Polygon basically went from having a focus on stories that few others were writing, to focusing on top 10 guides for everything. There's no money in gaming journalism anymore.
There hasn't been money in it for a good long while now. Almost every gaming site has been bogged down into a general IGN-styled pop/nerd culture clickfarm. GamesRadar used to have good articles and great podcasts, then was just reduced to churning out articles that were just "The Defenders: When They Might Show Up Again Now That Netflix Series Has Wrapped" which is then a long-winded article that boils down to "We don't know"
Polygon is now just "Top 10 Anime to Watch if You Loved Playing Game X", and the demise of GameFAQs means any guide for a game is either carpet bombed with ads or is a bloated article that spends the first five paragraphs explaining what the game is before ending with "Below you'll find the solution to X"
>general IGN-styled pop/nerd culture clickfarm
It feels like a sign of how far we've fallen that this is being referred to as "IGN-styled", given that there was a time when even IGN wasn't quite like this (at least not to the same extent). We can no longer imagine a time when this wasn't the default for games writing.
I was referring more to their topical coverage, as even IGN was never a games-only publication outside of its first few years. They had a *lot* of coverage in the day spanning many a topic: Video games (broken down into sections for each platform), tech, sports, cars (yes, cars), comics, movies, TV, babes (yes, you read that right), and anime.
Right, that's fair (and god the "babes" thing was cringe). As somebody who spent a fair bit of time on IGN in the early 10's, I just have fond memories of some of the writing that used to be done on it. I think back to stuff like [Greg Miller writing about inFamous](https://www.ign.com/articles/2011/05/05/playing-through-the-pain-with-infamous); it wasn't necessarily the deepest writing in the world, but there was a sort of base-level passion behind it. Then IGN spent the next decade pivoting toward just spamming its front page as hard as possible with every little crumb of pop culture news.
IGN actually seemed to have had a fun atmosphere to it in its heyday. Co-founder Matt Casamassina called it "the only job where you could keep a bottle of vodka at your desk with no questions asked", and fellow Nintendo editor Mark Bozon (who is coincidentally the brother of Shantae creator Matt Bozon) likened it to almost a playground. I remember their year end awards coverage from 2006-2008 was actually pretty well done because they did lists for nearly everything they covered.
2011 was when things really started decline, and I remember they stopped doing IGN Weekly and started to push their forums a lot more. They also removed the links to their old-school sections so you had to finagle a bit to access the old PS1 or N64 sections.
Probably not coincidentally, that was also around the time when they pivoted away from old-style guides (as in guides that were singularly authored, cohesive, and totally unique) and toward wiki guides, which would increasingly both rely on user contribution and atomize their content as time went on. People forget that there was a time when IGN was essentially making their own GameFAQs-style walkthroughs for every game that came out, complete with [bespoke graphic design](https://i.imgur.com/WSHETIv.png) and some genuine personality injected into the writing.
Dude Matt C was the man back then. He was basically in the late 90s the only guy who had as much knowledge of Nintendo and their inner workings as someone working in there. Loved his coverage and passion and how it didn’t have the corporate bias of something like Nintendo Power. Made speculation during the N64 and GameCube era a real treat.
The whole Nintendo team was great. Matt and Craig's coverage in the late GC days during the run up to the Wii was stellar. I swear those guys never left their desks when all the demos and spiel about the "Revolution" hit. Later on Craig would even mention network quality and voice chat quality in his DS game reviews.
That’s the attitude the magazines had in the day too. Jeff Green of Computer Gaming World game talks about how everyone in the office used to clock in and immediately jump into Quake with the rest of the office. He has no idea how they put out some of those magazines. It sounded like the coolest job as a teen but it’s gone.
When IGN was a website with a black background with red icons for each console. And none of the sites that were linked even noted IGNs overall ownership.
Gamefaqs guides have always been user-generated. Fandom owning the site has not changed that. There was a bounty system at one point to incentivize guide creation for new releases that were in demand, but I'm not sure if they've brought those back, as I'm not in the FAQ-writing community.
There’s a news tab on the site as well, but that’s always been aggregated from Gamespot and other websites.
Redventures basically bought a portfolio of websites just to get CNET (which they horribly devalued; just recently they got caught using AI to write articles)… they sold the rest to Fandom a bit ago. Honestly as a long-time user of the site I don’t think it is the worst thing that could have happened to it, but in this day and age once you’re sold off, the future of your site is at the whims of the suits anyways, as we’ve seen here with Kotaku…
It could be worse. Half of Gamespot's "articles" these days are "This gamer product is on sale, but supplies are running out fast!" headlines for pages filled with sponsored links.
Though I might find that preferable to this annoying trend from PC Gamer and GamesRadar to write these 30-word long quippy hipster headlines.
If anything, Gamespot managed to actuall innovate within the gamespace by offering articles related and/or interesting to gamers. After Ahoc left a vaccuum with his gun videos, Gamespot pushed an excellent trend and made Jonathan Ferguson internet famous
I think there is money in good gaming journalism, but it's a lot harder to make it as a website exclusively dedicated to it.
