They Fell for It
The recent video from Digital Foundry in which founder Richard Leadbetter and producer Oliver Mackenzie tout NVIDIA’s manufactured-for-investors GDC tech demo misleadingly named DLSS 5 was not a surprising debacle. Since the site went independent in August 2025, decisions that could once be excused by the corporate sway of IGN instead exposed the ideological underpinnings of the tech-obsessed worldview the outlet elevates. The only difference this time was the backlash.
Reactions to DLSS 5 across the social internet evinced that we were all seeing the same thing. Something abhorrent and gross, yes, but also blown out and too bright. Yassified. Slop. Beyond criticism of the product, people were also critical of NVIDIA and what it is doing to the world, the industry, and to people with its AI. To put it plainly, what DLSS 5 does to the image of female bodies in videogames is misogyny the likes of which was previously reserved for female protagonists and their actresses at the center of Gamergate’s discourse du jour. Digital Foundry, however, saw something else: the future (a mirage), artistic intention (a farce), the real deal (we’ll see). Their YouTube video has over 64,000 dislikes. Comments on their website, social media, and the video are filled with people derisively calling their coverage an ad. Clearly, Digital Foundry’s audience is not seeing what they’re seeing either.
I can't tell you how NVIDIA almost got away with letting Digital Foundry blow smoke for their mirror creations so repulsive it has already sent CEO Jensen Huang into panicked damage control while simultaneously laundering the credibility of Digital Foundry’s entire staff. The question I am concerned with answering is: From where is Digital Foundry looking at DLSS 5 that it sees something entirely different than what you and I do?
In Digital Foundry’s 2023 “tech review” of Hogwarts Legacy, Leadbetter called the game “a beautiful, expansive piece of fan service…likely to seriously impress those deeply into the Wizarding World” that was difficult to reconcile with ”the range of performance issues it has on the Xbox consoles.” While almost every other major outlet covered Hogwarts Legacy in some capacity, some at least acknowledged—if not outright grappled with—its connection to JK Rowling amidst the anti-trans backlash in the U.K. she was funding with her Harry Potter fortune. (It was a damning moment for the mediascape as a whole, which did the bare minimum to bend to the online outrage of trans and allied content creators, gamers, and readers.) Since then, Digital Foundry’s YouTube channel has published five more videos about the game’s performance on different consoles, and has used it in other videos as a go-to reference point for new hardware (including in the DLSS 5 video).
The fixation on Hogwarts Legacy never sat well, but it was at least possible to imagine Digital Foundry was simply in the position of needing to meet certain viewership requirements or that it had been given a corporate mandate to cover the game. Since going indie, however, coverage of the game has continued. It’s the same story with Digital Foundry’s coverage of Microsoft published games during the BDS boycott of Xbox: It has been ignored without so much as the courtesy acknowledgement progressive outlets feel the need to perform. Silence was once excusable under corporate oversight, but is no longer permissible for the indie publication.
I wish that praising DLSS 5 was not a more immediately recognizable dereliction of journalistic duty than ignoring Hogwarts Legacy’s material impact on trans people in the U.K. or Starfield’s laundering a corporate reputation for surveilling civilians in Gaza and the West Bank. It is certainly, however, the endpoint of Digital Foundry’s tech fetishism. All that’s left when you ignore the political, social, gendered, raced, and environmental impacts of technology and games is tech boosterism. How many strikes are these men permitted before they can no longer plead ignorance for advancing Gamergate talking points?
Learning to practice solidarity and feminism 101 seems like a small task compared to the knowledge and skillset for producing accessible, informative tech videos that Digital Foundry has cultivated, but we have to believe that it is possible to produce quantitative analyses of videogame hardware and software while living consistently with a belief in the self-determination of Palestinians and trans people and basic respect for women—people who Digital Foundry should at least care about as colleagues, audience members, and subscribers.
That might begin with incredulity. Leadbetter wrote in his coverage “there could be some comparisons to generative AI” before Huang admitted in a statement that DLSS 5 “[blends] hand-crafted rendering with generative AI.” Digital Foundry clearly noticed the similarities, but seemingly took NVIDIA at its word that this was an iteration on DLSS lighting tech. It should also start with articulating what we all see: the misogyny built into this technology that reshapes women to look more fuckable to the worst men on the internet.
It will include covering into the future how the technology they are interested in materially impacts the world you and I move through at a higher cost due to these corporations. It would seek to disavow the chauvinism of trolls who invoke euphemisms about keeping politics out of games and the inevitability of generative AI. And it would acknowledge that there are no charts or spreadsheets we can retreat into to avoid standing for something.
To do anything less would be cowardly.