I'll be honest, it seems to me that as time goes on a lot of the guys doing videos for The Escapist tend to be agressively turning them into rant and attack pieces, rather than focusing on geek culture.
I am unsure if it's because of Yahtzee's enduring popularity, when he's famous because due to being "offensive", because they have gotten arrogant due to the increasing exposure and attention "The Escapist" itself is getting, or what.
To be honest, I did doubtlessly misinterpet his target a bit, but I was still fairly surprised to notice Shamus calling people idiots in a professionaly produced column. While Bob has his moments of normality, it seems with increasing frequency he seems to be going after the audience and sharing his opinion on various groups of people, rather than focusing on the movies themselves and the actors within them. I'd point a finger at his criticisms of the people who would like a movie like "The Expendables", and the demographic he believes Vin Diesel appealed to in the first "Fast And The Furious" movie. Not to mention the commentary about the treatment of Brazil, presumably because it's a backwards country being treated as a backwards country which isn't politically correct nowadays. I point to things like the old Escapist article "Nation Of Pirates" which went into video game piracy in Brazil, how it's tied to organuized crime, and how powerful organized crime is in that nation, operating overtly enough where criminal syndicates go so far as to buy and operate their own shopping malls. While action movies are always an exagerration, running into crime syndicates that virtually run the country and operate fairly openly with powe over the society itself doesn't exactly strike me as being totally out of line or offensive in characterization.
If I had to pick a point where I think "The Escapist" started to have problems, I'd probably go back to "Just Cause 2" a while back, with the comments in a published review about how refreshing it was to have a non-white hero, and involving a crack about how slow the Black Market mechanics were "but then again, it's not rhe white market". I can't say that was the tipping point, and it's been gradual, but it seems that since then I've noticed that all of the writers want to be edgy by occasionally pushing buttons for what is probably no other reason than pushing buttons.
Could Bob has expressed the same sentiments in another, less offensive fashion? Could Shamus have conveyed the essence of his point about thinking it's stupid to metabomb a game over DLC, without using the term "idiot" even if that's what he thought? I think they could have, and I think it's a sign of professionalism. As time goes on, I think The Escapist is gradually being morphed into a sort of network of personality cults more than anything.
... and yes, the irony of me saying this with some of the things I say and the way I say them is not lost on me. But then again, I'm also not being given my own feature that I'm being paid for. I'm a user, and not affiliated with the site itself even if some people have told me I'm more famous than I give myself credit for. If I ever WAS paid by someone to write professionally (unlikely with my english skills) I'd wind up saying a lot of things differantly.
It's sort of like how when I was in security, I might tell my boss/co-workers how I shut off some drunken dirtbag who was harassing a waitress, and how they might want to keep an eye on him because it seems like he's such an obsessive gambler that he at some point dropped a load in his pants and stinks like his own feces, and consider walking him off the floor if he doesn't stagger off on his own or go back to gambling (money is all important) by way of a heads up. In my report for the incident however which is on file, and to be professionally presented, I am not going to use terms like "dirtbag" and elaboration about the condition he was in that is possibly relevent to the job is not going to be included, unless I am ALSO responsible for walking him off the floor later, then it would be in THAT report and would state it in a professional fashion, intended to not be offensive or judgemental, because that reflects on the casino if someone checks those records for something like a court case.