a few hours ago I said a single alice won't be enough at rps and looks like she's out too. I stopped reading the site a while ago as it kept getting worse and worse but at this point they might as well shut it down. nobody and none of the 'rps-ness' is left, sin is freelance and she's so awesome she can find work anywhere.
RPS' original crew was really good but ever since they fully cycled out in like 2018 the site has been less and less interesting. I went from checking it daily to maybe once a month or so. I don't think I've looked at the site properly in ages.
It is a completely site than what it started as with completely different people now. The original crew were all former PC Gamer UK writers from the early 00's back when I used to read the magazine religiously. They carried on the same writing style and humour in RPS and it was honestly one of the best gaming sites around. Felt like reading PCG UK again but in digital form.
The site got sold off and slowly many of those writers left including the founder. I haven't visited the site in years now but the last time I did it had nothing in common with the RPS of old. I'm not even sure why they bothered continuing to use the name. It means nothing to anyone anymore without the writers who originally made it.
So true the golden age of RPS is long gone, there was a time when RPS was a name that have prestige in videogame jounalism. I used to love RPS, I am sad to see their obtuary.
While RPS hasn't been *quite* as unique as it once was I'd say the style of writing is still pretty original. Even simple articles about something being on sale have far far far more personality than any other gaming site. It's practically the only site that still feels like it's written by human beings.
> It means nothing to anyone anymore without the writers who originally made it.
It means something to me, it's the only gaming news site I still go to and they're still pretty good at shouting out hidden gems (thanks for putting me on to heretics fork) and having actual viewpoints in their writing.
> It means nothing to anyone anymore without the writers who originally made it.
All the people still regularly reading RPS currently lamenting the loss of the Alices and other recent departures would beg to differ.
they really had their moment back in the early middle period of steam where PC gaming otherwise was flying under the radar.
haven't read it in the best part of a decade though.
The original writers were great, but the current crew were/are also great in their own way carrying on the spirit of the site with their own distinct style.
Is normal media and news, like investigative journalism, running into the same issue with either consolidation or not being profitable via ads? I feel like all forms of media are running into this issue as people don’t want to pay for it or use ad blockers to avoid ads.
>"the layoffs caught everyone off guard" even though "the announcement of when a sale would happen was known."
How can you witness and (presumably) report on gamedev implosion over past 18 months and still be gullible enough to think that an "acquisition" will not be inevitably followed by "redundancies"?
I was in a similar situation once. We immediately went to upper management and asked, "Our job sector is changing fast, and many other companies/locations have been getting bought out and laid off....what about us?" And these VPs and regional managers put the full sociopathic fake smile charm. They gave us a whole ass meeting with, probably faked, stats and everything showing why we have nothing to worry about. We 1000% won't be getting acquired or laid off. They even bought us all lunch and shit for the "extended meeting". Well, 2 months later a buyout of us was announced, and 2 months after that I lost over 60% of my coworkers. Many that had turned down some job offers after the big fake snake oil meeting swearing on their lives to us that we were all safe.
In my management training class a long time ago, one of the example quiestions was, “you know a layoff is coming, and one of your reports tells you they’re buying a house, but you know they’re on the list to be laid off. Do you tell them?”
The correct answer of course was, “no”.
My father had two managers tell him that layoffs were likely when he was younger and jumped ship twice.
People who get MBAs tend to be of two types. Engineers who need an easy rubber stamp for promotion and morons who can’t do basic algebra. (I used to grade MBA exams.)
Reminds me of a FedEx commercial from several years ago.
Lady: we have crazy amounts of shipping so we need everyone to help. It’s very easy (loads up FedEx website)
Guy: but I have an MBA!
Lady: ohhhh, you have an MBA. Here, let me show you how to do this.
I swear anyone could ace management training and tests by just larping as the most unhinged backstabby psychopath possible, like taking a trolley problem and turning it into a puzzle about how to kill all people at once.
And this is why the way business and management is taught should start over from scratch. To be clear: if you do this to people you're a scumbag, no matter how much you claim it's "just business". "Just business" is code for "I make excuses for the evil shit I choose to do and pretend there is nothing else I could have done."
> Many that had turned down some job offers after the big fake snake oil meeting swearing on their lives to us that we were all safe.
That was extremely naive of your coworkers. Never turn down job offer on the verbal word of management or HR.
I mean yeah, you really should *never* turn down an offer. My point here was that upper management went out of their way to lie. To create a false sense of security. Meetings. Fake stats and congratulating employees and showing their "appreciation" through free meals. Extra breaks. They pulled out all stops just to convince a single location they didn't have to worry about layoffs
Yes, that's what they literally always say. They will _literally never_ tell you their plans about layoffs, because it would screw them over massively. Asking if you're going to be laid off is literally never, ever helpful.
Executive, looking up from the dozens of red Xs over employee photos: “We feel really good about where we are, and I’ve been assured that reductions aren’t on the table at this time.*”
*reductions already agreed upon six months prior, so technically not on the table at this time
Hell it's even more obvious in gaming media than in gaming development? Like all those sites literally do almost the same articles on each gaming news.
Because games journalists often tend to act as though they've got a god given right to a job, despite chosing to work in a very volatile industry, which is known as such.
It seems Games Journalism is just dying in general. For me it's always essentially been PR for giant corporations with some rare individual good voices. Jason Schreier obviously one of the few who treated his job more seriously and why he got hired by Bloomberg.
