If I were launching a new subscription-based games media site I'd have launched it with articles worth paying for first but that's just me
At some point I looked at what their articles were in their first couple days, and it was, like
- Six articles about AAA games
- Four articles about twitter
- Several articles about media, inc. the Zelda movie
- Zero articles about indie games, or any game with a budget below $50 million
Didn't really feel like a bold new direction for independent media, just same old same old
To add my own spin to this, and because I've wanted to comment on the state of games writing since No Escape's reflections on Uppercut closing:
As it is, games writing has split into two distinct subfields. The first is pure content, delivered to the reader for free (read: with ads). No reflection, no voice, no analysis: just serve up exactly whatever answer to pre-defined problem the reader is looking for so they'll keep consuming. The second field is the opposite of that, in that you're paying somebody - through Patreon, through subscriptions - not for the writing itself per se, but for the personality and expertise of the writers who produce that writing. In other words, those writers have a brand which people value enough to pay for, thus raising the question of how exactly new writers are supposed to develop this brand.
The answer? "Have already made it big in the 10s and, assuming some pause between then and now, still have enough of a material base to continue participating in this space." I don't know. It's hard to escape the idea that whatever brief window into games writing that existed in the 2010s closed years ago, and isn't about to open up again any time soon. Not many sites are accepting pitches anymore (certainly not the site the above post is referring to); the prevailing genres of writing at the major sites still accepting freelancers actively preclude developing a voice because it's easier to exploit said freelancers that way; and while there certainly are communities in which you can strike it out as an individual blogger looking to develop your own voice - just to name a few, No Escape, Deep Hell, Critical Distance, and KRITIQAL - there is an element of fandom in several of those that sticks out to me, but more to the point, these are less sites of career advancement and more artistic communities for honing one's craft.
Maybe that's the ideal, though. Didn't I fave this chost, like, twenty minutes ago? Isn't it better that we not turn games writing into a practice only available to the petit-bourgeois sacred idiots we all secretly long to be, by approaching it mainly in terms of careerism?
If anything good is going to come from this moment, it's going to be developing the communal quality of games criticism mentioned a couple paragraphs ago while divorcing it from the commodification that threatens it.
