“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.
I miss Total Biscuit 😭
They’re really aren’t any other good game reviewers. They used to be Nerd Cubed but he doesn’t seem to do game reviews anymore. There’s Sid Alpha, but if he feels particularly frisky he’ll put out a whole two videos a year, so that’s not very helpful.
Journalism at large is dangerously close to dying. People favour free click- and rage-bait headlines on Facebook over quality journalism. The latter can’t compete because quality costs money, while cheap quality articles oversaturate the market. AI only exacerbated the issue.
Which is why the free democratic world has to keep subsiding quality journalism that sticks to the facts. Sadly that‘s dying along with private newspapers because governments believe people just don‘t want it and it‘s not worth keeping. They treat it as entertainment and that‘s a huge problem because it‘s a pillar of democracy. Defunding it is dangerous.
As for games… well, there‘s plenty of ways and different mediums to consume games nowadays so it makes sende magazines are shrinking.
I think they’re almost kinda right.
I think these platforms need to adapt. They need to make short form, entertaining videos like The Washington Post or the break off with Dave Jorgenson called Local News International.
There is too much news for anyone to actually bother reading the long form articles that theyre used to having awfully agitating formats designed to get the reader to read the whole thing and scroll past ads.
Short form, entertaining, and factual is the best route. Do a little skit, explain the concept simply, bingo bango.
Getting my news from reddit or Lemmy led to the same problems, and neither actually gave me the news, so in the past couple of years, I have definitely budgeted for a news subscription as well.
If I had the money I’d definitely do the same, but for now I do RSS instead of link aggregator communities if I’m being serious about it. Takes some curation, but at the very least it’s not being run through a vote algorithm first.
Getting news off Lemmy is a shit-for-brains idea. It’s 70% bias saturated US politics links. I have no.idea how people keep lapping it up, but I hear that’s the culture of Americans being told what to believe and do based on their feeds.
You can block keywords, though, so if anyone posts any interesting news, you may even get to see it.
but I hear that’s the culture of Americans being told what to believe and do based on their feeds.
Hate to break it to you, but this is becoming the norm globally as more and more people got addicted to smartphones and social media.
The problem was more that people are more likely to submit stories that continue to get you angry about the latest thing. It won’t be a deep investigative piece about the corporate interests that led to some strange move and hid some shady dealings; it will be a third or fourth article about the latest thing we all already know Trump did, but it adds like one detail and focuses on it. It’s easy to fall back on by default and think you need nothing else because it’s free and major events will get shared instantly.
click- and rage-bait headlines on Facebook over quality journalism
Gaming journalism has been overrun with that.
What I, and I think many people, want are trustworthy, knowledgable reviews.
I can’t trust any of the major publications. I trust a small handful of YouTubers who are giving me more of what I want than the entire professional industry.
There are still Youtubers out there motivated by the same engagement goals as gaming journalists. Both need you to click the link. With Youtubers, you can at least identify what games they like, and would know more about those specific type of games.
Not all YouTubers are quality. This is obvious. What I am saying is that I’ve found a mere handful who are quality and for my tastes they have replaced the entire legacy professional gaming journalistic media. Other people I’m sure can find similar YouTubers who cater to their tastes and opinions.
Good riddance to any gar journalists who rate games on a 6/10 to 10/10 scale. I insinuated because sponsors, but fuck that.
Journalism at large died a while ago, gaming journalism has been an absolute joke for over a decade.
I have no respect for 99% of modern journalists, they just push 1%er propaganda and post mugshots while jerking themselves off as being self appointed “guardians of democracy.”
There are some who are trying to do some good and they have my utmost respect but they’re needles in haystacks.
You even see it here. People will post “quality journalism” and then it gets attacked because its nuanced and doesnt extrapolate into extreme claims.
People are so used to the rage-bait and bad journalism that its hard for actual reporting to break through. As well as it takes 1000x more effort to gather the evidence and story for quality reporting. Its bad, we need to start supporting journalists through gov subsidies and donations.
I’ll only address journalism as it relates to video games/reviews, but my opinion is that there are better ways to communicate information about a game than reading about it.
For me the big one is simply seeing it played. I’ve read beautiful reviews of games that when it comes time to play do not click for me. Watching someone else play it gives me way more context and appreciation. My go to for this is simply youtube. I skip the middle man entirely. I get a wide range of videos from different players in an easy to access format. Others I know use twitch to similar effect. As the options for providing this information grow, older media lose footing. I’m not surprised at all. I’m not sure we should lament it, truthfully.
I mean I’d like to be upset but honestly video game journalism has always been the lowest form of Journalism. Mostly it’s just pure propaganda and press releases from major game companies. 90 to 95% of Articles written by these game journalists were just useless fluff.
