“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.”
The games media outlets that have survived, except for Gamespot and IGN, have just about all switched to this model. It seems to be the only way it survives.
It’s so bad now that nearly all the articles are mainly clickbait or written to favor a particular game (no matter how mediocre), and someone had to create what’s called Saved You A Click.
Back in like 2012, a gaming journalist would write an honest review of a game they tried or they would give an update on the industry or they would share interesting tips and info about certain games and franchises. The sites would clean, maybe a couple of ads here and there, but the overall atmosphere is driven by genuine passion.
Today, you don’t get any of that. Instead you get an advertisement masquerading as an article. The reviews aren’t authentic, the updates are basically a part of marketing campaigns, and the info they give is to push readers to buy something. The sites are all completely cluttered with ads, a lot of the articles are just AI slop, and the industry is driven by greed. Why would anybody go there anymore? Might as well just go see a youtube review or get the game and try it out yourself.
Do you feel that way about the site reporting the linked article?
And I know the likes of IGN have been a mess for far longer than 2012.
Do you feel that way about the site reporting the linked article?
Yes, although I am not the first dood, but posting as someone who did read the linked article it is a barely veiled attempt to support the “writer’s” media and looks more like a lazy filler article to meet a quota. I use quotes around writer as the article in question is 2/3s quotes more in the style of an interview with “Veteran games journalist Alex Donaldson” and a few comments from “Press Engine co-founder Gareth Williams” (nothing wrong with that per say). The other 1/3 is “data supplied to VGC by Press Engine…” (again nothing wrong with this on its own). The issue is when we take the article in its whole this seems more like someone talked to a colleague or two then put a header on it using in house data from a “… popular PR tool used by developers and publishers to distribute codes and press releases to a global database of journalists and content creators.” and adding a few other comments from the very founder of the program used in house to round it out making a very thin and kinda lazy article. This reminds me very much of the stuff written I saw many many years ago when I worked at a newspaper watching that media circle the drain.
Also on the point of:
The sites are all completely cluttered with ads, a lot of the articles are just AI slop, and the industry is driven by greed.
This is not AI slop but good old fashioned 4:30 on a Friday human slop covered in ads, for example I got 2 pop ups with ad block reading it. This is what it looks like without ad blocker:
But then again, you get what you pay for and I guess the irony here is that the article (that could be used as a captain obvious joke) pointing out the collapse of games media is in itself an example of a degrading quality of writing leading to the demise of said media. The real joke is that the article does not even touch on the degrading quality of the writing and experience (other then a “…lack of diversification in content…”) but instead putting the blame on every thing else (thanks google, AI, COVID and advertising spending I guess?).
What would the “good version” of this article look like in your opinion? VGC doesn’t have quotas, btw.
The real joke is that the article does not even touch on the degrading quality of the writing and experience
I’ll say that you state that as fact, but it’s a perception that not everyone shares.
They don’t need humans to write the engagement slop articles anymore.
I miss Total Biscuit 😭
Yeah, it turns out people don’t like advertising pretending to be reviews.
I tried contributing to game8. They only accept payment through paypal. I’ve closed my paypal account.
An effort was made.
Shout-out to Nextlander and Giantbomb for keeping gaming journalism alive.
And sites like Aftermath.site
Giantbomb is legit the fucking goat.
I hate games journalists. I’m sure there are some good ones but most of them are corporate trash and their reviews are thinly veiled ads. They dont care about the games they write about. They dont take the time to learn the games and are just generally bad at games. Basically the entire industry is just shitting out the most dogshit video game opinions 24/7. I’d rather go to Lemmy or Reddit and read what actual players have to say about games.
This is why I still pay the NYT for access. They may suck. But I am trying to keep some of the good ones employed.
Why do you feel they suck?
Defended a genocide in Palestine. Also fucked over Biden during the election.
I gotta say, I don’t see it. I did start reading the NY Times toward the end of the election cycle, but it seems to me that hardly a day goes by without showing the awful things Israel’s doing; Bret Stephens has his own opinions, but they’re in the opinion column. Of what I’ve seen, I think they reported Biden’s administration accurately, and if that fucked him over, it’s not really their job to withhold that. That’s how I see it, anyway.
Special interest journalism is usually overrun by corporate interests and inflated reviews. Find someone who knows the history of the industry and was fired or left an organization for something like reporting a low review to search out integrity for individuals.
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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.
Go to Steam page. Scroll to bottom. Filter out negative reviews. Read 5-10. Update filers to only show negative reviews. Read 5-10.
That’s never let me down when it comes to determining whether or not a game is one I’ll enjoy.
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.
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.
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.
Indie or AA and AAA?
Indie and AA.
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.
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.
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.
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 they’re almost kinda right.
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.
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.
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.
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.
but I hear that’s the culture of Americans being told what to believe and do based on their feeds.
Hate to break it to you, but this is becoming the norm globally as more and more people got addicted to smartphones and social media.
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.
Good riddance to any gar journalists who rate games on a 6/10 to 10/10 scale. I insinuated because sponsors, but fuck that.
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.
I blame AI
They were long gone before AI
I blame time-traveling AI
Damn Roko’s basilisk, ruining games journalism.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel it’s important
Genuinely, why?
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.
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‘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.