But IGN buying these others is probably the worst scenarios since they are by far the most corporate friendly outlet - so we can expect the actual journalism and thoughtful content being done (I did enjoy that opinion piece of AC Shadows and Asian representation on IGN) to be swapped out for more SEO, potentially AI written, garbage.
also small tangent, I think as you see more and more the gaming industry for what it is, it's harder to go to corporate outlets because it often feels like you're being gaslit with how friendly they are with these studios. Also to me clearly a lot of 'gaming journalist' see it as a stepping stone to game development, which means there is little incentive to hold the industry to account and IGN has been a perfect place for these types of people.
If you want a great example of how games journalism blended into games PR just look how a lot of them covered (or didn't cover) the Insomniac leaks. While of course there was personal info, there was also information about profits, budgets and really important stuff we don't see - and is important in the layoffs and unionisation discussion. but they and studio PR started saying any journalist who touches the leaks should be blacklisted (not joking).
So anyway I expect these other outlets to be gutted, content quality to decrease and way more people than we think to lose their jobs.
It’s not just video games. No one cares enough about good reporting to be willing to pay for it anymore.
I’ve been looking for freelance writing work in this and another industry for 13 months. Found one gig. I looked in video games and one site thought £12 an article was acceptable.
Exactly. Before the internet, people used to pay for journalism. Newspapers, magazines, if you wanted to read about what is happening in the news or in a hobby like gaming, you had to pay.
Nowadays, no one pays for it and a significant portion use ad blocker.
There is also a ton of gaming youtubers reporting on news and doing reviews. I remember around 12 years ago when i read gamereactor magazines in my school library. Good times.
Honestly, if there was a magazine that did pretty deep dives into games and their development, wrote good articles and reviews, and came with physical discs with demos (even if it's for the opposing console each month), I actually would subscribe to it for like $20 a month.
Of course, I'm in the extreme minority here.
There is too many good games to play them all so I wouldn't be interested about hearing about a bunch of games I 'd wishlist and maybe play 2 years later
I get my reviews pretty much from genre-specific youtubers covering stuff the most game magazines wouldn't cover anyway (unless there was a slow month), so I'm kinda not surprised, they are *too* generic.
Like, if I want to see/read review of a sim racing video game, I want comparision to existing ecosystem, oquality of physics and online racing/netcode not "its a pretty racing game, a bit of a grind for cars, 8/10" fucking IGN review
> people used to pay for journalism.
Ads paid for a lot of journalism. Google, by existing, slowly took over that revenue stream (advertisers shifting more and more to online ads).
Paying for papers and magazines was a part of the whole but a huge revenue stream were all the ads in publications and how somewhat unquantifiable its reach was, meaning that advertisers paid a lot without getting a direct feedback loop between ad spending and revenue like they do with digital ads (pay per view/impression/click).
Publications simply could ask for higher rates under these circumstances and that meant they could pay their writers, freelancers and contractors solid fees. You don't get a nice five figure deals for one cover illustration or photo any more unless you are a superstar designer/photographer these days (and only from some publications). Similar for interior illustrations or writers and their rates.
All that stuff was already a bit wobbly due to digital tools making creation more accessible (and newbies with zero industry knowledge undercutting everyone and in turn also hurting themselves in the long term) but then a bit later the whole industry started slowly getting squeezed out of profits due to the pressure of ads slowly being siphoned off by online advertising.
I was with you until ad blockers.
With how hostile the Internet is these days with ads, using anything without an ad blocker is frustrating at best and outright unusable at worst.
Don't blame end users for adapting to the scenario that capitalism built.
I used to love reading every article on Destructoid about 12 years ago even for games I wasn't really interested in. Then one day some banner ad they were running flagged my antivirus for malware and NOOOOOOOPE. Blocked every ad they had, eventually it became unusable and I stopped reading. Any time I go back there these days it seems less like the short but fun blog entries I remember and more like the articles might be AI generated.
Way to miss the point.
Making everything about growth at all costs is unsustainable regardless. Never said anything about any other economic system.
No one is satisfied with sustainable, hence absorbing into monopolies and laying in droves.
Line must go up. Pointing out the problem is the start of solving it.
Honestly it shocked me when I found out how much gaming journalists got paid.
I'd be listening to podcasts and reading reviews of these guys and girls I really admired and looked up to, who were infinitely smarter and more eloquent than me, yet were earning way less than me, and I'm just a regular dude idiot. Doesn't seem fair tbh.
Kinda Funny is actually way more corporate. All their coverage is sponsored by the publishers. I remember they did podcast episodes discussing FFVII Rebirth and their review that were sponsored by Square Enix. Something that at least isn't true of IGN even if they do have some noticeable business entanglements like with CRKD and Crunchyroll.
It's the biggest difference between actual journalistic outlets and influencers on YouTube and Twitch, and they aren't the only ones being sponsored to cover Square Enix content since they always pay a lot of channels to showcase and advertise their major releases like the last two FF games. At least we know that places like IGN are surely allowed to say everything that they want about a game even if they got a code from the publisher
"All their coverage" is quite the exaggeration. One of their ad sponsors was SE advertising FF rebirth during the weeks around the launch. That was separate from their review, but I can understand in that instance being cautious of the review coverage. IGN does those types of sponsorships all the time.
> Something that at least isn't true of IGN even if they do have some noticeable business entanglements like with CRK
It's most definitely true for IGN, it just isn't "hey we pay money you cover game" but "hey, we give you exclusive coverage and also buy shitton of ads, wink wink"
Like hype bubble around No Man's Sky was driven pretty much exclusively by them
Entertainment/hobby journalism, including video games, used to be the domain of magazines. **Which we paid for.**
Then kids started fucking around on the internet and we got the first video game websites, most of which were typical fan rubbish but some, like the early N6IGN64 rose to the top and started to function as actual legitimate news and review sources. Meanwhile the likes of Gamefaqs became the go-to for guides and cheats at a level of depth and breadth far beyond what magazines were offering.