Maybe it’s because my experience with it goes well back into the print era, but very little of it is actual fact-finding capital “J” journalism, and even that part has only come on in the industry more recently. I’ve always put the games press in its proper buckets of “previews for access” and then game criticism. Quality for both varies, but I’m rarely disappointed when I stick to a publication I like (until the inevitable EIC churn, anyway).
Absolutely agree. A youtube video where you can mostly ignore what theyre saying and just see the game and problems with it along with some benchmarks is all you need.
If its online, watching someone play online to get a feeling of how the community is also works, particularly if its just them playing solo for a long stretch of time not editing out toxicity.
Yup, I remember even back in the print era there was significant criticism about the relationships between games publishers and various magazines resulting in what was essentially advertising disguised as articles. Payment was either indirect (exclusive access to preview builds etc) or direct via in-magazine advertising. Can’t badmouth the big flagship game releases too much when EA just paid big bucks to advertise the very same title for the next view editions.
Remember how Cyberpunk got hyped across the board? Not a single critical voice before launch (as far as I’ve heard). If that’s the “journalism” you’re providing, then I’m sure as hell not paying for it.
It’s hard to be critical of something that hasn’t been released yet. All anybody had to go off of were statements from the developers, until the product was actually released and people could get their hands on it.
That might be exactly part of why gaming journalism is irrelevant.
If the “news” about an upcoming game is just repeating developer hype, then it’s just useless noise. At that point the only thing that matters are reviews, and independent YouTubers are beating the professionals in quality and trustworthiness.
So what’s left? Actual dry industry news? I suppose some small amount of people care, but not enough to support the amount of gaming journalists out there.
They were useful in the past as a magazine by the toilet really helped.
I’ve never remembered seeing quality video games journalism.
The tyypes that they’re describing as that always seemed hacky and liable to push very subjective opinions as facts.
Their scores almost always seemed wonky and part of that is probably because individual scores for something as complex as a game don’t really make sense. They rarely make sense for anything.
Instead what you want are scores in multiple areas with no single amalgamated score.
Anyhow, for the longest while video games journalism has been rife with controversy about pulling negative reviews for ad deals etc.
I think unfortunately written media is pretty much dying due to finances, and for video games, due to never being all that good in the first place.
The details I care about, like monetization, grind, and performance, are the details that most games journalists just completely skim over or they’ll glaze game companies while they perform awfully here.
My way of buying games is basically watching video reviews of someone playing and mostly ignoring their commentary to figure out those details for myself.
That and benchmarks of course… and figuring out whether they’re owned by the saudi government…
Anyways, yea, video content for games both makes more sense, and more money.
I can totally get this feeling for PC/consumer electronics hardware related articles and reviews, but for video games? Meh. I won’t cry.
Instead what you want are scores in multiple areas with no single amalgamated score.
Well, it’s definitely not what I want.
Understandable. I just feel like amalgamated scores tend not to truly reflect the subjective opinions of the reviewer as sometimes games are more or less than the sum of their parts, and then it doesn’t represent anything close to objectivity because it ignores that different people value different things more or less than others, therefore making this score not all that useful for them.
I can completely understand just wanting a quick score at a glance from a favourite review or outlet though.
I listen to podcasts featuring people who used to score games in that separated way for Gamespot, and it frequently led to scores that were out of sync with what the content of the review actually said. Plus, who’s to say if the visuals of Clair Obscur are better or worse than Hades II when they’ve got very different goals and art styles? And does it matter how high the visuals score for Bye, Sweet Carole is if they’re leaving a subpar review for the puzzles? That’s what the content of the review is for.
How grindy a game is or how it’s monetized often makes its way into a review. Publishers can get slimy around it though and turn the knobs to be more nefarious after the review period, which people can call them out for, but much like how lies spread faster than the truth, updates spread slower than initial reviews. What I’d personally like to see make its way into reviews are how much ownership the game actually grants. So many multiplayer modes are not designed to last, and no one, often times not even the people updating the features list on the Steam store page, care to mention if a game supports offline multiplayer like LAN. Some games blur the line, like Hitman, on just how offline their game and its content can be. That’s what I’m missing from review outlets.
But all of this has only been about reviews, and games media also breaks news. Real change has been happening by way of reporting on unionization and crunch. Harassers are being taken to court or otherwise removed from their position of power in their companies. Sometimes we can actually get real confirmation that absolutely nothing is happening with Bloodborne and no one should get their hopes up for anything anytime soon. All of that is valuable, too.
While I am a strong supporter of independent games media (and am ride or die Remap):
“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.”