A lot of the best gaming journalists have either been scooped up by major *paid* general purpose news publications (think Jason Schreier at Bloomberg), or have shifted over to YouTube and Patreon.
A big reason for this is that ads on news sites do not make the kind of money they used to. Advertisers get a lot more bang for their buck advertising on social media platforms that offer much more effective ad targeting, so that is where they spend more of their money.
> A big reason for this is that ads on news sites do not make the kind of money they used to. Advertisers get a lot more bang for their buck advertising on social media platforms that offer much more effective ad targeting, so that is where they spend more of their money.
The EIC of a popular political blog (I think Talking Points Memo?) was saying a few weeks ago that ad revenues have dropped by something like 80% over the past ~15 years. No business can survive that without major changes.
Ninja edit: this is the post going into details, with a top-line ad revenue decrease of 95%, driven mostly by the drop in ad rates, but pushed lower as they diversified revenue sources away from ads.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/josh-replies-to-the-slings-and-arrows-of-those-claiming-digital-news-advertising-is-going-great
>I think there is money in good gaming journalism, but it's a lot harder to make it as a website exclusively dedicated to it.
I think this also has a lot to do with the slowdown in development. There just isn't as much gaming news in general compared to a decade ago. Games cost so much and take so long to develop now. That, and publishers typically have their own news delivery platforms and streams now. Gone is the day of big press conferences that news media would be there reporting on. Now, publishers speak directly to their audiences.
I can't stand all of those sites as a result. I hate how Polygon/GamesRader and their 10 clones all churn out the same padded How-To articles for the most obvious and mundane things in games that should only take a sentence to answer but they manage to do it in five paragraphs.
> GamesRadar used to have good articles and great podcasts
TalkRadar 80ish-120.
If you know, you know. One of the podcasts that made me fall in love with Podcasts. That year or so they did was fucking incredible. And in like 2009 it felt revolutionary.
It's a universal problem in publishing, not just gaming. The interesting, thoughtful stuff rarely pays the bills. You either focus on that and cultivate a smaller but appreciative customer base that reliably pays up front, survive on investments or donors, or churn out the dogshit that draws in crowds. Pamphlets in the 1700s and newspapers in the 1800s had all the same problems.
As in other areas of publishing, more special interest outlets like this new "aftermath" site will appear and disappear as someone gets a bug up their ass about doing "real writing" and then run face-first into the problem of real funding. Any number of amazing literary and film journals have come and gone in the last many decades. I've already seen this cycle happen in gaming several times. The fundamental problem is that the market just doesn't sustain very much serious publishing.
If you want to be paid, you're going to have to get someone to pay you--and that requires making something they want enough to pay for.
People complain about the quality of content nowadays, but the sad truth is that nobody cares enough to pay for good content. Otherwise, companies would still be paying writers for it.
People put out shitty top 10 lists because that's what people actually consume.
The industry is too big to follow now.
This isn't the 90s where you were getting ~5 quality releases a year. We're getting 5-10 a month sometimes now. And hundreds of great indie games.
It ain't worth checking news sites to find some drip of info about a game that won't come in for 5 years when you can play good ones now.
And even if someone does in depth journalism about some game chances are I haven't played it and never will because there are too many games to play them all.
> This isn't the 90s where you were getting ~5 quality releases a year. We're getting 5-10 a month sometimes now. And hundreds of great indie games.
You'd think that would make curation and critical evaluation even more valuable.
The current state of almost any video game discussion shows that critical evaluation is *not* what people desire for game journalism, at least not in the genuine sense.
A good handful of people seem like they want to be told how to feel about the latest game release, then go and regurgitate that elsewhere on the internet. Genuinely insightful discussion or evaluation isn't inflammatory enough to warrant engagement.
I wonder how many people who complain about "journalism" are paying, or even have ever paid, for content directly?
From what I've seen the people complaining about the quality of writing on news sites are the same people who laugh at the idea of paying for content as they run ad-blockers to make sure they never have to see any advertising.
Where do people expect the money to come from in these situations?
And the issue is that there aren't many great YouTube journalists. Like most of the big channels just repeat stories written by other people, often get facts wrong, or do good work but release very very infrequently especially compared to written sites
thats pretty much all of youtube for most topics and subjects. These are just people regurgitating wikipedia and other peoples reporting to their niche audiences. You will never learn any actual new information that was gained by them exclusively.
I'd argue there is, especially in niches, they are just, well, niche.
The proper long term well analyzed stuff doesn't get as much clicks but clearly well enough that channels like [Resonant Arc](https://www.youtube.com/@ResonantArc/) can make it into a job
Personally - and I don't say this with any grudge or anything, games journalism just kind of stopped being relevant to me.
When I was a wee lass, magazines were this outlook at gaming that I could not get anywhere else and it was coupled with an infectious excitement for the medium. To me, both of these qualities got lost sometime after the transition to game blog style media.
To me, it's too much rage, hate, anger, bait, grandstanding, incitement, hatebaiting, accusations, slammings and what not, for me to be something I enjoy reading. Yet joy was all I ever wanted out of my games media. I hold no ill feelings towards folks.
