There was another round of "why is it so hard for small games to get games media coverage" stuff going around on twitter, though I don't want to talk about what frustrates me about these discussions (I did a Blog about this back in May), and instead just want to share a thought I just had a few minutes ago. One I'm sure isn't new either, but I haven't really thought about much before.
It's not like smaller games coverage was better ten years ago. You can probably make a solid argument that it was worse. I think the problem really is not that mainstream games sites cover less indie games, but much more that most of the sites and blogs below the larger outlets have mostly dissappeared? I remember way back when I started to really dive into indiegames in the late 2000s, how most of the games I found were through smaller blogs and personal sites where people just wrote about them. From there, some games then got coverage from larger outlets as well, but usually you didn't go to a large gaming outlet and expected them to cover a ton of smaller games.
However since blogs kind of withered away (I know they still exist, but the ecosystem is so different nowadays, that they might as well not be there), that part of games coverage also disappeared from the public perception, which means you kind of expect larger sites to do things they aren't, and never were, equipped for?