This doesn’t scale. The outlets doing this can support MAYBE 3 people with the outliers being Kinda Funny who have never found a sponsorship they didn’t like and Giant Bomb who are pretty much riding on the massive support wave after they got fired AND have THE biggest legacy name out there and… time will really tell if they can keep supporting the whole crew this time next year. Oh, and MinnMax where Ben has to constantly remind people that he is actually the only full time employee and all the cohorts are contractors with day jobs and that you can also see Janet at Remap or her twitch channel and Charles at Game Informer and Jacob talking about death in a video essay on Nebula and…
But the other aspect, which Remap (specifically Patrick Klepek and Rob Zacny) have pointed out is… when you are part of a big org you have, among other things, lawyers. You can’t really do investigative journalism without those. With the power of (I think at the time it was) Kotaku? Jason Schreier is the “press sneak thief” and Bethesda just puts the outlet on a shitlist for review codes until the end of time. Without the power of Kotaku? Jason gets a letter in the mail and needs to find a lawyer who can protect him.
Outlets like 404 Media (and, to a much lesser extent, Aftermath) have more or less structured themselves entirely around this and I don’t actually know how they are pulling it off.
But Independent Games Media is, by and large, just that: Games Media. Not Games Journalism. And the reason you want the latter can probably be summed up with the Nintendo pricing of the Switch 2. They very specifically did not mention it as part of their press event or in the copy they sent out. And many outlets (including Remap and MinnMax) pointed out why. It is not going to look good for them but by doing it that way they control the message. Because all the Hype is gonna be for the Direct. So they get all the benefits of all your favorite talking heads Talking Over a Mario Kart trailer but the actual pricing? That is MAYBE an updated news article or a tweet. Which becomes “it is what it is” when they go to buy rather than “Wait… IS a gameboy actually worth 500 bucks?” discourse that we see for brands like XBOX that couldn’t market their way out of a paper bag at this point.
And we’ve seen similar with so many controversies over the years. People who are REALLY tuned in might have heard about The mordhau “Show us your kni**a” thread and rampant racism or the black myth wukon sexism. But the majority of outlets people actually go to for coverage/opinions are VERY aware that their legal department is Uncle Jack and don’t want that smoke. So you mostly just get “we aren’t going to cover it” rather than “Yo dog, this shit is fucked” that we would in the old days.
Honestly surprised anyone who could claim to be a journalist was left in that advertising front of an industry
The entire industry was flooded with mouthpieces for developer statements and opinion piece hottakes. How many of those people does an industry really need?
As for reviews, they are for the most part similarly worthless and hard to trust. There’s about five YouTubers who I actually trust the opinions of, and I haven’t felt left out at all with that as the extent of my gaming journalism intake.
It would be difficult to measure if that was the case, but what does seem to be the case is that the old revenue model these outlets relied on just paid less and less over the years.
Go to Steam page. Scroll to bottom. Filter out negative reviews. Read 5-10. Update filers to only show negative reviews. Read 5-10.
That’s never let me down when it comes to determining whether or not a game is one I’ll enjoy.
Most “reviewers” get a version of the game with infinite money and health to get through the game quickly and only talk about story and size.
I bet there’s bosses and quests that have a special place in our rage that these people just breezed through and they don’t remember them a single bit.
The most I’ve heard about reviewers getting extra help is that they have a small tip sheet for the trickiest parts, and only sometimes. If they need extra help beyond that, they’re messaging their colleagues on Discord who are also under embargo.
I’ve gotten release copies of games for review. Unless they have another secret tier of pressers, this is nonsense. If anything, review copies are more likely to have bugs that making completing the game harder.
Indie or AA and AAA?
Indie and AA.
Anecdotal, but I have never read a game review in my life that was from a journalist. It’s always been in forums, and lately some small youtubers. I want to hear from normal gamers, not people getting a paycheck for it.
Back in the late 90s-early 2000s the PCGamer magazine was actually worthwhile. It had reviewers who specialized in different genres and if read enough you could get a feel for their writing style and critical voice. The fact it was a monthly publication meant they weren’t racing to get a review out in the first 24 hours.
Nowadays it all seems like publications race to put reviews out online for relevance, and the reviewers often seem to have a disdain for video games and even if they don’t they aren’t genre experts.
I don’t like fighting games. My review of a fighting game would be trash. Yet major publications just pump out reviews by whoever.
Individual youtubers at least can develop a recognizable critical voice and stick more to genres they know and enjoy.
I’ve actually just renewed my subscription to PC Gamer, I read it on my tablet. A large part of that decision was to just help keep it alive because I feel it’s important. Future Publishing can get fucked though.
