No, they shouldn’t have started businesses to chase ad money and convince people to work for you in a market that was saturated.
The OG magazines didn’t sell that much back in the day but enough to be a stable business due to its format and brief writings.
Then again who wants spoilers to anything? Same thing happened with movie critics. We all know too much, too quick, too soon. There’s no surprise or open expectations like there once was. You just need an announcement and a date. You know what you like.
Games “journalists” have always been awful at their job and the entire industry is so incredibly fucky with nerds power tripping on the tiniest modicum of power they’ve been given.
Personally haven’t really read gaming journalism even before. If I want to see what score a game has, I’m much more likely to check How Long To Beat or Backloggd, where users rate games.
Or, as has been mentioned in this thread, Youtubers, if I want a singular subjective opinion as opposed to a “out of 5” or “out of 10” score which, admittedly can be tricky when different people have a different view on what each number should mean. For instance, a 5 (on a 10 scale), is average for me when I rate anime. But most of the anime community uses 7 as the average, so a 6.2 show on MyAnimeList, which you would think is above average, is actually below.
The entire industry was flooded with mouthpieces for developer statements, and opinion piece hottakes. How many of those people does an industry really need? (Or more importantly: How many of those people can it financially support?)
As for reviews, they are for the most part similarly worthless and hard to trust. There’s about five YouTubers who I actually trust the opinions of, and I haven’t felt left out at all with that as the extent of my gaming journalism intake.
I can’t be certain, but I suspect a lot of gamers are completely burnt out on the professional gaming journalism industry.
Most “reviewers” get a version of the game with infinite money and health to get through the game quickly and only talk about story and size.
I bet there’s bosses and quests that have a special place in our rage that these people just breezed through and they don’t remember them a single bit.
The most I’ve heard about reviewers getting extra help is that they have a small tip sheet for the trickiest parts, and only sometimes. If they need extra help beyond that, they’re messaging their colleagues on Discord who are also under embargo.
I’ve gotten release copies of games for review. Unless they have another secret tier of pressers, this is nonsense. If anything, review copies are more likely to have bugs that making completing the game harder.
It would be difficult to measure if that was the case, but what does seem to be the case is that the old revenue model these outlets relied on just paid less and less over the years.
Their game reviews are worth shit all, so their only worth is reporting on the game industry itself. And that’s a niche area that not many people are interested in.
that’s 1200 highly self-motivated workers that are now competing with you and me for the “boring” jobs. Not to wish ill on these former journalists - I hope all these people have landed in good places with stable incomes. But man… this job market just keeps getting more and more brutal. Jobs are eliminated and more and more workers are competing for the same tiny pool.
Whenever these massive tech companies started laying people off during 2020 was when I went “well shit”. I was only a year into my job and struggled to find something even somewhat relevant at that point prior to covid. I thankfully still have that job for now but I don’t know what’s next
Tech workers have become a dime a dozen now it seems. Heck all workers seem to have. Now with the whole AI thing I’m trying to think of what I can pivot to.
Tech is ruined for me personally. I don’t want to touch AI. I’ve been considering some kind of business i can start myself or like…I don’t know really. I’m just burnt out and don’t know what the future will look like. There’s so much uncertainty
Anecdotal, but I have never read a game review in my life that was from a journalist. It’s always been in forums, and lately some small youtubers. I want to hear from normal gamers, not people getting a paycheck for it.
I‘d rather read a well articulated opinion that is embedded into a rich cultural context than some rambling from strangers. I know the former is hard to find (Eurogamer and RPS are good, but suffer from layoffs, too). The latter I only skim through to find things I might find distracting that were omitted by others.
Back in the late 90s-early 2000s the PCGamer magazine was actually worthwhile. It had reviewers who specialized in different genres and if read enough you could get a feel for their writing style and critical voice. The fact it was a monthly publication meant they weren’t racing to get a review out in the first 24 hours.
Nowadays it all seems like publications race to put reviews out online for relevance, and the reviewers often seem to have a disdain for video games and even if they don’t they aren’t genre experts.
I don’t like fighting games. My review of a fighting game would be trash. Yet major publications just pump out reviews by whoever.
Individual youtubers at least can develop a recognizable critical voice and stick more to genres they know and enjoy.
Embargoes exist to prevent that race. Your fighting game problem has been solved by assigning fighting game reviews to the “fighting game guy” on hand, which is why you’ll see the same byline on games in the same genre from major outlets.
I’ve actually just renewed my subscription to PC Gamer, I read it on my tablet. A large part of that decision was to just help keep it alive because I feel it’s important.
Future Publishing can get fucked though.
For all of the reasons everyone’s saying here that the quality has gone. When the only revenue for an organisation is adverts and data it tends to head downhill pretty quickly.
I actively borrow content from the internet but willingly cough up the money for things that i get good use out of. There’s no way you can visit the pc gamer website without an ad blocker, so i pay a little bit quarterly and sit with a magazine instead.
I also have box sets of tv series that I’ve never opened, i just bought them because I enjoyed the pirated version so much.
I’ll listen to music on Spotify or whatever but then go to the artist website and get some merch.