They're perfectly in their right to write how and what they want and it seems that angry media paid a lot more bills than media that brimmed with joy and optimism. I get it. Still I've made it a habit to filter my entertainment media so it's not constantly gutpunching me with negativity.
It's cool if folks like that. But it's not relevant to me. I am obviously just one figure but I'm saving a lot of money by no longer buying magazines. Money that goes towards gaming content creators that better meet my desire for what I want.
>To me, it's too much rage, hate, anger, bait, grandstanding, incitement, hatebaiting, accusations, slammings and what not, for me to be something I enjoy reading
100%.
I'll also bullshit articles like one that suggests they have some info on a new Red Dead game and when you actually read it it's just some baseless speculation from nobody associated with RockStar at all. It's just a useless article. How many of those can you be tricked into reading before you just tune them all out? I certainly had a number.
Yeah why would I want to go on a website that's ostensibly about entertainment that I like, and get constant negativity, reports about companies acting shitty to their employees, or just straight up be scolded about something. Does anyone writing for these websites enjoy anything
games journalists nowadays are people who think games journalism is beneath them so they bring their political journalism energy to the job as a way to live out their fantasies
> There's no money in gaming journalism anymore.
Hasn't been for a long time. Over a decade ago, I worked as a "staff writer" (actually not staff, they only hired independent contractors they didn't have to pay benefits to) for a major gaming news site and was paid a flat monthly wage that barely covered about a third of my rent. I did the math to see how much that came out to per labor-hour I spent and found out that I was, on average, making less than minimum wage.
So I reduced the amount of effort I put in, and ended up getting a talking-to from management about the reduced quality of my work. I told them that I was capping my monthly input at what would make me $10/hr and if they didn't like it, they could pay me more.
They ended up pretending the conversation never happened.
There's money in games journalism. The problem is these corporate owners have driven away all their talent, don't invest in original content, and are so reliant on just Google traffic - all while doing the same guides, tips, tricks whatever the fuck at every website.
These websites don't have audiences anymore because they just chase Google for money instead of making their own money. Subscription models, merchandise, events, work for hire projects, there's lot of ways to do it, but these old-school CFOs just want constant six figure deals that don't exist anymore for media.
They don't build brands with their talent, they don't create varied sources of revenue to protect against slower quarters... nope, just Google, Google, Google.
Source: Was the EIC of Escapist under Gamurs Group who does this exact same strategy and it doesn't work longterm.
> Subscription models, merchandise, events, work for hire projects, there's lot of ways to do it,
Merch and events aren't going to fund journalism in any meaningful way.
Subscription models can, but games aren't important enough for people to pay subscriptions to read about. Even regular news sites are struggling with the subscription model.
Yeah, that's the thing, to get enough out of subscription you'd have to actually spend some time reading what you subscribed to... instead of playing the games they write about.
Correction, there is money in games journalism. There isn't exponential growth that private equity/VC demands when they buy companies. See all the new independent sites/podcasts doing quite well for themselves (but nothing that's going to attract millions in investment).
A lot of those independents are already established personalities like Jeff Gerstmann; people who have broken off from once well-known and respected publications that succumbed to the shitdemand and already have a modest fanbase. I expect that at somepoint, that will wane too when people get tired of spending Patreon money.
>Patreon
I'm pretty sure a large chunk of the world economy is built on people being too lazy to regularly cull their automatically renewing subscriptions.
We'll see. Waypoint built a brand pretty much from scratch in 2016-2017 (?). Austin Walker and Patrick Klepek were known commodities from Giant Bomb, but I don't think they were huge. They and eventually Rob and Cado (along with various others over time, shoutouts to Danielle, Natalie and Ren) built up the brand to be self-sustaining to where Remap is today. I hope they continue to grow and make compelling content.
> There's no money in gaming journalism
The internet has been pretty terrible for professional games journalism IMO.
I still buy physical gaming magazines because they're actually well written, full of interviews with developers/publishers/artists/programmers, actually show a wide variety of games instead of just whatever is most popular, and have a bit of integrity and you have the same writers on the team every month so you get a feel of each real persons preferences.
I'd encourage more people to support magazines again. They're honestly so much better written and composed than anything on the net.
* Retro Gamer is very good - has had a long tenanted regular writing staff who each get their own editorials and have their own features regularly. It's good. They cover a LOT and they interview a huge arrange of programmers and artists.
* Edge is still going and still quite good
* Freeze64
* I quite like PLAY - it has a lot of reviews and previews of games that are incredibly obscure. Stuff that you literally wouldn't know about if you just look on the net. It's quite interesting what they feature.
* Old School Gamer Magazine
* PC Gamer
* PC PowerPlay
There's a few more, but those are the big published ones. There's some small ones on platforms like patreon that print and ship your magazines monthly or quarterly.
I'm not the person you responded to, nor am I in the market for gaming magazines myself, but I wanted to say that I very much appreciate you taking the time to write out some great suggestions. I had no idea these were still a thing, and now I do. One of the actually great things about reddit.
