This has me lamenting what future there can be for games writing as anything other than a hobby.
For as long as it's existed, games writing's been defined by this tension between corporate's need for a cheap, effective, relatable way of promoting their latest products, and writers' creative need to do something more meaningful than hock the latest wares. Following a brief period in the 2010s where it looked like the latter might have a chance at calling the shots for once (and all the unfulfilled promises this period entails), it looks like various structural developments years in the making are starting to resolve in favor of the former. AI is the obvious example in all this - just cut the writers out and keep all the profit for ourselves! - but consider guide writing and acquisitions like this (which definitely aren't going to end the same way every other acquisition has over the past couple of years *wink wink*). The effect is to return us to games writing's early days where writers only figured as anonymous, interchangeable bylines. Meanwhile and deprived of any institutional backing, the handful of writers who've survived the old era can only survive this one by creating subscription-based, personality-driven outlets - and even that's far from a secure option. A new writer's new options are grim, and it doesn't feel like an accident that personality begins to figure more and more as a commodity right at the moment when forces like these (AI, content slop) threaten to divorce creative work from the people who, well, create it.
I'm not sure how to end this other than to gesture at how necessary major structural change, even if I can't imagine how that might possibly form under these conditions.