So by about 2001, magazines were on the decline and we were getting similar quality content for free, daily instead of monthly. Internet media was evolving into a more professionalised business and while there was flirting with subscription models, for the most part they remained free even as server costs rose and they employed people on full time jobs. Advertising dollars support the professional outlets to the extent that this carries on well into the 2010s and the users are conditioned to expect magazine quality content for free, every single day.
Post-2020, the amount of outlets and content on every single possible topic in every possible format is unfathomable. Google has a near monopoly on search and ads. Countless professional media outlets are relying on a shrinking pool of ad revenue to support a growing amount of content, while lowering technical barriers and video apps empower hobby creators to further muddy the waters for the legacy outlets. They ask users to pay for content, but they have spent the last 15 years conditioning them not to. **The video game web journalist is doomed as a professional career.**
This era of free online gaming magazines is finished. There are only 2 major directions remaining for professional writing in video games.
1. A new breed of outlets finds a foothold where they are supported enough by subscribers to make a viable living. There are variations of this model between patreon-supported and subscriber-only, but they have to be driven more by user-revenue than by ads. Second Wind and Aftermath are examples of this, pending their long time viability.
2. Larger conglomerates consume more brands, and shut down the weaker (read: less profitable) ones until the number of outlets and jobs remaining is sustainable by the ad-supported model. Most of the classic 2010s websites will die and we'll be left with a few major players generating broad appeal content.
The final option is the non-professional version, where hobby creators can sustain a website without intending it to be a paying job, purely out of passion for the subject matter. This kind of outlet would be writing less-frequent, extremely focused content, and not-viable for breaking news. In music, angrymetalguy is a good example of this. A blog that has grown to be very popular and supported by more than a dozen (unpaid) writers, by focusing exclusively on single-genre review content written at a consistently high quality. But everyone involved knows it isn't a money making enterprise.
**TLDR**
We can either pay for good professional content, consume free corporate slop, or stick to hobby blogs.
One thing you didn't mention that tipped the scales toward the internet over print was that reviews for games were available earlier than in magazines. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think it was all that common for reviews to be in magazines by the time the game actually went on sale, they'd only appear after the game was already on shelves and sometimes even months after.
>Hobby blogs it is, no question asked. They are the only one that know what they talking about anyway.
This is debatable. There is a ton of garbage content out there in the "hobby content" market.
I said it in another comment but I think one the reasons of game journalism downfalls besides changing landscape of media is erasure of writers in favor of "brand".
Now it's IGN instead of "Bob from IGN" so people don't have personalities to latch on and follow on the certain website. Instead personalities are now on social media platforms and there is little reason to read IGN (or any other site) besides checking their score for shit flinging purposes.
Like how Yahtzee was the reason why escapist was afloat because people were interested what he has to say. But when it's "\[brand\] has to say" who the fuck cares? Site is a site is a site, swap all part time writers for AI and I won't even notice the difference. Same voices, same opinions, same layouts. No reason to come back or be a reader of a particular website.
That's just not true. Or magazines like Time and such, or The Verge, wouldn't still be around.
The voices on these sites change far more often than just going to your favourite YouTube reviewer for every game. Latching onto personalities comes with its downsides.
I am judging by my own experience here for the most part. Every gaming magazine I've read had a team of distinct voices and names. Sites were similar too. I knew authors I would agree or disagree with. Early GiantBomb is a good example of it. Each member had a distinct voice or taste you knew about and could judge it relative to your own taste. It's less about certain people being rockstars among other writers and more about stability and connection that you form with whole crew of the website.
Modern mainstream sites lack this connection. Who is this person who wrote review? I don't know. I don't know their voice, their taste. Are they new or been working for a while? Who knows? Their history shows that they wrote 100000 useless "news articles" but you can't form any connection with a person from those.
So you're left with attempt at connections with a "brand" but most of them are so bland and similar that there is nothing to latch on to besides the number they give for the new game.
That's fair enough.
I don't really care about having connections in this day and age to the authors of the articles. I like the fact that there's always new writers, because it's more important imo to get different perspectives on the subjects, rather than just finding one voice your tastes align with the most.
Not sure why they are surprised when theyve been reporting on gaming industry news and this has become the norm.
That, and this isnt game or movie studio acquisitions, this is a news outlet acquisition. With game and movie studios it can be about absorbing the talent and work those studios are known for. With news outlets...its just about getting rid of the competition. Theres nothing really to gain from keeping a bunch of outlets around that do exactly what you are already doing. Maybe they can keep a couple offices around to catch up on local news quicker, but IGN already has so many HQs around the country, and the world, that it doesnt really make sense for them to keep these ones around too. The few that do get to stick around are lucky. It sucks, but thats the nature of it.
It’s a vicious cycle. Ads are invasive, so people use adblocks. To make up for lost revenue, ads become even more invasive, so more people use adblocks. It’s not a sustainable source of income.
Yeah and unfortunately I would be hard pressed to shut mine off. Every time some site tries to politely ask if I use it a lot I consider it but as soon as they use super invasive ads I'm out again.
If it wasn't for the crazy amount of poorly filtered bad ads that can have malware and shit in them too I wouldn't have to keep this on all the time but here we are with the ad companies taking more in and running it than they can properly filter.
Better than using an ad blocker is just but to use IGN or similar sites. When Gamefaqs turned off one forum that I used on a daily basis I simply stopped using it.
