'There Are So Few Of Us Left': Even Full-Time Games Journalists At Big Websites Are Feeling It In 2025
'There Are So Few Of Us Left': Even Full-Time Games Journalists At Big Websites Are Feeling It In 2025 - Aftermath
Video Game Jounalism missed the step to professional, independent work. Either by work ethic or by an industry playing the consumer and being outside of legislatives eye.
Like how can a honest, self-paying journalist compete in marketing and access to sources, when companies can blacklist them and at the same time allow exclusive time and content access to willful pawns? - and google and consumers support it.
The journalists worth listening to don't work for big websites.
When we're talking game journalism, most of them aren't even journalists, just 3rd party PR for publishers. Only thing they do is just forward marketing blurbs they receive, rather than journalism.
They dug their own grave.
Honestly not surprised, catering to GamersTM honestly feels like a fool’s errand; there seems to be an ever growing divide between what the vocal minority demands to see, and what the silent majority of the market ends up consuming.
Catering to the former is like dancing on a knife’s edge, its only a matter of time before you fail to live up to their expectations - and that’s even if there’s enough of them to even be able to support a journalist’s career to begin with!
Catering to the mainstream segment will usually cause you to fall on the former’s bad-side anyway, as they unleash a torrent of vitriol and hate at the journalists for not focusing on whatever manufactured outrage is de jour at the moment (previously woke, now DEI).
Double whammy of mistrust in media - I think worse with video games as that's been viewed like it's tied to the hip as a marketing arm since 90s gaming magazines.
Other whammy I think is PC gaming. Tradiitonal video game journalist rarely get the scoop on the popular game of the week in a timely manner. The popular game of the week is almost always some random game on Steam. FFVII Rebirth is the most impressive game since at least Cyberpunk 2077 and it didn't go viral with gamers but traditional video game publications spent months writing a lot of articles about that game
Traditional video game isn't proper to cover gaming which is now core to what is viral. Hyping up AAA games is mild attention compared to the latest Palworld. It even goes back to ~2010 when traditional games media had and continues to have no answer to esports. Starcraft 2 then LoL/Heroes of Newerth/DOTA2 then CSGO then DayZ then PUBG then Fortnite then etc. Traditional games media has very little cultural relevance these days. Not just these days, really the past decade
Can't they just follow the trends and write short interesting pieces of the game-du-jour? Cant the content we see coming from streamers, tiktokers and youtubers be matched by professional media publishers?
FFVII Rebirth? hahaha good one
I miss TotalBiscut :c
It's just video is slowly replacing writing. Old people were used to reading, young people are used to watching short videos and skipping. For video games I find it easier to find "walktrough no commentary" to figure out how long the game is and scroll briefly to see the gameplay than to read subjective view of author. I simply watch gameplay and decide if game is for me or not.
God I hate this. I much prefer writing to videos.
Obviously we're on writing website.
I'm not even that old and I still prefer reading because you can take screenshots of directions, flip to the correct spot, easily reference stuff, and copy/paste text. You can't do any of that with video. I will never understand why people prefer video for this stuff.
You can also control +F text
When search engines started putting lists of videos in response to every query, I fumed. Trying to find a solution to the game issue you're having? Here, scan through this 10 minute video and hope you come across the part that discusses your specific issue! Oh, it didn't actually talk about the thing you need? Lol well at least you watched some ads.
I think next time I have a game issue, I'll be asking about it here on Lemmy. Yeah, the audience isn't as big as on Reddit, but we'll never know the depth of the knowledge fellow Lemmings have to offer if we never ask.
You mean walktroughs ? I don't watch walktroughs to know how to beat the game. I beat the game myself. I watch walktroughs to listen to music and feel the atmosphere. You can't feel the game without audio inside the game.
Because gaming is slowly migrating over to PC as gamers see that while there's a higher cost up front -- but a longer lasting library at a cheaper cost to build it. PC tech journalists cover more than just videogaming so they can diversify their coverage when gaming is in a slow release period.
The free internet as we’ve known it for the last 20 years is collapsing as the ad market evaporates and corporate media ownership becomes increasingly unhinged in response. As belts tighten and profits dwindle across all media–not just video games–that rising tide could begin claiming more and more sites that even ten years ago would have seemed immortal.
Why is this happening? The post alludes to Google and Meta hogging all the ads somehow, but why would advertising on things resembling traditional media now be worthless? Everyone started using adblockers or is there something else too?
Video game reviewers used to provide a valuable service. Back when all video games were Nintendo expensive, we needed trustworthy reviewers to guide us towards making the correct purchase. Paying the inflation-equivalent of $100+ for a single video game made a single bad purchase really hurt.
Nowadays, people log on Steam and scroll through hundreds of previously purchased (never played) games they picked up for a few dollars each during a Steam holiday sale 3 years ago. They can just click download and start playing anything that tickles their fancy!
Plus I’d also add that many gamers have found games that have enormous replay value (especially multiplayer games like League of Legends or Hearthstone or Fortnite) and they sink thousands upon thousands of hours into that one game.
What room is there for professional game reviewers reviewing new games every week and writing about them? Most gamers seem to have more games than they could ever want, plus single games that could last a lifetime by themselves.
The same could really be said for music reviews. People used to read magazines like Rolling Stone in order to get reviews of the latest songs from the hottest bands. Nowadays people just listen to the music themselves and decide whether or not they like it, no reviewers needed.
Edit: I forgot to mention streamers and lets players. People can watch a lot of these videos by amateur or professional content creators and judge whether or not they like the game based on how it plays. Reading an article, even a very well-written one, pales in comparison to a gameplay video at the job of communicating how a game looks and sounds in motion.
You're also missing a big piece... You can't fucking trust the reviews any more. Steam reviews are great, and game reviewers have been trying to insist "no, this trash game is actually great, don't trust your fellow gamers" for years now
At this point, it's blatantly obvious you can pay for good critic reviews, and there's no walking that back... Especially since there's better, more honest, options
These explanations make sense to me, but they seem to conflict a little with what's being said in the post, where it's implied that game journalism sites get a decent amount of traffic but it isn't worth as much because media business models as a whole are collapsing somehow:
It doesn’t matter how many millions, or even tens of millions of people are reading a website if the means of financially supporting that writing are evaporating.
A more apt comparison would be with film reviewers. Before the internet, knowing what a movie was about, if you didn't care about spoilers, would require either someone watching and telling you, or reading a piece on a newspaper (or, in some places, watching TV). It's almost the same with "professional" game reviews and how they completely lost space to random dudes on the internet.
Also, watching a video usually feels more like entertainment, whereas reading a review or walkthrough feels more like doing some research.
A lot of content available on the web now is getting scraped by search engines and ai, which provide summaries and results that don’t profit the website that wrote them.
In any post-apocalyptic world, the skinny guy on a leash used to be a games journalist, movie reviewer, or online influencer.
OP is a marketing bot fwiw.
Marketing for what exactly?
Paywall
I’m not encountering a paywall either through embedded Safari or Firefox (iOS); worst case seems like 12ft.io should work?
Kids don't game. Why would you when there's sensory content on tap?
I'd say a reasonable amount of this is due to how many of them shove their own ideologies into their reporting, with not even a slight attempt to remain objective or neutral.
Exactly.
"Games journalists": blame gamers for everything
Gamers: stop consuming their content
"Games journalists": shocked pikachu face
They wanted a 'post gamer world' and now their sites are living it.