I don't think it's particularly "nobody wants to read it", just that effort to put one is greater than low effort content, for similar return. So why pay good journalist to do 2 articles a week when mediocre can 20 fluff ones.
The "how to do a thing in a game" also googles well.
Also I feel like "srs game journalism" and long form gaming related content moved to podcasts and youtube
There’s no money in genuine internet writing, period. This internet is quickly becoming a toxic waste dump of SEO engineered AI generated blogs and fake web traffic for to pump up paltry ad sales, ad sales that pay less because it’s not leading to purchases for ad buyers anymore.
Half of the crap on the front page are guides for menial shit in FF7 Rebirth.
“How to steal Tonberry King’s crown” something the game tells you how if you use Assess.
Spanfeller is such a shitstain.
Can I just take a moment to say how awful a lot guides are? A good chunk of guides on gaming websites I've used are pretty much unfinished and how often some of the most balant examples are often at the top of Google? Like it has been a pain to find a decent guide for some of FF7 Rebirth's side content.
100% You can find the same exact guide posted across multiple publications/sites. Hell even Sports Illustrated was posting this crap before their sale last week, because they went 100% AI.
IGN has been hit or miss for me when it comes to guides, but the site game8 can straight up go to hell. They have such an awful UI and when Xenoblade 3 released, they plagued the search results especially when you were trying to find an certain items.
Their guides are really detailed and descriptive, but the website, even on pc, is such a pain in the ass to use that I never use it. I use gamefaqs or neoseeker instead usually. It's a shame really.
Even the people who make the management decision to make them that way often don't *want* them that way. The biggest culprit is google's algorithm. If you don't game it, you're beaten by the people who do, who never get penalized.
It sucks. It's like steroids in pro sports - at this point, if you're not doing it, you should just be in another industry. The battle is lost.
They are usually all garbage. Every time I try to look up something for a game, "how to get the omega weapon", you get articles which spend 50% of the length explaining what the game is, "X game was released to critical acclaim in 2017, as a follow up to...", then 40% of the time explaining what weapons are "when you start X game you will want a weapon. Weapons are useful for doing damage to enemies, which is important to progress the game". Then finally in the last sentence it will say "You can find omega weapon at the end of the True Blood questline. Subscribe for more information on X game!"
Like why explain the game to me if I'm obviously already playing it and looking for a particular weapon. I assume making detailed guides are pretty costly for these websites, paying someone to not only beat the game, but 100% everything and write up the best way to do it. So to wring the most money out of the article, they fill them with bloat to retain people longer or just AI to do the same thing.
It does make me wonder how in the 90s and 00s, nerds on Gamefaqs put untold, unpaid hours into making guides upon guides, really well written ones too. Nowadays it's like no one has the motivation to do it.
>Nowadays it's like no one has the motivation to do it.
I've noticed that game wiki's have been suffering too. A lot of them are nowadays very barebones, even for the newest games.
Feels like everyone and everything migrated to discord servers, which sucks since discord is a shitty place to seek game guides.
God wikis are so garbage now. As a kid going on a wiki and reading everything about a thing I liked was what helped me become a super fan of a lot of properties (shout out to the Transformers Wiki, hardly "professional" but is written with love and tongue firmly in cheek).
Now, I checked out the Dune wiki after watching the 2 films and it is tiny and incredible dull, read the God of War wiki recently and the "trivia" was full of speculation and conjecture, and the less said about the Dark Souls wikis the better.
A lot of that is due to how ubiquitous Fandom/Wikia is, which is an absolutely dogshit series of websites currently owned by yet another group of private equity shitheads.
That's the even worse part: They don't. That is to say, the information is there on Discord, but it isn't presented in an easily-parsed, straightforward guide format. Rather, the information all exists in scattershot conversations, loose collections of pins, the odd FAQ channel, and linked-to Google docs that are impossible to find on your own. You have to manually sift through all of that yourself if you want to actually learn anything.
The absolutely worst part is that stuff on discord is not indexed by search engines. How am I even supposed to find these crappy FAQ channels, when I don't even know which discord server has them? Unlike forums or wikis, discord is walled off from the internet.
My earliest memories of using the internet is searching for game guides and cheats on various websites and forums. Back then stuff like this was everywhere; huge communities working on writing it down. I never would have imagined it but it seems that despite there being so many more people online today, the net nowadays feels much smaller.
>How am I even supposed to find these crappy FAQ channels, when I don't even know which discord server has them?
I've had multiple cases of needing to find guides for specific characters in a character-based game, going to a Discord server for that information, and trying to learn from it... Only to way later learn that there's actually a different, larger Discord server for the same character that's considered significantly more reliable. There was no way for me to even know that another server existed without someone telling me directly. It really is a crapshoot.
People still do that kind of thing, they just put it on YouTube. It's an objectively worse format for users, though. I don't want to watch a 10 minute video, I need a two sentence explanation for one specific thing. It was so much easier to use ctrl+f to find what I needed in a .txt file back in the day.
I really think think we might be in the minority here and it's a self-selection effect inherent to Reddit.
I mean I obviously agree with you, I'd much rather read a text guide than watch a video. But also, we are here in the comments on a primarily text-based social media platform.