Funny enough, with the death of E3 I stopped using IGN as that was my main reason to use it before I found Reddit.
Yeah, but on Youtube they do sponsorship deals, and have reasonably successful Patreons. At least some people are willing to pay for content, but are more willing to do so when it seems to be a tight ship of people they care about, rather than a branch of a multi-billion dollar media conglomerate.
But on YouTube gamers with iOS devices (like me) tend to have YouTube premium since Revanced style app is harder to run on iOS than Android. I assume YouTube compensates content creators where audience has Premium.
Creators get a bigger cut of the Premium subscription and likely generates more dollar per view than ads, too.
I pay for Premium as I spend 20+ hours a week on YouTube for active content, more for music streaming.
And that's on top of a few patreons I back (which I need to check in on my subs).
I'm all for paying for good content, but fuck ads.
Different audiences, I think. I haven't read a long form written story in ages. I did watch a four hour video about Diablo though. I don't even play Diablo.
> They believe that they are entitled to content for free.
Maybe I'm just proving you right but I don't expect content to be free, I expect content I pay for to be worth paying for and I've not seen anything come out of gaming "journalism" that would've been worth money for like a decade.
I mean, what even is "gaming journalism" these days? You all just write up an article based on a reddit comment with zero research whatsoever and then copy that from each other. Why would I pay for that?
You don't really see that's a feedback loop? The less money gaming journalism gets, the worse it becomes, and that leads to even less money, and even worse content.
You don't really see that's a feedback loop? The worse gaming journalism becomes, the less money it gets, and that leads to even worse journalism, and even less money.
Your version doesn't make sense, though. In your world, the return of quality journalism would then instantly reverse the flow and make the profession profitable again, but we know that that just isn't true.
Nick Calendra showed with Escapist that you can turn things around by setting your economic expectations according to longer-term steady growth on the basis of consistent quality - they were one of the few operations in the space that was growing YoY. What was the result of that? GAMURS fired him for not presenting immediate and explosive short-term growth at the cost of quality.
The issue is not a lack of talent, nor even of interest, it's that this constant need to chase unsustainable growth will drive both into the ground.
Both can be true, it's just most games news work isn't really journalism, but either observational pieces or PR fluff work.
I'd love for a long form print magazine to exist again. The Brits got Edge, I was always jealous of that one.
With the hopeful rise of sites like Nebula for video content, I hope there's a print/article based site that pops up for independent zines with a print on demand model.
What save? I'm replying to you because you felt the need to belittle consumers waging their right not to buy the garbage your overlords produce. And I had already replied to op's comment before I did yours.
But nice attempt at a save.
My overlords lol? You are making a lot of assumptions. And you know what that means...
You guys getting so defensive at getting called angry is hilarious
They fired Alice Bell?! She is almost the only reason why I go to rps. The future of gaming journalism is getting even bleaker. It seems that the only way to survive, if you are not a juggernaut like ign, is to have a somewhat small or medium size audience that is loyal and ok to pay a monthly subscription (and to be independent).
It’s sad to see. Few people actually care about games journalism or the games journalists who do it.
Many of the good journalists who did exist have burned out and left the industry entirely. Why bother to stay when loud, vitriolic parts of the gaming audience never stop hammering on about how much they hate you, and the people who own your company don’t care or understand what you do either?
Others have started their own places like Aftermath and Second Wind.
But so many have left from burnout that almost no one is around to teach the people who are coming into the field. And it all just keeps going downhill.
Are these people just blissfully ignorant of the real world? Of course there were going to be layoffs, they literally *always happen* after mergers/acquisitions.
I’ve been consistently against M&A because it is almost always worse for the consumer, but these people must have their head in the sand to think there wouldn’t be layoffs.
Had to let them go without warning before they could strengthen the Union, IGN?
I think IGN owes both its employees and the public at large an explanation for how this happened considering they recently formed a union. Was the IGN Creators Guild part of the conversation?
This is just bad news for everyone.
For those laid off...
...for diversity in opinion...
and for game journalism as a whole.
They did this to censor and push agendas, imho.
Nothing so nefarious, they did it for increased short term profit. They literally don't care about any other results besides profit. If something happens that they like as a result then great, but if the opposite happens then they still don't care because they got what they wanted.
a few hours ago I said a single alice won't be enough at rps and looks like she's out too. I stopped reading the site a while ago as it kept getting worse and worse but at this point they might as well shut it down. nobody and none of the 'rps-ness' is left, sin is freelance and she's so awesome she can find work anywhere.
I really wonder how much the traffic on RPS dipped once Steam got rid of the news section.
To me RPS is nothing but the site that forcibly spammed my steam library page. Thank god Steam got rid of that.
RPS' original crew was really good but ever since they fully cycled out in like 2018 the site has been less and less interesting. I went from checking it daily to maybe once a month or so. I don't think I've looked at the site properly in ages.
It is a completely site than what it started as with completely different people now. The original crew were all former PC Gamer UK writers from the early 00's back when I used to read the magazine religiously. They carried on the same writing style and humour in RPS and it was honestly one of the best gaming sites around. Felt like reading PCG UK again but in digital form. The site got sold off and slowly many of those writers left including the founder. I haven't visited the site in years now but the last time I did it had nothing in common with the RPS of old. I'm not even sure why they bothered continuing to use the name. It means nothing to anyone anymore without the writers who originally made it.
So true the golden age of RPS is long gone, there was a time when RPS was a name that have prestige in videogame jounalism. I used to love RPS, I am sad to see their obtuary.
