I mean I’d like to be upset but honestly video game journalism has always been the lowest form of Journalism. Mostly it’s just pure propaganda and press releases from major game companies. 90 to 95% of Articles written by these game journalists were just useless fluff.
Remember how Cyberpunk got hyped across the board? Not a single critical voice before launch (as far as I’ve heard). If that’s the “journalism” you’re providing, then I’m sure as hell not paying for it.
It's hard to be critical of something that hasn't been released yet. All anybody had to go off of were statements from the developers, until the product was actually released and people could get their hands on it.
That might be exactly part of why gaming journalism is irrelevant.
If the “news” about an upcoming game is just repeating developer hype, then it’s just useless noise. At that point the only thing that matters are reviews, and independent YouTubers are beating the professionals in quality and trustworthiness.
So what’s left? Actual dry industry news? I suppose some small amount of people care, but not enough to support the amount of gaming journalists out there.
Absolutely agree. A youtube video where you can mostly ignore what theyre saying and just see the game and problems with it along with some benchmarks is all you need.
If its online, watching someone play online to get a feeling of how the community is also works, particularly if its just them playing solo for a long stretch of time not editing out toxicity.
Maybe it’s because my experience with it goes well back into the print era, but very little of it is actual fact-finding capital “J” journalism, and even that part has only come on in the industry more recently. I’ve always put the games press in its proper buckets of “previews for access” and then game criticism. Quality for both varies, but I’m rarely disappointed when I stick to a publication I like (until the inevitable EIC churn, anyway).
Yup, I remember even back in the print era there was significant criticism about the relationships between games publishers and various magazines resulting in what was essentially advertising disguised as articles. Payment was either indirect (exclusive access to preview builds etc) or direct via in-magazine advertising. Can’t badmouth the big flagship game releases too much when EA just paid big bucks to advertise the very same title for the next view editions.
Journalism at large is dangerously close to dying. People favour free click- and rage-bait headlines on Facebook over quality journalism. The latter can’t compete because quality costs money, while cheap quality articles oversaturate the market. AI only exacerbated the issue.
Getting my news from reddit or Lemmy led to the same problems, and neither actually gave me the news, so in the past couple of years, I have definitely budgeted for a news subscription as well.
Getting news off Lemmy is a shit-for-brains idea. It’s 70% bias saturated US politics links. I have no.idea how people keep lapping it up, but I hear that’s the culture of Americans being told what to believe and do based on their feeds.
You can block keywords, though, so if anyone posts any interesting news, you may even get to see it.
The problem was more that people are more likely to submit stories that continue to get you angry about the latest thing. It won’t be a deep investigative piece about the corporate interests that led to some strange move and hid some shady dealings; it will be a third or fourth article about the latest thing we all already know Trump did, but it adds like one detail and focuses on it. It’s easy to fall back on by default and think you need nothing else because it’s free and major events will get shared instantly.
If I had the money I’d definitely do the same, but for now I do RSS instead of link aggregator communities if I’m being serious about it. Takes some curation, but at the very least it’s not being run through a vote algorithm first.
Which is why the free democratic world has to keep subsiding quality journalism that sticks to the facts. Sadly that‘s dying along with private newspapers because governments believe people just don‘t want it and it‘s not worth keeping. They treat it as entertainment and that‘s a huge problem because it‘s a pillar of democracy. Defunding it is dangerous.
As for games… well, there‘s plenty of ways and different mediums to consume games nowadays so it makes sense magazines are vanishing along with game events despite the medium being bigger than ever. Most of the older game news outlets have overstayed their welcome.
I think these platforms need to adapt. They need to make short form, entertaining videos like The Washington Post or the break off with Dave Jorgenson called Local News International.
There is too much news for anyone to actually bother reading the long form articles that theyre used to having awfully agitating formats designed to get the reader to read the whole thing and scroll past ads.
Short form, entertaining, and factual is the best route. Do a little skit, explain the concept simply, bingo bango.
click- and rage-bait headlines on Facebook over quality journalism
Gaming journalism has been overrun with that.
What I, and I think many people, want are trustworthy, knowledgable reviews.
I can’t trust any of the major publications. I trust a small handful of YouTubers who are giving me more of what I want than the entire professional industry.