There’s a lot of content that deserves to be paid for and supported.
I noticed you haven’t mentioned the actual quality of the content. Is it a responsibility to give money to a medium simply because it takes payment instead of using ad revenue?
The competition for what’s in those magazines is with independent online reviewers.
I would have thought my judgement of the quality of the content I’m willing to pay for would have been implicit.
For further context, for what it’s worth, I’m a British guy in my late 40’s who plays single player offline games. I don’t use or follow anyone from twitch, discord, or YouTube, mostly due to a lack of both time and inclination.
Is this a “we’re just gonna let AI do it” kind of thing? Because I think there’s going to be a market for 100% human non-AI content opening up. I think some people would be happy to pay a premium for it, even if it’s just Patreon-level dollar a month stuff.
That website has so much ragebait and I’ve never noticed it to ever have been anything better than that since I first started seeing articles from them. Once I noticed I stopped. Like 15-18 years ago I would read Kotaku but at some point it became click bait and weirdly gooner bait for a while so I stopped with that site 15-18 years ago. Like the site started good but then became the worst kind of geekdom pandering. Like Perez Hilton for fictional characters
It happens to every gaming site. Some worse than others. Gamespot post-Kane and Lynch and IGN at some point became a shameless industry advertising site. Polygon started real good and quickly devolved into a terrible ratio of clickbait to occasional good article. At this point the only games media I care for are official communications and gameplay videos from randoms on YouTube or twitch where the only narration I care to hear is about bugs and performance. Gameplay can show itself in video. I can judge writing myself
TheGamer came out of nowhere too. Back when I used faceboook almost a decade ago, I used to follow a gaming meme page. They post typical gaming shitposts of that era. They had massive followers, and big engagements.
Then one day every shitpost they post is branded with TheGamer logo, the page renamed to TheGamer. I don’t remember the original page name but it gave me disingenious vibe from both of them, I suspected the page has been sold & ownership transferred to TheGamer.
Back then I do have silly loyalty to stuff that I like, so I feel betrayed when they sold themselves to a sloppy article site.
Every once in a while they’d post buzzfeed-type of articles from their website. I eventually unfollowed the page.
They’ve been around so long but I don’t associate it with any major investigative article or any writer that made their name writing for them. It’s the most faceless notable gaming website and it’s notability to me seems entirely based around SEO and spamming social media with their blogspam articles
While I am a strong supporter of independent games media (and am ride or die Remap):
“For quality games media, I continue to believe that the best form of stability is dedicated reader bases to remove reliance on funds, and a hybrid of direct reader funding and advertisements. If people want to keep reading quality content from full time professionals, they need to support it or lose it. That’s never been more critical than now.”
This doesn’t scale. The outlets doing this can support MAYBE 3 people with the outliers being Kinda Funny who have never found a sponsorship they didn’t like and Giant Bomb who are pretty much riding on the massive support wave after they got fired AND have THE biggest legacy name out there and… time will really tell if they can keep supporting the whole crew this time next year. Oh, and MinnMax where Ben has to constantly remind people that he is actually the only full time employee and all the cohorts are contractors with day jobs and that you can also see Janet at Remap or her twitch channel and Charles at Game Informer and Jacob talking about death in a video essay on Nebula and…
But the other aspect, which Remap (specifically Patrick Klepek and Rob Zacny) have pointed out is… when you are part of a big org you have, among other things, lawyers. You can’t really do investigative journalism without those. With the power of (I think at the time it was) Kotaku? Jason Schreier is the “press sneak thief” and Bethesda just puts the outlet on a shitlist for review codes until the end of time. Without the power of Kotaku? Jason gets a letter in the mail and needs to find a lawyer who can protect him.
Outlets like 404 Media (and, to a much lesser extent, Aftermath) have more or less structured themselves entirely around this and I don’t actually know how they are pulling it off.
But Independent Games Media is, by and large, just that: Games Media. Not Games Journalism. And the reason you want the latter can probably be summed up with the Nintendo pricing of the Switch 2. They very specifically did not mention it as part of their press event or in the copy they sent out. And many outlets (including Remap and MinnMax) pointed out why. It is not going to look good for them but by doing it that way they control the message. Because all the Hype is gonna be for the Direct. So they get all the benefits of all your favorite talking heads Talking Over a Mario Kart trailer but the actual pricing? That is MAYBE an updated news article or a tweet. Which becomes “it is what it is” when they go to buy rather than “Wait… IS a gameboy actually worth 500 bucks?” discourse that we see for brands like XBOX that couldn’t market their way out of a paper bag at this point.
And we’ve seen similar with so many controversies over the years. People who are REALLY tuned in might have heard about The mordhau “Show us your kni**a” thread and rampant racism or the black myth wukon sexism. But the majority of outlets people actually go to for coverage/opinions are VERY aware that their legal department is Uncle Jack and don’t want that smoke. So you mostly just get “we aren’t going to cover it” rather than “Yo dog, this shit is fucked” that we would in the old days.
I get the feeling the people at Aftermath are just hungry to poke the bear. I imagine it’ll eventually catch up to them, but hey, more power to them for now.