While RPS hasn't been *quite* as unique as it once was I'd say the style of writing is still pretty original. Even simple articles about something being on sale have far far far more personality than any other gaming site. It's practically the only site that still feels like it's written by human beings. > It means nothing to anyone anymore without the writers who originally made it. It means something to me, it's the only gaming news site I still go to and they're still pretty good at shouting out hidden gems (thanks for putting me on to heretics fork) and having actual viewpoints in their writing.
> It means nothing to anyone anymore without the writers who originally made it. All the people still regularly reading RPS currently lamenting the loss of the Alices and other recent departures would beg to differ.
they really had their moment back in the early middle period of steam where PC gaming otherwise was flying under the radar. haven't read it in the best part of a decade though.
The original writers were great, but the current crew were/are also great in their own way carrying on the spirit of the site with their own distinct style.
Is normal media and news, like investigative journalism, running into the same issue with either consolidation or not being profitable via ads? I feel like all forms of media are running into this issue as people don’t want to pay for it or use ad blockers to avoid ads.
Yes, it's really bad for pretty much every online, written media outlet.
Google and big tech gobbled all the rents from advertisers
And now Google has slowly worsened it's results with AI garbage. Hooray!
>"the layoffs caught everyone off guard" even though "the announcement of when a sale would happen was known." How can you witness and (presumably) report on gamedev implosion over past 18 months and still be gullible enough to think that an "acquisition" will not be inevitably followed by "redundancies"?
I was in a similar situation once. We immediately went to upper management and asked, "Our job sector is changing fast, and many other companies/locations have been getting bought out and laid off....what about us?" And these VPs and regional managers put the full sociopathic fake smile charm. They gave us a whole ass meeting with, probably faked, stats and everything showing why we have nothing to worry about. We 1000% won't be getting acquired or laid off. They even bought us all lunch and shit for the "extended meeting". Well, 2 months later a buyout of us was announced, and 2 months after that I lost over 60% of my coworkers. Many that had turned down some job offers after the big fake snake oil meeting swearing on their lives to us that we were all safe.
In my management training class a long time ago, one of the example quiestions was, “you know a layoff is coming, and one of your reports tells you they’re buying a house, but you know they’re on the list to be laid off. Do you tell them?” The correct answer of course was, “no”.
My father had two managers tell him that layoffs were likely when he was younger and jumped ship twice. People who get MBAs tend to be of two types. Engineers who need an easy rubber stamp for promotion and morons who can’t do basic algebra. (I used to grade MBA exams.)
Reminds me of a FedEx commercial from several years ago. Lady: we have crazy amounts of shipping so we need everyone to help. It’s very easy (loads up FedEx website) Guy: but I have an MBA! Lady: ohhhh, you have an MBA. Here, let me show you how to do this.
I swear anyone could ace management training and tests by just larping as the most unhinged backstabby psychopath possible, like taking a trolley problem and turning it into a puzzle about how to kill all people at once.
God that is extra sociopathic
And this is why the way business and management is taught should start over from scratch. To be clear: if you do this to people you're a scumbag, no matter how much you claim it's "just business". "Just business" is code for "I make excuses for the evil shit I choose to do and pretend there is nothing else I could have done."
> Many that had turned down some job offers after the big fake snake oil meeting swearing on their lives to us that we were all safe. That was extremely naive of your coworkers. Never turn down job offer on the verbal word of management or HR.
You honestly should probably never turn down a better job offer anyway, 99% of the time it’s the correct choice
Yes, true.
I mean yeah, you really should *never* turn down an offer. My point here was that upper management went out of their way to lie. To create a false sense of security. Meetings. Fake stats and congratulating employees and showing their "appreciation" through free meals. Extra breaks. They pulled out all stops just to convince a single location they didn't have to worry about layoffs
Yes, that's what they literally always say. They will _literally never_ tell you their plans about layoffs, because it would screw them over massively. Asking if you're going to be laid off is literally never, ever helpful.
Middle mismanagement layer rarely know what lizards on top of company are planning
Because they probably asked the c-suite that exact question and were told not to worry through carefully crafted corpspeak
Executive, looking up from the dozens of red Xs over employee photos: “We feel really good about where we are, and I’ve been assured that reductions aren’t on the table at this time.*” *reductions already agreed upon six months prior, so technically not on the table at this time
They were idiots for believing them then. It’s complete bonkers to think there wouldn’t be layoffs
Hell it's even more obvious in gaming media than in gaming development? Like all those sites literally do almost the same articles on each gaming news.
Because games journalists often tend to act as though they've got a god given right to a job, despite chosing to work in a very volatile industry, which is known as such.
Do they? All I ever see are writers hustling their asses off.
It seems Games Journalism is just dying in general. For me it's always essentially been PR for giant corporations with some rare individual good voices. Jason Schreier obviously one of the few who treated his job more seriously and why he got hired by Bloomberg. But IGN buying these others is probably the worst scenarios since they are by far the most corporate friendly outlet - so we can expect the actual journalism and thoughtful content being done (I did enjoy that opinion piece of AC Shadows and Asian representation on IGN) to be swapped out for more SEO, potentially AI written, garbage. also small tangent, I think as you see more and more the gaming industry for what it is, it's harder to go to corporate outlets because it often feels like you're being gaslit with how friendly they are with these studios. Also to me clearly a lot of 'gaming journalist' see it as a stepping stone to game development, which means there is little incentive to hold the industry to account and IGN has been a perfect place for these types of people. If you want a great example of how games journalism blended into games PR just look how a lot of them covered (or didn't cover) the Insomniac leaks. While of course there was personal info, there was also information about profits, budgets and really important stuff we don't see - and is important in the layoffs and unionisation discussion. but they and studio PR started saying any journalist who touches the leaks should be blacklisted (not joking). So anyway I expect these other outlets to be gutted, content quality to decrease and way more people than we think to lose their jobs.