I feel it’s important
Genuinely, why?
For all of the reasons everyone’s saying here that the quality has gone. When the only revenue for an organisation is adverts and data it tends to head downhill pretty quickly. I actively borrow content from the internet but willingly cough up the money for things that i get good use out of. There’s no way you can visit the pc gamer website without an ad blocker, so i pay a little bit quarterly and sit with a magazine instead. I also have box sets of tv series that I’ve never opened, i just bought them because I enjoyed the pirated version so much. I’ll listen to music on Spotify or whatever but then go to the artist website and get some merch. There’s a lot of content that deserves to be paid for and supported.
I noticed you haven’t mentioned the actual quality of the content. Is it a responsibility to give money to a medium simply because it takes payment instead of using ad revenue?
The competition for what’s in those magazines is with independent online reviewers.
YouTubers really are the way to go. For me, there’s no better way to see if I want to play a game than watching someone play it.
And for story games best played blind, I go by word of mouth.
I‘d rather read a well articulated opinion that is embedded into a rich cultural context than some rambling from strangers. I know the former is hard to find (Eurogamer and RPS are good, but suffer from layoffs, too). The latter I only skim through to find things I might find distracting that were omitted by others.
Their game reviews are worth shit all, so their only worth is reporting on the game industry itself. And that’s a niche area that not many people are interested in.
Lol.
Games “journalists” have always been awful at their job and the entire industry is so incredibly fucky with nerds power tripping on the tiniest modicum of power they’ve been given.
Personally haven’t really read gaming journalism even before. If I want to see what score a game has, I’m much more likely to check How Long To Beat or Backloggd, where users rate games.
Or, as has been mentioned in this thread, Youtubers, if I want a singular subjective opinion as opposed to a “out of 5” or “out of 10” score which, admittedly can be tricky when different people have a different view on what each number should mean. For instance, a 5 (on a 10 scale), is average for me when I rate anime. But most of the anime community uses 7 as the average, so a 6.2 show on MyAnimeList, which you would think is above average, is actually below.
Special interest journalism is usually overrun by corporate interests and inflated reviews. Find someone who knows the history of the industry and was fired or left an organization for something like reporting a low review to search out integrity for individuals.
No, they shouldn’t have started businesses to chase ad money and convince people to work for you in a market that was saturated.
The OG magazines didn’t sell that much back in the day but enough to be a stable business due to its format and brief writings.
Then again who wants spoilers to anything? Same thing happened with movie critics. We all know too much, too quick, too soon. There’s no surprise or open expectations like there once was. You just need an announcement and a date. You know what you like.
I blame AI
They were long gone before AI
I blame time-traveling AI
Damn Roko’s basilisk, ruining games journalism.
Um, that’s how it always should have been. That’s how journalism in general works, going back since pretty much the dawn of newspapers: readers pay for copy, and advertisements subsidize it.
Like the games industry, publications that cover video games have been rocked by a turbulent market since the highs of the COVID-19 pandemic. Media owners like IGN, Fandom, Gamer Network, and Valent have all cut jobs in the past year.
Is it turbulent though? This article goes over video game spending by year, and it has largely plateaued since 2019. There was a pretty big jump in 2020 due to the pandemic, but the market seems to have returned to a normalish trajectory and mobile revenue seems to be plateauing (I guess it’s saturated?).
I think what happened is that people are shifting where they get their information from. Instead of relying on game journalists, who seem to be paid by game devs (hence why any big game rarely gets below 7/10), they rely on social media, who theoretically aren’t paid by game devs (there’s plenty of astroturfing though). The business model where they’re not paid by game devs should always have been the case, since when people are deciding what games to buy, they clearly would prefer a less biased source.
IMO, games journalism should have multiple revenue streams, such as:
- fan revenue - either donations or subscriptions should always be primary
- curated game bundles, like Jingle Jam - run a charity event where a large portion is donated (be up-front, and have a slider so donators can decide how much goes where, even 0% to one or the other)
- merch
- game tournaments w/ prizes - would be especially cool to focus on indies
- maybe have paid questions from fans that gets answered in a podcast or a paid video to discuss topics of fans’ choosing
They can get very far before needing to run ads. Produce quality journalism and have some additional revenue streams and it’ll work out.
I don’t consume much gaming journalism because it’s largely BS that praises big AAAs and generally ignores indies unless they get viral. I want honest opinions about games, not some balance between sucking up to who pays the bills and mild criticism.
Games media worked under an ad-supported model for about 20 years though. As those in that business will tell you, the payouts from advertisers have fallen dramatically. The ones keeping themselves afloat now have pivoted to your first, third, and fifth bullet points, as well as ads on the free content that subscribers typically get to opt out of.
