trying to keep the sense that they are still the wacky kid in a basement just having fun but actually now in charge of a hundred people and millions of dollars and it’s not fun and games anymore. My son is having personal experience with people who have grown into a position where they clearly have no idea what they are doing anymore.
The trappings — and traps — of fame.
Just saw that actual serious product tester Project Farm tested one of the LTT-branded screwdrivers Linus is always pushing. TL;DR — came out pretty well. Third overall at a price competitive with the top brands.
Feathers something something too close to the sun.
Honestly LTT handled it about as poorly as they could have. The apology was cringe. Linus clearly cannot let aspects of this go which highlighted that LMG is Linus.
I don’t begrudge Linus his fame or position but he clearly is the last person that should have been running this company and its pretty obvious he isn’t really letting go even though he had stepped down as CEO.
Linus thinks he’s still a “content creator” which is the most frustrating part of all of it. He wants all of the benefits of being the cool tech tips guy that makes videos while also being a 100+ employee company.
And having been a long time LTT and WAN Show (podcast) listener it does not shock me in the least how it was the comments in the labs tour video that started all of this. If Linus cant see how his employee making statements about other creators isn’t a reflection of how Linus himself built up LMG (videos every day, “labs will be the first real true testing”, yadda yadda) then I don’t know what to say.
I unsubscribed across the board. I’ll watch the trainwreck because it’s just how the world goes, but thats that.
I have to say that I am waiting to see what LTT looks like when they come back. I hope that Linus has stopped blaming other people. I wish him no ill will. But dude, you have to let go.