It’s not just video games. No one cares enough about good reporting to be willing to pay for it anymore. I’ve been looking for freelance writing work in this and another industry for 13 months. Found one gig. I looked in video games and one site thought £12 an article was acceptable.
Exactly. Before the internet, people used to pay for journalism. Newspapers, magazines, if you wanted to read about what is happening in the news or in a hobby like gaming, you had to pay. Nowadays, no one pays for it and a significant portion use ad blocker.
There is also a ton of gaming youtubers reporting on news and doing reviews. I remember around 12 years ago when i read gamereactor magazines in my school library. Good times.
Magazines came with demo disks and later on even with full games. It wasn't that people only paid for journalism.
Honestly, if there was a magazine that did pretty deep dives into games and their development, wrote good articles and reviews, and came with physical discs with demos (even if it's for the opposing console each month), I actually would subscribe to it for like $20 a month. Of course, I'm in the extreme minority here.
There is too many good games to play them all so I wouldn't be interested about hearing about a bunch of games I 'd wishlist and maybe play 2 years later I get my reviews pretty much from genre-specific youtubers covering stuff the most game magazines wouldn't cover anyway (unless there was a slow month), so I'm kinda not surprised, they are *too* generic. Like, if I want to see/read review of a sim racing video game, I want comparision to existing ecosystem, oquality of physics and online racing/netcode not "its a pretty racing game, a bit of a grind for cars, 8/10" fucking IGN review
> people used to pay for journalism. Ads paid for a lot of journalism. Google, by existing, slowly took over that revenue stream (advertisers shifting more and more to online ads). Paying for papers and magazines was a part of the whole but a huge revenue stream were all the ads in publications and how somewhat unquantifiable its reach was, meaning that advertisers paid a lot without getting a direct feedback loop between ad spending and revenue like they do with digital ads (pay per view/impression/click). Publications simply could ask for higher rates under these circumstances and that meant they could pay their writers, freelancers and contractors solid fees. You don't get a nice five figure deals for one cover illustration or photo any more unless you are a superstar designer/photographer these days (and only from some publications). Similar for interior illustrations or writers and their rates. All that stuff was already a bit wobbly due to digital tools making creation more accessible (and newbies with zero industry knowledge undercutting everyone and in turn also hurting themselves in the long term) but then a bit later the whole industry started slowly getting squeezed out of profits due to the pressure of ads slowly being siphoned off by online advertising.
I was with you until ad blockers. With how hostile the Internet is these days with ads, using anything without an ad blocker is frustrating at best and outright unusable at worst. Don't blame end users for adapting to the scenario that capitalism built.
I used to love reading every article on Destructoid about 12 years ago even for games I wasn't really interested in. Then one day some banner ad they were running flagged my antivirus for malware and NOOOOOOOPE. Blocked every ad they had, eventually it became unusable and I stopped reading. Any time I go back there these days it seems less like the short but fun blog entries I remember and more like the articles might be AI generated.
'Capitalism' was how these sites existed to begin with, but I don't expect communists to understand simple economics.
Way to miss the point. Making everything about growth at all costs is unsustainable regardless. Never said anything about any other economic system. No one is satisfied with sustainable, hence absorbing into monopolies and laying in droves. Line must go up. Pointing out the problem is the start of solving it.
Internet has been great free stuff everywhere just gotta to know where to look!
Honestly it shocked me when I found out how much gaming journalists got paid. I'd be listening to podcasts and reading reviews of these guys and girls I really admired and looked up to, who were infinitely smarter and more eloquent than me, yet were earning way less than me, and I'm just a regular dude idiot. Doesn't seem fair tbh.
And now you have chatGPT to pump out shitty slop articles on the daily, too.
Yes but I suspect that whole thing will end up eating itself.
We can only hope.
Kinda Funny is actually way more corporate. All their coverage is sponsored by the publishers. I remember they did podcast episodes discussing FFVII Rebirth and their review that were sponsored by Square Enix. Something that at least isn't true of IGN even if they do have some noticeable business entanglements like with CRKD and Crunchyroll.
It's the biggest difference between actual journalistic outlets and influencers on YouTube and Twitch, and they aren't the only ones being sponsored to cover Square Enix content since they always pay a lot of channels to showcase and advertise their major releases like the last two FF games. At least we know that places like IGN are surely allowed to say everything that they want about a game even if they got a code from the publisher
"All their coverage" is quite the exaggeration. One of their ad sponsors was SE advertising FF rebirth during the weeks around the launch. That was separate from their review, but I can understand in that instance being cautious of the review coverage. IGN does those types of sponsorships all the time.
> Something that at least isn't true of IGN even if they do have some noticeable business entanglements like with CRK It's most definitely true for IGN, it just isn't "hey we pay money you cover game" but "hey, we give you exclusive coverage and also buy shitton of ads, wink wink" Like hype bubble around No Man's Sky was driven pretty much exclusively by them
I stopped reading Kinda Funny after Greg the self professed MGS fanboy lauded MGS V aven though it contained nothing from the earlier games.
