You'll find in life that criticism is largely proportionate to the egotistical nature of the person. Jason's pieces aren't 'reporting'. Let me tell you what's missing that would validate his work:
Time sheets of employees/sign in times (crunch period, normal period)
Details of contracts
Evidence of employees starting and leaving work (photographs)
Employee status (contractor/salary), and differences in those contracts
Details of benefits, perks and vacation entitlement
Why ex-employees used as sources left (dispute, tribunal, advancement, career change)
What level and experience the complaints are coming from
Which of the sources had families and which did not
Where any of the interviewed going through personal stresses at the time
What quality of work did those complaining usually produce? Were they well respected and were they experienced in shipping games?
How was it received across all staff
Who is crunching (numbers, seniority) - we all remember the article about R* crunching which turned out to be a few writers for example ("Dan Houser described working “100-hour weeks” to get the game out the door. The following Monday, Houser said in an e-mailed statement to Kotaku that he was only referring to the writing team and only for a period of three weeks.")
That's just off the top of my head. The whole problem with the hit pieces are that they can easily be fabricated. Let me give you an example. In the UK we have an ambulance service, the people there are aamzing and spend a shitload of time with massive pressure, often late or doing extra hours because of things like traffic, floods, hanging round ED departments for someone at the hospital to sign off and 'accept' the arrival into stretcher triage areas.
- Now I could go to a regional centre close to me and interview 9 people, 3 of them might bitch about conditions and explain all the above to me and give me some examples of particularly bad winter nights. Then I can write a blog post sharing that, fishing for sympathy.
- The week after I could take the accounts of the other 6 who love their job, give examples of how they saved several lives, say that the nature of the job has certain expectations.
Until Jason starts representing balance in his articles he will never be taken seriosuly except for the extremists on the web, which is reflected by the direction he is taking. He is searching for accolades and a niche, so his current job is overblowing these issues as massive problems he is 'exposing', when all he is doing is parroting a few disgruntled employees complaints that we all have.
Put it this way, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who agrees that crunch is normal and should be the norm. The part that is failing is getting empathy from the vast, vast majority of readers of his material, which is what his pieces are meant to evoke. So he is failing at what he is attempting (apart from the extremists), and he is failing because his pieces lack credibility and are getting worse. Because when people go looking for facts, or more detail under the hood there is none. Just a pattern of overblown complaints, misrepresented and out of context corporate emails (R*, CDPR), dead ends and an ever increasing number of alternate and contradictory viewpoints that were never even highlighted.
All of this isn't a way to simply slag him off, it's a challenge to say 'be better', you have to work to make me believe you. You have to bring more receipts than share an anonymous interview from a minute portion of an entire workforce. For the cynical among us, he is someone who hates the industry he is in and clearly wishes he was reporting on other actual important global events so he is living out his fantasy fabricating 'world exclusives'.