I didn’t really follow him, but the YouTube algorithm filled my feed with his shorts and I inevitably formed an opinion based off those. I don’t watch twitch.
When I first saw the negative coverage about him with the wow thing, I thought it was just people being petty and the usual trolling
Not to the extent I’d post defensive comments, but I was on his side. I did start to wonder if he was full of it, the coverage following ross’ rebuttal of his arguments confirmed it for me.
I’m not trying to convince you if he’s a bad guy or not, just explain why a lot of people, including me are annoyed at him and creating a market for content pointing out his lies.
I don’t want to go in depth on his background, that wikka is broadly correct although his first job was in QA at blizzard due to nepotism (source: Thor himself on stream) he left and I don’t recall whether the security researcher job followed immediately but he did a stint of that where he did pen testing via social engineering (source his LinkedIn) and returned to Blizzard to work in the security department, not nepotism this time (according to him) although he had worked there before and his Dad still did which wouldn’t have hurt. Then he worked at Amazon as a tester.
As for his credentials and their relevance to his take on SKG, the big difference is that Ross doesn’t claim to be an expert, he’s made it clear his opinion is the way the industry treats eol products is anti-consumer, that the law isn’t clear on whether that’s allowed, and that if you agree, you can join the campaign. Jason on the other hand is relying on his credentials to back up his arguments and why people should listen to him.
The wow thing, as I understand it, mistakes were made by several people including him, not that big of a deal, except he refused to admit any wrongdoing and banned anyone who disagreed which rubbed people up the wrong way. It might have caused less of a stir if he didn’t flex on others about how good he is.
But that’s the point people are making, that his credentials actually aren’t relevant, at least not to the extent he’s an expert. He worked at Blizzard, but not as a developer, it’s been likened to someone who worked in the billing department at a hospital weighing in on medical care.
He does have experience as a dev on Heartbound, but that’s not AAA, and he seems to have got bored of that, preferring the ego boost of being a streamer.
He’s still entitled to an opinion of course, but it shouldn’t carry the weight it had been given.
His support for life services makes sense when you find out the game publisher he (allegedly) founded and the one he recently resigned from, was publishing live service games.
He claims he was review bombed, others have checked the steam stats and it didn’t support his claim.
It seems like you want to give him the benefit of the doubt, and TBH that’s fair enough, especially if you’re just going to ignore him. Like I said, I think a lot of people who are mad at him were following him, and feel like they were taken for chumps.
If you did decide to dig into it though (and I’m not recommending it), there are some content creators bringing receipts, and there is a definite pattern of behaviour.