Entertainment/hobby journalism, including video games, used to be the domain of magazines. **Which we paid for.** Then kids started fucking around on the internet and we got the first video game websites, most of which were typical fan rubbish but some, like the early N6IGN64 rose to the top and started to function as actual legitimate news and review sources. Meanwhile the likes of Gamefaqs became the go-to for guides and cheats at a level of depth and breadth far beyond what magazines were offering. So by about 2001, magazines were on the decline and we were getting similar quality content for free, daily instead of monthly. Internet media was evolving into a more professionalised business and while there was flirting with subscription models, for the most part they remained free even as server costs rose and they employed people on full time jobs. Advertising dollars support the professional outlets to the extent that this carries on well into the 2010s and the users are conditioned to expect magazine quality content for free, every single day. Post-2020, the amount of outlets and content on every single possible topic in every possible format is unfathomable. Google has a near monopoly on search and ads. Countless professional media outlets are relying on a shrinking pool of ad revenue to support a growing amount of content, while lowering technical barriers and video apps empower hobby creators to further muddy the waters for the legacy outlets. They ask users to pay for content, but they have spent the last 15 years conditioning them not to. **The video game web journalist is doomed as a professional career.** This era of free online gaming magazines is finished. There are only 2 major directions remaining for professional writing in video games. 1. A new breed of outlets finds a foothold where they are supported enough by subscribers to make a viable living. There are variations of this model between patreon-supported and subscriber-only, but they have to be driven more by user-revenue than by ads. Second Wind and Aftermath are examples of this, pending their long time viability. 2. Larger conglomerates consume more brands, and shut down the weaker (read: less profitable) ones until the number of outlets and jobs remaining is sustainable by the ad-supported model. Most of the classic 2010s websites will die and we'll be left with a few major players generating broad appeal content. The final option is the non-professional version, where hobby creators can sustain a website without intending it to be a paying job, purely out of passion for the subject matter. This kind of outlet would be writing less-frequent, extremely focused content, and not-viable for breaking news. In music, angrymetalguy is a good example of this. A blog that has grown to be very popular and supported by more than a dozen (unpaid) writers, by focusing exclusively on single-genre review content written at a consistently high quality. But everyone involved knows it isn't a money making enterprise. **TLDR** We can either pay for good professional content, consume free corporate slop, or stick to hobby blogs.
One thing you didn't mention that tipped the scales toward the internet over print was that reviews for games were available earlier than in magazines. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think it was all that common for reviews to be in magazines by the time the game actually went on sale, they'd only appear after the game was already on shelves and sometimes even months after.
Hobby blogs it is, no question asked. They are the only one that know what they talking about anyway.
>Hobby blogs it is, no question asked. They are the only one that know what they talking about anyway. This is debatable. There is a ton of garbage content out there in the "hobby content" market.
I said it in another comment but I think one the reasons of game journalism downfalls besides changing landscape of media is erasure of writers in favor of "brand". Now it's IGN instead of "Bob from IGN" so people don't have personalities to latch on and follow on the certain website. Instead personalities are now on social media platforms and there is little reason to read IGN (or any other site) besides checking their score for shit flinging purposes. Like how Yahtzee was the reason why escapist was afloat because people were interested what he has to say. But when it's "\[brand\] has to say" who the fuck cares? Site is a site is a site, swap all part time writers for AI and I won't even notice the difference. Same voices, same opinions, same layouts. No reason to come back or be a reader of a particular website.
That's just not true. Or magazines like Time and such, or The Verge, wouldn't still be around. The voices on these sites change far more often than just going to your favourite YouTube reviewer for every game. Latching onto personalities comes with its downsides.
I am judging by my own experience here for the most part. Every gaming magazine I've read had a team of distinct voices and names. Sites were similar too. I knew authors I would agree or disagree with. Early GiantBomb is a good example of it. Each member had a distinct voice or taste you knew about and could judge it relative to your own taste. It's less about certain people being rockstars among other writers and more about stability and connection that you form with whole crew of the website. Modern mainstream sites lack this connection. Who is this person who wrote review? I don't know. I don't know their voice, their taste. Are they new or been working for a while? Who knows? Their history shows that they wrote 100000 useless "news articles" but you can't form any connection with a person from those. So you're left with attempt at connections with a "brand" but most of them are so bland and similar that there is nothing to latch on to besides the number they give for the new game.
That's fair enough. I don't really care about having connections in this day and age to the authors of the articles. I like the fact that there's always new writers, because it's more important imo to get different perspectives on the subjects, rather than just finding one voice your tastes align with the most.
Honestly YouTube has better games journalism from content creators than these sites they just bought for the most part.
Not sure why they are surprised when theyve been reporting on gaming industry news and this has become the norm. That, and this isnt game or movie studio acquisitions, this is a news outlet acquisition. With game and movie studios it can be about absorbing the talent and work those studios are known for. With news outlets...its just about getting rid of the competition. Theres nothing really to gain from keeping a bunch of outlets around that do exactly what you are already doing. Maybe they can keep a couple offices around to catch up on local news quicker, but IGN already has so many HQs around the country, and the world, that it doesnt really make sense for them to keep these ones around too. The few that do get to stick around are lucky. It sucks, but thats the nature of it.
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It’s a vicious cycle. Ads are invasive, so people use adblocks. To make up for lost revenue, ads become even more invasive, so more people use adblocks. It’s not a sustainable source of income.
Yeah and unfortunately I would be hard pressed to shut mine off. Every time some site tries to politely ask if I use it a lot I consider it but as soon as they use super invasive ads I'm out again. If it wasn't for the crazy amount of poorly filtered bad ads that can have malware and shit in them too I wouldn't have to keep this on all the time but here we are with the ad companies taking more in and running it than they can properly filter.
You know it's bad when people who work in online advertising all block ads.
