You must be quite sensitive to see this as “acidic”. I have seen this guy speak at several conferences and he is absolutely the opposite of “acidic”. Here’s an “acidic” comment for you: He makes great games that people love and he doesn’t owe you a thing.

> I have seen this guy speak

But have you seen him write? I'm talking about the article and the quote above shows some very aggressive sarcasm. I believe calling it acidic is appropriate.

If I provided the same kind of reply to you it would either be downvoted to hell, flagged, or deleted by mods. Using 2 different moral standards for the same action has a name.

But that is pretty much exactly how Apple responds to criticism of their most asinine product decisions. They double down on them. (And occasionally, years later, quietly come to their senses)

I don't see "doubling down" as analogous to "responding acidly," and I'd actually say that Apple's most common response to criticism isn't "doubling down" as much as "not officially responding at all." You may find their lack of apology for arguably dubious design decisions or out-and-out product flaws to be annoying, and I get it, but it's not as if the tech industry is chock-full of counterexamples.

In any case, the OP's argument for "why all of our games look like crap" is "we're not prioritizing the resources to put into consistent, polished aesthetics." I'm going to bet that if you made a consensus list of the most common complaints with Apple over the last ~5 years, "they just don't pay enough attention to how things look" would not be near the top.

If you know of cases when Apple or MS came with this kind of aggressive sarcasm (read quote above) and moreover, people still found excuses for them I am open to discussing a particular example. Absent such an example I will assume you're just doing what I implied above: judging Apple and MS a lot harsher for a lot less just from strong bias.

And if such an example exists it just strengthens my point that it would sound just as awful and that the only difference is that people will judge MS or Apple with far more bias that this guy, regardless of the actual "crime".