But weren’t game reviews essentially ads paid by the publisher? Because that’s what it looks like from the outside, since the reviews are increasingly poor quality that largely focus on positives and ignore negatives. Some games that completely flopped due to technical issues got glowing reviews by journalists, probably because they were paid handsomely for that review.
I think game journalists should avoid advertisements as much as possible because once they rely on it, the temptation to allow their content to be colored by whatever attracts advertisers is too much. They should be solely focused on attracting readers, which means they need to be reader supported.
In America, they are legally required to disclose paid reviews. If the company pays for the review they legally must disclose it
If you receive free products or other perks with the expectation that you’ll promote or discuss the advertiser’s products in your blog, the FTC Act applies to you.
Is that actually enforced? If so, what’s the explanation for reviewers giving suspiciously high reviews to AAA games?
As someone who’s done this before, let me tell you it’d be much easier for Toby Fox to pay me to give Undertale a good review than it would for Ubisoft to pay me to give Rayman a good review.
Are you talking from a regulatory standpoint or from an “I like indies so I’d give it a pass” standpoint?
I’m talking about how easy it is to deal with a singular party than a developer/publisher duo and their rotating marketing and engagement departments.
Is that actually enforced?
Surprisingly so. There’s a huge difference in online advertisements pre- and post-Fyre Festival.
If so, what’s the explanation for reviewers giving suspiciously high reviews to AAA games?
They liked the game more than you. I promise you it is that simple.
I’m not talking about my personal preference on rating, I’m talking about broad community reviews.
For example, Cyberpunk 2077 is a notorious example. It got generally favorable reviews from reviewers, and the public release was a completely broken pile of trash on console. Reviews didn’t even get the console release, yet still gave it a positive review because the experience on PC was decent. How can we trust reviewers if they don’t actually try the game? The terms of the review embargo alone should have pushed reviewers to give it net negative reviews since they’re not able to actually try the game.
For strict review differences, look at Starfield, which got 85% by Metacritic, and Steam reviews are more like 55-60%, and it got hit hard by independent reviewers shortly after launch. That’s a pretty big mismatch.
GTA V was pretty close to a perfect score, but actual reception was a bit lower (80% or so on Steam right now). That’s not a huge difference, and it could be due to frustration about not having a sequel for over a decade, but it does seem that some studios get more favorable reviews/more of a pass than others.
That said, a lot of the time reviews are pretty close to the eventual community response. It just seems that reviewers overhype certain games. I haven’t really seen much evidence where critics review a game much below where the community reception is, but I have seen cases where reviewer scores are quite a bit higher than the eventual community response.
Maybe there’s nothing suspicious going on, it just sometimes feels that way.
It’s a symbiotic relationship that advances goals for each, but no, they’re not paid ads, and it’s been debunked over and over again. Some game reviews higher than someone feels it should, and they conclude it only could have been paid off, but it wasn’t. Here are a few things that do happen that influence review scores though:
- Publishers know which outlets review their games well, and they prioritize giving advance copies to those outlets and not others; this is why you’ll see the average score drop by a few points after the game’s official release.
- The person on staff who liked the last game in the series, or other games in the same genre, tends to keep reviewing them, because they enjoy the work more, and that review better serves the overall audience. This can explain why a genre-defying game like Death Stranding reviews in the low 80s, but then the sequel is reviewed by people who tended to appreciate the first game, and the sequel reviews higher.
- Publishers know which version of their game is best, and they’ll send review copies of that version. That means they send the PC version of Cyberpunk 2077 when the console version is broken, and they send the console version when the PC optimization sucks.
- When a game is online-only, publishers like to host on-site, curated review sessions with optimal network conditions in a space where all the reviewers definitely have someone to play with. Review outlets have become skeptical of reviewing games this way, and you’ll more often see “reviews in progress” of games where they want the servers to “settle” first. I was surprised to see MS Flight Simulator 2024 actually held to account over its broken online infrastructure, as you’re correct that, historically, they’re not held accountable, but that’s because of this change that review outlets have made in how they cover games like this.
This makes a lot of sense.
It would be nice if multiple people reviewed each game, and then they discuss before publishing a review. That’s one thing I really like about Digital Foundry, though they focus way more on technical details than overall gaming experience, but it’s very fun to see what each reviewer has to say about a given title.
That’s often a matter of resources. Staff sizes are only getting smaller at these outlets, and there are more games released each year than ever before; and they’re trending toward being longer on top of that. Being able to get multiple people to review a single game is a luxury, one that Digital Foundry can afford when they just need to benchmark a typical scene in the game.