The idea of ranking games on a numerical scale is inherently flawed. I suspect many publications still use it as a way to make nice with game publishers. Text that’s lukewarm can slap a 9/10 score on and a lot of people just jump over the review to the “objective” score.
There are still Youtubers out there motivated by the same engagement goals as gaming journalists. Both need you to click the link. With Youtubers, you can at least identify what games they like, and would know more about those specific type of games.
Not all YouTubers are quality. This is obvious. What I am saying is that I’ve found a mere handful who are quality and for my tastes they have replaced the entire legacy professional gaming journalistic media. Other people I’m sure can find similar YouTubers who cater to their tastes and opinions.
You even see it here. People will post “quality journalism” and then it gets attacked because its nuanced and doesnt extrapolate into extreme claims.
People are so used to the rage-bait and bad journalism that its hard for actual reporting to break through. As well as it takes 1000x more effort to gather the evidence and story for quality reporting. Its bad, we need to start supporting journalists through gov subsidies and donations.
I’ll only address journalism as it relates to video games/reviews, but my opinion is that there are better ways to communicate information about a game than reading about it.
For me the big one is simply seeing it played. I’ve read beautiful reviews of games that when it comes time to play do not click for me. Watching someone else play it gives me way more context and appreciation. My go to for this is simply youtube. I skip the middle man entirely. I get a wide range of videos from different players in an easy to access format. Others I know use twitch to similar effect. As the options for providing this information grow, older media lose footing. I’m not surprised at all. I’m not sure we should lament it, truthfully.
Journalism at large died a while ago, gaming journalism has been an absolute joke for over a decade.
I have no respect for 99% of modern journalists, they just push 1%er propaganda and post mugshots while jerking themselves off as being self appointed “guardians of democracy.”
There are some who are trying to do some good and they have my utmost respect but they’re needles in haystacks.
I think the people who just pick up an instrument and fool around with it might be more tempted to use AI than an actual composer who knows and cares about music theory and sound production.
It’s all about what they want to do. You don’t ask a algorithm to solve your sodoku, because what’s the point of doing it then.
It’s a standing joke that composers actually make their living doing tedious tasks like commercial jingles and background music for radio shows. The AI can easily do that, removing both the tedious work, but also the payment.
Algorithm based music isn’t a new thing. One could argue that it was exactly what Bach was doing. His ideas were mostly simple three note motifs, and the rest of the hourly long concerts were just him churning out all the possible arrangements using strict theory. AI could do that faster than a human, but I also don’t think any human is really interested in doing it like that anymore. It was a huge accomplishment by Bach, but only because he was the first to lay the groundwork. It’s not interesting today.
Composition today is all about conveying an idea or emotion through sound, which would be rather difficult for an AI. It can probably fake it well enough, but it’ll be based on already existing methods, aka slop. There’s already enough human made slop in music to saturate the market for such. AI doesn’t really have an edge in doing it, except it might be cheaper for those that need it.
final fantasy III (us III, the magitek mech kefka one) has tunes I STILL use as background music on audio production: magitek factory, the intro and shadow’s theme specifically
the idea this god damned genuis would let an algorithm write music he’s bother to even listen to is madness
idk, i have a hard time imagining a scenario where AI output is preferable to the alternatives. If one “needs” an AI to do something, they should just hire a human. They will get better results than they get from the word-association machine. Once AI companies stop subsidizing the cost of AI to attract users, the human will probably be the cheaper option, too.
i have a hard time imagining a scenario where AI output is preferable to the alternatives.
Oh that’s easy, it’s when you need the thing cheap and now.
I used to work at a friend’s start-up where, charitably, his approach to business was archaic. “We don’t need to advertise because good word-of-mouth is good enough, and what’s the point of having a website and social media?” kind of archaic. Without a doubt, he would be using AI for absolutely everything.
I am skeptical of how well done it’ll be. Do they have any games that aren’t just dialogue heavy, QTE adventures? Becsuse even those simple styled games I have played from them have a lot of jank.
Not to say they are bad games; the genre allows for a lot of leeway since it’s story focused. But competitive multiplayer? You want that shit as smooth as possible.
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