with investigative help from febby

Kevin Jimenez, founder of Threat Interactive, has been making waves in the graphics programming space on youtube with his scathing takedowns of the Epic corporation and the modern gaming ecosystem. he expresses a common frustration: ‘modern games look like shit, and run like shit’.

there’s an undeniable charm to this patrick bateman looking motherfucker who just, brutally assaults the Epic corporation and Unreal Engine 5, and seems to drink from a bottomless font of knowledge regarding graphics pipelines and rendering. frankly it’s hard to follow what he’s saying half the time. the man has a jawline made of stainless steel.

but generally, he talks about Temporal Anti-Aliasing, Nanite, Lumen, DLSS, and other rendering technologies which often seem make games look worse and run worse. Nvidia’s DLSS and frame generation are notorious examples:

• they’re proprietary tech, so users and developers are locked into using Nvidia graphics cards
• games like Monster Hunter Wilds lean on them to reach a stable 30 FPS, which isn’t their specified use case, and looks terrible
• they make screenshots look great but don’t work as well in motion, producing ghosting

all in all many rendering technologies are actually pretty cool but they have to be used in a very specific way, which AAA studios don’t always pay attention to. the graphical problems plaguing modern gamedev are complex and myriad, and you’re best off doing your own, meticulous research to understand them. Jimenez, leading his company, aims to develop solutions to these problems.

Our long term goal is to independently raise 900K to pay a team of graphic/engine programmers to modify UE5’s source code (along with patches & plugins). […] Since the beginning, we never actively sought donations for the 900K because our intent is to wait for the unveiling of our game prototype and release more information about our modification plans. 

— Support And Funding page, Threat Interactive

Jimenez also seeks funding through the Threat Interactive youtube channel, where memberships and donations go directly towards video production. but when i watch this channel and i hear this dude say ‘we’ like 50 times in a row, alone, and he’s like claiming they’re gonna make a videogame so ambitious that UE5 simply wasn’t up to the task, i start to wonder who exactly Threat Interactive is.

a quick search for “Threat Interactive” takes us to their LinkedIn page, which lists a grand total of 3 employees: Jimenez, his COO Stephanie Wolfe, and one Jason B. already, we can conclude that TI is not an actual company, and therefore Jimenez is pretty much using ‘We’ in the royal sense.

Jimenez’s employment and education background does not exist; it’s pretty hard to find any information about the guy. The other guy, Jason B., does wordpress and social media outreach, so nothing interesting there. Stephanie Wolfe, on the other hand, has a very descriptive online footprint.

she worked as a retail manager and a compliance auditor for one year each, and did some tutoring (presumably as part of Mt San Jacinto College). apart from that it’s all self-made marketing startups, for example her Amazon page where she publishes books.

Wolfe’s books are …interesting. She publishes children’s books with AI-generated covers, all of which in their description say “This author believes in traditional family values”. she publishes autobiographies about UFO encounters and supernatural phenomena. she relates her experiences to her Rh-Negative blood type, which is just a whole can of worms dude…

we can start to speculate what brought these two together, with Jimenez’s “wake up!” approach to graphics advocacy, and Wolfe’s fondness for conspiracy theories. the important question, though, is whether or not Threat Interactive have any grounds on which to claim they can solve modern graphics for everyone, and release a decent videogame with a $900k development studio. and the answer, obviously, is no!!

you should never, EVER, see someone who hasn’t publicly released a game before and be like “yes. i will give you my kickstarter money”. even without an extensive background check it’s pretty easy to grok that Threat Interactive is not a game studio, it’s not a company, it’s like, two college graduates without a relevant portfolio trying to market their way to their corporate dreams.

“i am a game developer” is an unfalsifiable statement to many. who can say you’re not capable of running a million dollar game studio and developing the next half life, when you haven’t even been given a chance? there is no proof that someone isn’t a game developer. the only proof is the lack of evidence, which anyone can deny and deflect about until the cows come home, as Jimenez does. all you need to realize is that no-one on earth has seen a screenshot of his supposed videogame, not even him, because it doesn’t exist.

beyond that, other developers on youtube like Dallas Drapeau have criticised Threat Interactive for, basically, not knowing what they’re talking about and asking for $900K. TI (specifically Wolfe) has responded by filing DMCA takedowns and lawyering up. Drapeau brings a brutal but undeniable truth to the table: “Developers develop, and phonies make excuses”. he also uses a wojak for good measure (????????).

so all in all, supporting Kevin Jimenez so he can make videos criticizing modern graphics is like, whatever right? he makes some great points sometimes. but if you’re giving this dude money in the hopes that he’ll change the industry through any means besides advocacy, that money is gone.