Dumb and Dumber

There are some unsavory folks on the fringes of the video game industry that leave a faint taste of bile in your mouth whenever you hear their names. Joe Lieberman. Jack Thompson. Leland Yee. Michael Pachter. Some of these people no longer darken our doorstep, like Lieberman, who left the Senate to join the shuffleboard set, and Thompson, who was disbarred after one too many obnoxious publicity stunts. And Yee, well, we're probably not going to hear him rant too much about "murder simulators" after being arrested for such real-life felonies as gun trafficking and money laundering six years ago.

Michael Pachter, on the other hand, continues to annoy gamers with his reverse Cassandra act, getting undeserved attention for industry predictions that are predictably, well...

Desperate to stay in the public spotlight, Pachter's predictions have gotten increasingly abrasive. He described the former CEO of Nintendo Satoru Iwata as "late and not-so-great" shortly after his passing, and now... there's this.

I'll give you the Cliff Notes. Michael Pachter claims that Switch owners overwhelmingly prefer handheld mode to docked (wrong, as is Pachter tradition... it's split evenly between docked and handheld use, according to Ars Technica) and that if Nintendo were "smart," they'd get rid of the docking feature entirely and just sell the Switch Lite. Ooh, ooh! I know why Nintendo shouldn't do that! Hell, they don't even need to listen to a schlub like me... the fact that Nintendo has already sold 65 million Switch units, and only 9 million of those have been Switch Lites, should be reason enough for them to stay the course and respond to Pachter's remarks the way we all should... with a hearty chuckle and a condescending pat on the head.

The silver medal for the week's dumbest take goes to Alex Hutchinson for claiming that streamers should pay game publishers for any footage they broadcast on Twitch. And where is that money supposed to come from, exactly? All but the most popular streamers are riding the razor's edge of poverty as it is. While you're bleeding the stone, maybe streamers should start paying Hanes and Levi's for the clothes they wear on camera, until they can't afford the licensing fees and switch to a barrel held up by suspenders. 

Look, the streamers already paid for those games. They're giving their publishers free advertising. Maybe you should leave it at that, rather than trying to drill through the bottom of an empty barrel you're already making them wear. I don't know what's more aggravating, the greed of this industry, or the short-sighted stupidity.