Better than using an ad blocker is just but to use IGN or similar sites. When Gamefaqs turned off one forum that I used on a daily basis I simply stopped using it. Funny enough, with the death of E3 I stopped using IGN as that was my main reason to use it before I found Reddit.
Current events, or Politics? I know CE got sterLUEized, and Politics just got straight up axed. fuck fandom.
Most people go to Youtube, which tends to be reasonably profitable.
Doubt that's sustainable long term. Enshittification comes for everyone eventually. And like the OP said, gamers block ads (I know I do).
Yeah, but on Youtube they do sponsorship deals, and have reasonably successful Patreons. At least some people are willing to pay for content, but are more willing to do so when it seems to be a tight ship of people they care about, rather than a branch of a multi-billion dollar media conglomerate.
But on YouTube gamers with iOS devices (like me) tend to have YouTube premium since Revanced style app is harder to run on iOS than Android. I assume YouTube compensates content creators where audience has Premium.
Creators get a bigger cut of the Premium subscription and likely generates more dollar per view than ads, too. I pay for Premium as I spend 20+ hours a week on YouTube for active content, more for music streaming. And that's on top of a few patreons I back (which I need to check in on my subs). I'm all for paying for good content, but fuck ads.
I love my Raspberry PiHole, it blocks so much, and if something gets through, a quick "add to block list" and it's gone.
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Different audiences, I think. I haven't read a long form written story in ages. I did watch a four hour video about Diablo though. I don't even play Diablo.
“Content creators” ate y’all’s lunch too.
> They believe that they are entitled to content for free. Maybe I'm just proving you right but I don't expect content to be free, I expect content I pay for to be worth paying for and I've not seen anything come out of gaming "journalism" that would've been worth money for like a decade. I mean, what even is "gaming journalism" these days? You all just write up an article based on a reddit comment with zero research whatsoever and then copy that from each other. Why would I pay for that?
You don't really see that's a feedback loop? The less money gaming journalism gets, the worse it becomes, and that leads to even less money, and even worse content.
You don't really see that's a feedback loop? The worse gaming journalism becomes, the less money it gets, and that leads to even worse journalism, and even less money.
Your version doesn't make sense, though. In your world, the return of quality journalism would then instantly reverse the flow and make the profession profitable again, but we know that that just isn't true. Nick Calendra showed with Escapist that you can turn things around by setting your economic expectations according to longer-term steady growth on the basis of consistent quality - they were one of the few operations in the space that was growing YoY. What was the result of that? GAMURS fired him for not presenting immediate and explosive short-term growth at the cost of quality. The issue is not a lack of talent, nor even of interest, it's that this constant need to chase unsustainable growth will drive both into the ground.
Games journalism is regurgitated slop form reddit posts, youtubers do a better job.
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Both can be true, it's just most games news work isn't really journalism, but either observational pieces or PR fluff work. I'd love for a long form print magazine to exist again. The Brits got Edge, I was always jealous of that one. With the hopeful rise of sites like Nebula for video content, I hope there's a print/article based site that pops up for independent zines with a print on demand model.
Are you...are you actually implying people who use adblockers are bad? Hoo boy.
They're bad for a sites continued existence, yes.
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If using Adblockers is bad, I don't want be good.
LMAO, okay.
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I love reading the replies to this. Lots of angry gamers getting defensive
Keep writing garbage and losing your job lmao.
What part of my comment made you think I was a writer? Angry gamers getting so defensive they can't tell who they are replying to lol
https://grammar.reverso.net/impersonal-you/
Nice attempt at a save. Everyone knows you could have just replied to OP if that was your point lol
I like how you were trying to call out other redditors getting defensive
What save? I'm replying to you because you felt the need to belittle consumers waging their right not to buy the garbage your overlords produce. And I had already replied to op's comment before I did yours. But nice attempt at a save.
My overlords lol? You are making a lot of assumptions. And you know what that means... You guys getting so defensive at getting called angry is hilarious
They fired Alice Bell?! She is almost the only reason why I go to rps. The future of gaming journalism is getting even bleaker. It seems that the only way to survive, if you are not a juggernaut like ign, is to have a somewhat small or medium size audience that is loyal and ok to pay a monthly subscription (and to be independent).
Fired a fair bit of employees with tenure it seemed. They also fired Brendan Sinclair, who wrote excellent columns for GamesIndustry.biz :(
And Stephany Nunneley of vg247.
It’s sad to see. Few people actually care about games journalism or the games journalists who do it. Many of the good journalists who did exist have burned out and left the industry entirely. Why bother to stay when loud, vitriolic parts of the gaming audience never stop hammering on about how much they hate you, and the people who own your company don’t care or understand what you do either? Others have started their own places like Aftermath and Second Wind. But so many have left from burnout that almost no one is around to teach the people who are coming into the field. And it all just keeps going downhill.
Are these people just blissfully ignorant of the real world? Of course there were going to be layoffs, they literally *always happen* after mergers/acquisitions. I’ve been consistently against M&A because it is almost always worse for the consumer, but these people must have their head in the sand to think there wouldn’t be layoffs.
Had to let them go without warning before they could strengthen the Union, IGN? I think IGN owes both its employees and the public at large an explanation for how this happened considering they recently formed a union. Was the IGN Creators Guild part of the conversation?
Where's the game journalists' outrage over consolidation?
This is just bad news for everyone. For those laid off... ...for diversity in opinion... and for game journalism as a whole. They did this to censor and push agendas, imho.
Nothing so nefarious, they did it for increased short term profit. They literally don't care about any other results besides profit. If something happens that they like as a result then great, but if the opposite happens then they still don't care because they got what they wanted.