It would be nice if more people gave a shit about in depth reporting on the industry but it’s an ever-shrinking niche. I think that’s a problem with any “enthusiast press” though. The game industry is huge and has asinine amounts of cash sloshing around in it though, so maybe we just end up with a bigger gulf between sites regurgitating press releases and sites actually doing reporting?
Most importantly, it’s “press sneak thank you very much!
I’ve never remembered seeing quality video games journalism.
The tyypes that they’re describing as that always seemed hacky and liable to push very subjective opinions as facts.
Their scores almost always seemed wonky and part of that is probably because individual scores for something as complex as a game don’t really make sense. They rarely make sense for anything.
Instead what you want are scores in multiple areas with no single amalgamated score.
Anyhow, for the longest while video games journalism has been rife with controversy about pulling negative reviews for ad deals etc.
I think unfortunately written media is pretty much dying due to finances, and for video games, due to never being all that good in the first place.
The details I care about, like monetization, grind, and performance, are the details that most games journalists just completely skim over or they’ll glaze game companies while they perform awfully here.
My way of buying games is basically watching video reviews of someone playing and mostly ignoring their commentary to figure out those details for myself.
That and benchmarks of course… and figuring out whether they’re owned by the saudi government…
Anyways, yea, video content for games both makes more sense, and more money.
I can totally get this feeling for PC/consumer electronics hardware related articles and reviews, but for video games? Meh. I won’t cry.
Understandable. I just feel like amalgamated scores tend not to truly reflect the subjective opinions of the reviewer as sometimes games are more or less than the sum of their parts, and then it doesn’t represent anything close to objectivity because it ignores that different people value different things more or less than others, therefore making this score not all that useful for them.
I can completely understand just wanting a quick score at a glance from a favourite review or outlet though.
I listen to podcasts featuring people who used to score games in that separated way for Gamespot, and it frequently led to scores that were out of sync with what the content of the review actually said. Plus, who’s to say if the visuals of Clair Obscur are better or worse than Hades II when they’ve got very different goals and art styles? And does it matter how high the visuals score for Bye, Sweet Carole is if they’re leaving a subpar review for the puzzles? That’s what the content of the review is for.
How grindy a game is or how it’s monetized often makes its way into a review. Publishers can get slimy around it though and turn the knobs to be more nefarious after the review period, which people can call them out for, but much like how lies spread faster than the truth, updates spread slower than initial reviews. What I’d personally like to see make its way into reviews are how much ownership the game actually grants. So many multiplayer modes are not designed to last, and no one, often times not even the people updating the features list on the Steam store page, care to mention if a game supports offline multiplayer like LAN. Some games blur the line, like Hitman, on just how offline their game and its content can be. That’s what I’m missing from review outlets.
But all of this has only been about reviews, and games media also breaks news. Real change has been happening by way of reporting on unionization and crunch. Harassers are being taken to court or otherwise removed from their position of power in their companies. Sometimes we can actually get real confirmation that absolutely nothing is happening with Bloodborne and no one should get their hopes up for anything anytime soon. All of that is valuable, too.
I listen to podcasts featuring people who used to score games in that separated way for Gamespot, and it frequently led to scores that were out of sync with what the content of the review actually said.
This is my point about why a single number doesnt make sense.
Things are not a simple sum of their parts.
Plus, who’s to say if the visuals of Clair Obscur are better or worse than Hades II when they’ve got very different goals and art styles?
Also in support of what I’m saying.
How grindy a game is or how it’s monetized often makes its way into a review.
Before I completely gave up on written reviews, I feel like it was increasingly obvious that reviewers were purposefully just glossing over painfully obvious mtxs and marketting dark patterns to the point I felt like they were clearly being influenced by the fear of losing special access to ignore what they knew games companies felt strongly about.
Some ex media org folks have talked about the politics internally that went into pressuring people not to acknowledge problems like this, though I don’t recall the name of any specific source. I feel like there was a large group that split up and some of them talked about it. I want to say Jim “Stephanie” Sterling (I believe thats how they title themselves) has talked about it, but I can’t quite recall.
Anyhow, I don’t think the knobs being cranked can be fully to blame as I don’t think that happens all that often because they dont even need to. It has happened a few times infamously though and devs regularly try to boil the frog in modern games
So many multiplayer modes are not designed to last, and no one, often times not even the people updating the features list on the Steam store page, care to mention if a game supports offline multiplayer like LAN. Some games blur the line, like Hitman, on just how offline their game and its content can be. That’s what I’m missing from review outlets.
Definitely true.
Feels like the sort of thing movements like StopKillingGames would hope regulation would solve. Id love to see like, a mandatory nutrition facts label on games dictating a minimum amount of time from launch the servers will be active, whether you can play without servers, etc etc.
Real change has been happening by way of reporting on unionization and crunch. Harassers are being taken to court or otherwise removed from their position of power in their companies.
True and good, but with current admin, I think we’re going to see a lot of these positive changes reverting as we come to realize that crime is legal for those affiliated and who bend the knee.
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