I bet if you asked people who frequent TikTok and YouTube they'd say that they prefer the video guides. And there are a lot more users on those platforms than on this one.
I think it's more that the people providing the content (in this case game guides) want different things than the people who are consuming the content. I want to find an explanation on how to do something in a video game, YouTubers want to convert that into views on their channel that would otherwise go unnoticed. The same problem has infected most of today's media. It's not about informing, it's about getting you to watch by any means necessary and keeping you watching to maximize profits.
>Nowadays it's like no one has the motivation to do it.
Back in ye olde days there was an actual community built around this stuff. People knew the writer behind the guide, they'd participate on the game's forums and field questions and source some solutions. People would be ostracized for failing to credit someone else's work.
I think there *is* a lack of motivation to do the work properly now because someone can put all the time and energy into that and within a day of posting you'll see dozens of people ripping off the content without assigning credit while monetizing the hell out of it.
Who wants to put in 100+ hours of work only to watch some youtuber make bank off it?
Also the expectation for a guide in the past was some plain text formatted well.
People expect images, movies, and much more on guides or wikis now.
The barrier to entry was raised and the rewards (station/status in the community) was lessened.
I gotta imagine back then a lot of guides weren't rushed and often were put together viva an community effort. Like to this day, somehow fucking Gamefaqs message board can be more helpful then most gaming sites guides sometimes.
Yeah, the GameFAQs guides were product of love from people who liked the game enough to know everything about it and wanted to help people get through them. Modern guides are just pumped out as fast as possible, so when people google "how do I x" the site gets traffic. And once the hype dies, the guides die too. So if it was half-done, its going to stay half done, no use spending time on guides when its not gaining traffic and you can instead make a "guide" on a new game that just came out!
It's because they're hidden. Google's search algorithm did this. It just prioritizes those ad-riddled AI written "guides," instead of providing results to communities familiar with the game.
Once guides stop showing up in results, people don't want to waste time writing them.
Intrinsic motivation often produces higher quality, albeit more slowly. Extrinsic motivation can produce something fast, often at the expense of quality.
If you asked me nicely to make a hamburger, it'd be excellent. If you paid me $8/hr to make hamburgers all day, they'd be crap. If you paid me $100 to make hamburgers for an hour, they'd be great.
I use a couple that are decent, but more often than not, it's just either blatantly missing information or wrong. There was an IGN guide I looked up for how many Magnify Materia there are in Rebirth, and it's blatantly missing one that you can get.
Most 'guides' are now written by IA, unfortunately it feels like no one bothers writing the kind of content we could easily find on gamefaqs 10 years ago.
All the top results when you search for game tips are SEO-optimized garbage where you gotta scroll down half the page to find the one sentence that's actually important. The same garbage as finding cooking recipes where they tell you their life story first. SEO optimization is a plague.
> and how often some of the most balant examples are often at the top of Google?
Google somehow prioritizes those seemingly auto-generated garbage pages over wikis and discussions. I think its pretty undeniable that Google search has gotten far worse in more recent times.
So this is something I've often ran into when trying to look up Guides for Builds for various cRPGs over the years and I swear to God 99% of them are written from the perspective of somebody having borderline as much knowledge as the person making the guide, even if the build is for a "newbie" or "noob". No explanation of mechanics, no explanation of *why* something is chosen over another thing, etc. Or the information is straight up completely and totally wrong.
It's seriously frustrating when you're trying to find things that synergies well together, because often, nobody actually explains why they do or how they do leaving the player with a build they can follow, but they will not *understand* why it works or functions like it does.
I've notice that JRPGs at least the classics, tend to at least be very well documented when it comes to guides. Like games such as Final Fantasy 7, Chrono Trigger, and Persona 4 are so popular and beloved, that finding any help you need with those games is no problem. But modern ones on the other hand are just a complete dumpster fire for finding a decent guide. Sure you have some gems like CrycZ's guides for any Yakuza game. But a lot of modern JRPG's such as FF7 Rebirth, Xenoblade 3, Tales of Arise, Final Fantasy 16 etc all suffer from the exact issues plaguing any recent video game guide.
I’ve noticed that almost every guide for a minigame I’ve looked up has incorrect information in it. Like getting the chapter # wrong, the region the minigame takes place in wrong or saying the recommended level for a colosseum fight is 28 when it is actually 38.
Earlier today I was talking about this with a friend, and I gave a quick example off the top of my head: For a game like Elden Ring, a website like this might write an individual guide for e.g. how to find Reduvia, how to start Yura's questline, how to get through Murkwater Cave, how to unlock Patches as a vendor, and how to get Margit's Shackle. For those who haven't played Elden Ring, the bit here is that all of those actions essentially can't be done independently - all of them happen within the same vicinity, and it's difficult-to-impossible to trigger one without triggering (or at least being put in an intuitive position to trigger) the others. They're basically all individual steps of the same process.
It was meant to just be an exaggerated, demonstrative bit. But then I got curious, so I looked it up to see if anybody had actually done this. And, sure enough: Game Rant has an individual guide on every single one of those things. I tried to exaggerate for effect, and I accidentally demonstrated the literal truth of how absurdly atomized video game guides have become.
