Jim Sterling

"Thank God for me"

- Jim Sterling's outro

Jim Sterling (born January 1, 1984) is a gaming journalist, best known for his no-nonsense criticisms of both the games he plays and gaming companies he feels are either failing to take responsibility for producing poor games or or various practices that are unfair to gamers and YouTubers alike.

Biography
Sterling was born James Nicholas Stanton in the UK, although as he revealed in his review for The Beginner's Guide he had a deeply unpleasant upbringing where he and his brother were beaten by his mother's then-lover, a Hell's Angel outcast named The Preacher, which led to him creating the character of Jim Sterling and taking on the name - a name he has expressed his wish to have legally changed.

Prior to going freelance and embarking upon his YouTube career, Sterling worked as a review editor for Destructoid and a content creator for The Escapist.

Sterling currently lives in Jackson, Mississippi with his wife.

The Jimquisition
Sterling is best known for The Jimquisition, a regular segment where he critiques parts of the gaming industry that he sees as being contemptible. Among his targets are Gearbox Software for their grossly misleading previews of Aliens: Colonial Marines and their utter refusal to take responsibility for the appalling quality of the game once it was released onto the unsuspecting public, Konami for erasing P.T. from existence in one of their most bizarre actions in a long list of bizarre actions during the acrimonious parting of ways between Konami and Hideo Kojima, Nintendo for their inability to give gamers the new Star Fox game they want while simultaneously giving them a Star Fox game they certainly didn't want, and most famously of all his long-running dispute with Imminent Uprising.

Imminent Uprising feud
In November 2014 Sterling made a Jimpressionsvideo (aka Squirty Plays) of an indie shooter that passed the Steam Greenlight called The Slaughtering Grounds, in which he savagely criticises the game for its bad coding, poor controls, near non-existent AI, frequent glitches and overuse of generic art assets.

A few days afterwards, developers Imminent Uprising posted a response video titled Review The Reviewer that was a reupload of Sterling's original video with various pieces of text savaging Sterling superimposed on top, with the phrase "I'm Jim fucking Sterling son" - a phrase Sterling himself has since claimed - appearing frequently. In response to this Sterling reuploaded that video on his channel with new commentary on top of it because he found it highly entertaining to see a developer act like a spoiled child throwing a tantrum, and around this time word got out about not only how bad The Slaughtering Grounds is, but also Imminent Uprising's public hissy fit that somebody called their awful excuse for a game an awful excuse for a game, as well as Imminent Uprising deleting negative reviews and even banning people who spoke badly of the game, as well as not giving credit to the artist whose image the developers had simply stolen for their game artwork without giving credit. Yet despite all of this, Imminent Uprising continued, posting another video entitled Review The Reviewer Round Two where they uploaded the audio of Sterling's video with text overlaid on top, accusing Sterling of being a "leech" who was hurting the entire indie developer community.

A week after this, Sterling received a copyright takedown strike from Digital Homicide Studios LLC, demanding a full apology for his description of the game as an "absolute failure" - and it quickly became apparent that the basis of their lawsuit was because they spectacularly failed to understand that the term "Fair Use" should not be taken literally - leading to Sterling filing a counter-claim, while YouTube allowed the takedown to expire. Yet rather than let it go, ImminentUprising continued to claim they were wronged and were blaming the game's lack of success on Sterling and Sterling alone.

Rather than learn from their long list of mistakes, in March 2016 ImminentUprising filed a lawsuit of up to $10m against Sterling for "assault, libel, and slander." On February 22nd 2017, the lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice.