- cross-posted to:
- gaming@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- gaming@beehaw.org
“For quality games media, I continue to believe that the best form of stability is dedicated reader bases to remove reliance on funds, and a hybrid of direct reader funding and advertisements. If people want to keep reading quality content from full time professionals, they need to support it or lose it. That’s never been more critical than now.”
The games media outlets that have survived, except for Gamespot and IGN, have just about all switched to this model. It seems to be the only way it survives.
Back in like 2012, a gaming journalist would write an honest review of a game they tried or they would give an update on the industry or they would share interesting tips and info about certain games and franchises. The sites would be clean, maybe a couple of ads here and there, but the overall atmosphere is driven by genuine passion.
Today, you don’t get any of that. Instead you get an advertisement masquerading as an article. The reviews aren’t authentic, the updates are basically a part of marketing campaigns, and the info they give is there to push readers to buy something. The sites are all completely cluttered with ads, a lot of the articles are just AI slop, and the industry is driven by greed. Why would anybody go there anymore? Might as well just go see a youtube review or get the game and try it out yourself.
You have a much more optimistic memory of gaming review platforms than I do.
I remember getting several different magazines in the 90’s and they were always the same thing. Any “professional” journalist knows that their livelihood is based on selling games. Journalists have to strike a balance between their audience and publishers, which makes negative reviews incredibly rare.
It’s not just videogames. Music, movies, TV shows, books, comics, consumer products. Unkess you’re paying out the nose, reviews almost always have some sort of bias towards trying to sell things. I find the best opinions come from other sources: people I know personally, organic community discussions on the internet (though those are not immune to corporate influence), or when products are only mentioned in contexts where the author clearly will not benefit. For example, a journalist making a list of the top-10 games of all time putting Ocarina of Time on it is probably not incentives to do so… Unless Nintendo is trying to promote a re-release.
There was a brief period of time on the internet between the late 2000s and early 2010s where gaming journalism was genuinely decent because it was driven by passionate people who were trying to appeal to the gaming communities they were apart of. They were there to provide the community with good info and honest opinions first, and any money made was just a bonus. At some point, these priorities flipped, and internet journalism became job and then it became an industry that’s soulless, faceless, and driven by endless greed.