Those articles exist because there are always going to be hundreds of idiots googling very basic info and they want to have the top search result.
I'm not going to say it's inherently bad because it's not like they're tricking anyone or lying, they're just providing a service that there's clearly a demand for, but it's gross how it's become the only revenue stream for sites that actually used to report on stuff.
I miss the days of Prima Guided, back in the PS One era where you could buy a game and it’s complete guide book together. I still have the guide books for FF 10, 10-2, and 12. Got me through alllll the extra content and planning ahead for bosses and stuff.
Now we have half baked user “guides” worded horribly, formatted horribly, and with pics that barely help lead you correctly.
Depended on the Guide.
Unfortunately if you would like to read the rest of this post, go to the playonline website and put in the search code FF9BR4DYG1UD3
Oof, that stings. Those articles showing up in Google have helped me with like six things in the game so far and I still haven’t finished it.
One of them was the Tonberry King quest (I couldn’t figure out how to “steal” the crown, like what do you target with the steal command?) 😅
Equip the steal Materia on someone and once you stun him, his crown drops. Use the Steal command (NOT MUG) on the Crown on the ground, not on the Tonberry. It took me a few tries to understand what it meant because I kept trying to mug it and it wouldn't work lol. My dumbass figured that both would work, but only the Steal command will allow you to target the crown and yoink it.
Man, around 2010 I used to love browsing Kotaku during work breaks. I slowly backed away from the site over time as the content got worse and worse. Now I almost never go there. What a bummer.
This absolutely feels like a way for Spanfeller to shut Kotaku down and attempt to escape the blame without directly firing everyone. Well, what skeleton crew remains at least.
Even those people who do read Kotaku don’t read it for guides. And putting out 50 a week??? That’s absolutely absurd.
AI can't put out guides in a week for games that just dropped. That's not how Gen AI works, but I wouldn't put it past management to think that's precisely how it works.
What do you mean? I've asked ChatGPT for a guide on how join the Thieve's Guild in the Elder Scrolls 6, and it's given me a nice 7 step process for how to become the leader of the guild.
To think all this happened because their parent company Gawker decides to out a Billionaire and then report on Hulk Hogan's sex tape.
I hate that all the affiliate blogs got caught in the crossfire, but with the way Gawker conducted themselves they absolutely had the lawsuit coming.
Ever website on the internet gradually turns into SEO slush. I bet they’re just getting them to write all those guides so they can train AI on them and then replace the human staff.
I've worked for a high profile game journalism company like this and been through the interview process with others.
"50 guides per week" is more than just a matter of shallow content and insane work load. It's also that guide writers are paid by the word, and if you're making any effort to write good words, you're making less than a homeless person sitting outside of a low population area with a cup.
That's if they're paid at all.
These sites have a long list of "contributors" on their staff lists who are hired as freelance, or illegally as "interns" but make literally zero dollars. They're community members happy to "pay their dues" to get their feet in the door of game journalism.
As Tim Rogers, who left Kotaku in 2020 at 40 years old, recently said during a live stream: "You want to know how I got where I am today? I did exactly what I'm doing now for 20 years without pay".
> It's also that guide writers are paid by the word
I guess that and the need to hit all the keyword scraping search engines is why every "here's how you do X" guide to a game takes about fifteen paragraphs to get to the point and keeps repeating the full name of the game.
The more fluff they put before the more you scroll down and see the ads on the site. If they give you the info you want upfront you'd leave without seeing more ads.
Just to give more info to what u/Fiery1ce said, the longer you stay on the page, the better it still is. If you click into a guide from Google or any other search engine and don't immediately return, you're telling Google that the guide helped you. This can lead to higher page positions for that guide and then ad revenue from other users who may not be blocking ads.
By "Guide" they mean "Single webpage that tells you how to do a single thing in a game". Like:
>**"How to get to Flontopia in Mission Red Planet"**
>[Two paragraphs of nonsense]
Go east from Skwrj until you see it!
[Another paragraph of nonsense]
That's all the websites are anymore.
---
**EDIT**: Sorry, I forgot the most important part.
>*[Ad] [Ad] [Ad]*
>
>**"How to get to Flontopia in Mission Red Planet"**
>
>*[Ad] [Ad] [Ad]*
>
[Two paragraphs of nonsense] *[Ad]* *[Ad]*
Go east from Skwrj until you see it! *[Ad]* *[Ad]*
[Another paragraph of nonsense] *[Ad]* *[Ad]* *[Ad]* *[Ad]* *[Ad]* *[Ad]* *[Ad]* *[Ad]* *[Ad]* *[Ad]*
Basically, they don't want to own Kotaku or pay its employees, so why not just churn out some AI blogspam before shutting it down?
'guide' blogspam like that is honestly so annoying to stumble across
Is this a surprise to anyone? Gaming journalism has been having this problem for the last 15+ years. I remember when Jeff Gerstmann was fired from Gamespot, that’s when I realized nothing was going to be the same. Corporate culture started to scrap good content and talent a loooong time ago.
