Aura

here's my take on games journalism, as an ex-games-journalist who some people sometimes remember:

most gamers don't want to read games crit, because as austin put it, the subset of the Games Audience who wants to read game crit is a sliver of a sliver of a sliver. that's not in itself bad but it means you have to slip in games crit as a vitamin pill alongside a much more profitable business (e.g. the same way that larger journalism outlets do it) or you live with the fact that you have a niche audience and that's ok.

niche audiences can sustain a publication, if you're careful about it. But you gotta be very careful about it. there's also the twin problems of burnout and lack of elders in the space -- both are tied together and both make the other worse. Every outlet runs on the memory of the last four years of work and it's hard-nigh-impossible to keep people on for longer than four years, especially if they are working on Passion Wages.

for games journalism to work you need full-time jobs at positions that are stable and well-paid, and you need institutions that have protections for writers (things like HR and Editors and Legal and Unions). those are not the fault of 'gamers' per se, they're the fault of capitalism and a societal disdain for public institutions. you can't fix games journalism without also fixing Journalism, is i guess what i mean

I think pretty much every sustainable media business is built by having the breakout stuff subsidise the niche stuff. I'm sure 80% of Defector page views come from 20% of articles.

But I think what actually makes that model work is:

• Being able to cover the big stories people expect to see covered
• And having niche material you can't find elsewhere – you need both

This isn't a new model. This is how newspapers used to operate before they were gutted. This is what the entire hierarchy of the front page is about.

Like do we think everybody who bought the Sun-Times back in the day was reading Ebert? Most probably weren't. The audience for film crit, out of the newspaper-buying audience, was no doubt a sliver. But for that sliver, Ebert was the difference between buying the paper and just reading the front page headlines on the news stand. For another sliver, it was the sports pages. Or the crossword, and so on. Newspapers, as a business, worked by aggregating niche audiences together.

Which is why the logic of "oh, only 20% of people read this, we can just kill it" fails. Which is why Defector, I think very smartly, publishes tons of niche blogging that really doesn't matter to most people. This isn't an inefficiency, it's the core business model.

figured I might as well boost that tho I'm sure everyone has seen it already

unfortunately for me I was absolutely the target audience for that era of waypoint and I was screaming to the rooftops how incredible they were doing when that guantanamo stuff etc came out. I genuinely don't know how we'd ever get there again (and as austin points out, it was only sustainable bc of the other articles they had) but man that was like, I was truly Living during that era, I was getting into fights with other indie devs who were dismissive of the point of journalism, etc

the things I miss the most

• the 2011-12 period when indie games coverage was wide-spanning, vibrant, and included tons of previously unplatformed voices - even much of modern independent journalism treats indie as mostly an afterthought
• the 2012-2014 era when mobile gaming coverage was big enough that multiple sites had their own integrated tablet/phone apps and posted fascinating shit like coverage of the exodus of Gaming(Gambling) industry designers into mobile games, bringing with them tactics used in videoslot and the like

even putting aside other things like crit - which were in fascinating and weird places during that period - the sense that there was truly coverage for anything you could be interested in was so exciting and it really felt like for the first time in my life we were successfully expanding the public audience for games culture, as opposed to just playing games. We came out the other side of that and now everyone plays games but people don't read about games in the way I think anyone was hoping. Games Culture is now your friends watching a Direct in a discord together, insulated from the wider burning train wreck that is games culture. I miss the promise of that optimism, I guess.

figured I might as well boost that tho I'm sure everyone has seen it already

unfortunately for me I was absolutely the target audience for that era of waypoint and I was screaming to the rooftops how incredible they were doing when that guantanamo stuff etc came out. I genuinely don't know how we'd ever get there again (and as austin points out, it was only sustainable bc of the other articles they had) but man that was like, I was truly Living during that era, I was getting into fights with other indie devs who were dismissive of the point of journalism, etc

i think the difference between a casual blogger and a journalist is that journalists confirm sources and check basic information by asking people who would know, before writing an article

with apologies to most of modern game journalism for saying so

It's depressing honestly, i used to be the biggest advocate in the world to other devs that game journalism was doing important work and critical analysis mattered but now we're at a point where polygon is crossposting low quality tiktok explainers to their front page and it's like. idk. What I loved is gone. It left. It was destroyed.

The thing that depresses me as someone who came out of a five year career in games press is that people want to do this work. People don't get into journalism to write Top 10 Black Friday SSD Deals posts. But before too long you realise the demands of playing to ad rev and SEO have destroyed the ability to put time into good critique and journalism, or that the long term institutional knowledge at these outlets simply doesn't exist to train new writers.

I've written news on and off for GameSpot for three years. The rate used to be $25 for 200 words, it's now $30. This is unbearable, but it's actually pretty high for a games site. I used to edit for a Gamurs website that paid half as much per news story and once tried to raise the minimum requirement per story to 300 words without a pay increase. There are way more of those tiny SEO farms than there are GameSpots and IGNs.

All this is to say.

Exists! It exists!

