TheBlackNerd

The King of All Nerds

Podcaster, baker, streamer, writer, too many videogames player

Recipes - https://ko-fi.com/theblacknerd/shop

Gaming Blog - https://cohost.org/thisgameisneat

Writing - https://medium.com/@theblacknerd_23078

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/theblacknerd


dante
@dante

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


bruno
@bruno

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.


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in reply to @bruno's post:

Which then lets them do all their other cool shit, since people are locked in and now you get Tennis coverage, and investigation or followup with some scandal, and then you have some weird dive into a specific sports video game, and so on.