Then he went on to create Giant Bomb, a previously-awesome site that's now owned by (surprise surprise) a private equity company and which is now (surprise surprise) a shell of its former self.
A shell of a shell of a shell...
That said, props to the people running it now (Dan Ryckert?), I totally expected it to be dead by now after all the OGs left
Everyone, Gerstmann included, has moved to podcasting with their own patreons. Nobody really does written content anymore, which is a shame, but at least there's still people out there that love games covering games.
This mirrors the "stick to sports" edict that led to Deadspin's demise. Non-sports stuff like history and media crit and haters guides got tons of eyes.
It's astonishing how blind they are to the business they're in.
Becoming a purely utilitarian, 100% SEO-oriented, guides site is a race to the bottom in every way. When you give up editorial identity (regardless of what you believe of Kotaku's) you also become completely replaceable. You're just another guides site, and competition is *insane* there. They will f\*ck around banking everything on AI then find out that there are tons of people more agile at it that operate on much smaller overhead, and don't have to turn millions of dollars in profit every quarter to justify the acquisition of the site.
They'll sell the site in a year, like Deadspin and everything else.
It’s unfortunately not that they’re blind, it’s that they literally do not care.
None of the people involved in these decisions give two tenths of a hamster shit if their companies exist a year from now. They exist as human pump-and-dump schemes. Get in, maximize SEO-ability, ride the wave of temporary non-retentive traffic to a single fantastic quarterly report, and then jump ship with a golden parachute to the next thing they’re going to ruin.
They have no sentiment or concern for- honestly a lot of the time no real *consciousness* of- the businesses they run. They want to see “line go up”; all of these companies are just the titles of the graphs.
They’re not stupid, or naive, or inexperienced- they’re evil. And I know it sounds hyperbolic to label them as that but I just don’t know what else I can call a person that is motivated solely by the pursuit of wealth to the exclusion of all other aspects of human experience.
It doesn't help when one of your writers brings a massive defamation suit down on your head after using a national platform to attack a minor who wore facepaint to a sports game.
Yeah I feel like the dialogue with Deadspin is matching the dialogue with Kotaku. They are nominally about sports/gaming, but they do a ton of drama/rage bait/political commentary, which makes them appealing to an insular bubble of fans (of which, r/games is a part of apparently), but turns a bunch of people off outside of said bubble. I don’t think that core fan base is enough to sustain itself.
This new directive from upper management prob means that they want to sell the site (what they did with deadspin) although this time they don't want to pay severance fees so they want all the staff to quit on their own
Mark my words this site is about to get sold in the next weeks/months
Maybe start hiring people that don't hate their audience. That would be a good place to start in games journalism.
Also not click baiting everything. I understand the nature of it and I understand it's always been a thing, but the way it done today is so ridiculous.
Quality gaming publications don't really seem financially viable at this point; at least purely written content. The only content that seems to generate any buzz or engagement amounts to rage-bait, but at the horrible cost of having writers (and sometimes whole publications) targeted by over-emotional gamers with a chip on their shoulder.
These executives want publications to be operated as lean and barebones as possible without realizing if you want good content you're going to need some sort of money put into making sure good content can be written. The fact that major publications with (what would loosely be considered) prestige and reputation don't even bother doing things like interesting documentaries or developer interviews. Everything is always a thinly-veiled advertisement for a game, a review for a game, or occasionally some stupid shit to get Capital-G-Gamers riled up.
>Quality gaming publications don't really seem financially viable at this point; at least purely written content.
The internet media ecosystem has proven to be a rat race of VC gamblers, overinflated ad valuations, fraudulent "pivots to video" and short term blindness. Remember when Vice was valued at **5 billion dollars**? It collapsed in months, what a joke. In the case of G/O media and others, they're now in a desperate race to turn a profit on the preposterous acquisitions they made. They will fail.
I'm sure there is a possibility of a sustainable games journalism reasonably scoped, but competition in that market is poisoned at the moment. Outside of two or three massive institutions, the only outlets that seem to survive are modest, personality driven media (the Aftermaths, Second Wind, Remap, MinnMax, you name it).
I think long term, everything becoming based on Ads killed these places. Ads pay pennies now, and everything has become getting clicks at all costs.
Dunno about the others you listed, but places like Second Wind survive mainly due to sites like Patreon allowong them to get funding them directly from viewers. Ads just don't pay anymore, and while I'd like for subscription models to come back, people are too used to free articles.
I don't think quality, written journalism is possible in the gaming sphere any more.
And then you look at their patreon revenue and can already see the decline month over month although the patreon members are rising. Like you said, there is no money in it long term.
We'll see. I think the Second Wind team themselves knew the initial spike in revenue was an anomaly. That's why they didn't take salary at the beginning. The issue is not that the revenue is falling, but rather where it'll stabilize.
I forgot about Vice's valuation. They had some interesting stuff, but 5 billion? That's up there with FAZE Clan being valued at 1 billion, then trading at like $0.50 five months later.