But all the subscription money is funneled to well known personality driven channels. And a lot of good criticism and coverage and sometimes journalism comes out of those places, but the demographics are markedly different (older, whiter, more men) than the writers in the trenches as permalancers that wanted to do something different with their career. It's not our fault people pay for comedy and humor on pods and streams but not 2000 word essays pulling on classics and literary criticism.

You could go subscribe to a place that does games writing "like Defector" but people just...don't! Unwinnable has been around for over a decade, and if we made more money we'd almost all be writing a monthly magazine full time. But even our own colleagues forget about us. Bullet Points puts out the weirdest and most acclaimed crit in the industry and takes in barely $500 on their Patreon. Uppercut, Aftermath, VGBees have all showed up after and haven't been able to find enough money either, and there's a dozen other newsletters and blogs that have all claimed to be the Defector of games that have faded.

I met some game design undergrads at last Fall's No Quarter and a friend and I asked them if they read any crit. They'd never even considered it! But they did watch some of the biggest white men on YouTube and listen to some podcasts (s/o Something Rotten). That's not any writer's failure.

I've seen a lot of people finally give up on games writing like the above, but as someone that started writing about games in college in 2019, the only time I have seen people actually give in to it was Uppercut's EGM Recovery fund. And they're gone too.

ETA: the comments on the original post are so depressing as someone trying to pay rent as a writer. Yes there needs to be an apparatus for this stuff but people are doing the quality work y’all are lamenting while saying you don’t even read this stuff anymore.

Given my history, I obviously haver a lot of thoughts about this, but many of them have been touched on by folks above me in this thread already.

I'll add one more dour thing, though, that comes from years running a site that had the ability to (occasionally) tap into all of a media company's ability to promote our stories. On top of all the difficulties listed above re: business models, freelancers, pivots-to-video-and-beyond, etc., there also is the difficult fact that the audience for "good games reporting and crit" is simply tiny.

Years of running Waypoint and having a dedicated social & growth team look at what worked (both for us and our competitors) was sobering. Yes, some reporting would absolutely breakthrough. In general, that was content that was either: 1. Tied to a major industry scandal, 2. Leaks about major, AAA upcoming or canceled projects, or 3. (And really only for 2016-2018) Something with a really click-y, headline that played on what's called "The curiosity gap."

The bulk of good reporting does not fit into these categories. Well-reported interviews surveying parts of development culture. Deep feature reporting with original research and archival work. Embedded reporting from fascinating scenes or subcultures. Even developer-penned, first-hand material. Are there people who care about these? Sure. But it isn't as many people as you would like it to be!

And crit? If it wasn't about a brand new game inside of the two weeks prior to or after its release, or if it was about one of a small handful of evergreen games (Skyrim, Stardew Valley) good fucking luck getting anyone to care. No matter how well written, no matter how soul searching and personal, or cooly delivered and academic, or inflammatory and angry... You're hitting golfballs into the sea.

The above (both reporting and crit) were the bulk of what we ran, and mostly it didn't move the needle. We hit our goals every single year, we were profitable for my entire stay there, don't get me wrong. But we did that because we inevitably had one breakout leak or scandal story that generated 50x the views of a well written piece of crit about an SNES game or 10x the traffic of a carefully reported piece about the culture of a niche fighting game or the development history of a genre-defining adventure game.

Defector worked for a few reasons--not least of which was the momentous and theatrical executive detonation of the (large and well functioning) excellent Deadspin team. But the biggest reason is: A LOT of people want to read sports and culture coverage, broadly. Enough that there is a healthy subset of that big number that want to read the sort of work that places like Defector and the Athletic make.

The category mistake many of us have made is in assuming that "people who play games regularly" is filled with people who want to read about games. It's an understandable mistake, because that is part of these other hobbies. To be a sports fan means you probably have both a favorite athlete AND a favorite analyst. To be a film lover means to probably have both a favorite director AND a favorite critic. But a lot of people who are "into games" actually just... want to play games, and that's it.

The bet we made with Waypoint was that, for the first time in the history of video games, there existed an audience of 'news and culture reader' who was literate in video games enough that they would read stories that filtered to them via VICE's many channels. And we would be able to use that audience to supplement the already existing games audience.

What we learned was:

• 1. That new audience existed but was much less interested in reading about (say) the culture of play in Guantanamo Bay or the relationship between gun manufacturers and game publishers than they were about New Nintendo Games or harassment and abuse stories.
• 2. The internal games audience wasn't much different, except that the overall size of "games readership" was way smaller than "sports readership" and so you needed to try to throw an even wider net to get real numbers.

Add that to everything above, and to the ongoing shifts in social media, and to the short social memory of this subculture, and (another big unmentioned thing here) to the black box quality of the AAA games industry... and it's hard to see how we can get to a world of stable, well-staffed Defector-style outlets.

Which doesn't make the work that the outlets listed above in this thread (Bullet Points, Unwinnable, Aftermath, et al) unimportant. If anything, it makes them more important, because they're the few places carrying the torch forward, ideally reaching young writers who will be ready for the next "wave" of media expansion better than the last one. Which we can only hope happens at all.