NYT at least was very profitable in 2023
> Meredith Kopit Levien, president and chief executive officer, The New York Times Company, said, “2023
was a strong year for The Times that showcased the power of our strategy to be the essential subscription
for every curious person seeking to understand and engage with the world. Our market leading news and
lifestyle products commanded large and deeply engaged audiences, and our multi-revenue stream model
contributed to improving profitability. We realized strong annual growth in earnings per share, adjusted
operating profit, and free cash flow, which each hit their highest point since our digital transformation
began more than a decade ago.”
https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2024/02/NYT-Press-Release-Q4-2023-Final-gYtpe4NB.pdf
I don't read NYT or WSJ, but I'm glad to see going to a paid model is actually working out well for them. Exclusively relying on advertising was never a healthy revenue model for journalism. Not just because ads pay shit, but also because it creates such a strong and clear conflict of interest.
It's true, and I'm also happy. But it's also part of a larger and sadder story for journalism. NYT is the exception to rule right now. Even very prominent news rooms are seeing brutal cuts. LA times for example. And no matter how good the NYT may be at news, local news sources have an irreplaceable role in journalism below the national level. Someone needs to keep politicians and corporations and others accountable with investigative reporting on the local level as well.
> The only content that seems to generate any buzz or engagement amounts to rage-bait
That's a self fulfilling prophecy though. If a site posts stuff that makes people mad they might click on it to seethe about the contents of the article on social media and it might go viral as youtubers in turn farm it for their own outrage bait which is gonna drive traffic short term.. but people also remember which sites pissed them off and will be less likely to go there otherwise. Because they got a bad impression of that site.
The smaller staff owned outlets are the only way to deal with the executive stuff, but they'll never be big enough to fill the gap. I'm thinking about places like Remap and Aftermath.
> Quality gaming publications don't really seem financially viable at this point
Look at gaming magazines (the few that still exist) - they have everything you want. Really well written articles, informative, quality, variety. I wish more people would go back to magazines instead of perpetually surfing the net.
Kotaku’s been scraping the bottom of the barrel for over a decade now. Do you know which media outlet did the most to uncover the sexual misconduct scandals at Activision? The Wall Street Journal. Somehow the biggest news story in video gaming escaped every single gaming “journalist” out there.
Jason Schreier claimed he had been investigating the story for years but didn't publish anything because he couldn't corroborate it. Which is strange because it didn't stop him or other Kotaku editors from publishing without corroboration all the time, including when it came to accusing other game devs of sexual abuse
>The only content that seems to generate any buzz or engagement amounts to rage-bait, but at the horrible cost of having writers (and sometimes whole publications) targeted by over-emotional gamers with a chip on their shoulder.
So when Kotaku writes rage-bait, deliberately manufactured to enrage people, the blame falls on the people who respond? In what way is that a 'horrible cost' and not simply the consequence of their own actions?
Kotaku and other outlets CHOOSE to be contrarian and combative by nature rather than being genuinely hobbyist oriented.
>So when Kotaku writes rage-bait, deliberately manufactured to enrage people, the blame falls on the people who respond? In what way is that a 'horrible cost' and not simply the consequence of their own actions?
It sounds unfair but that's the real truth. Until the public doesn't realize that this has been the intention for over a decade, Kotaku and whoever take it's place (if ever) will continue to do so. They know it's unethical and it's not illegal, so there is nothing to lose here.
This will only stop if a shift happens in the social media space (Twitter contributes a lot to this) or in search engine rankings.
Yep. Seems a self-fulfilling prophecy to me.
1) do bottom of the barrel SEO articles to boost clicks
2) traffic increases but quality plummets
3) fire actually content creators, hire ex-buzzfeed writers, site becomes laughing stock, people eventually start moving on
4) traffic decreases
5) somehow we're to blame for the enshittification
I largely agree, one recommendation I do have is EDGE magazine. The quality is really high and has remained so for years and it’s available digitally as well as physical print.
Except kotaku never stood next to quality.
They eere ragebaiting site. Perhaps to many kotaku articles proven to be blatant lies and it became a big issue. Like sbi article or claiming nintendo uses slurs in smash bros without even checking lyrics of the song.
And nothing of value was lost.
Kotaku, just like any other ex Gawker Media publication taken over by G/O, is the journalistic equivalent of eating half-rotten food out of a garbage can. They're even trashier than McDonalds.
They constantly violate NDAs and post rage bait articles for clicks harder than the Daily Mail (and that's saying something.) Best example was when they falsely drummed up headlines that Smash Bros Ultimate contained ableist slurs in a song added to the game for the Joker DLC.
It's truly trash tier 'games journalism'
I fail to see the problem here as Kotaku these last few years became less a site for gaming news and more a site for complaining about politics and maybe a paragraph about games. Not to mention the leaks they published made sure that a fair few companies never gave them the chance to even review their games or products on time.
Honestly, probably for the best. Closest thing to being put out of it's misery they can hope for.
Kotaku's always had its issues, but these last few years have just been pathetic.
Writing about video games on the internet hasn't been a viable way to make money for like a decade already. That's why all the other websites switched more and more to video.
Outfits like Kinda Funny are made up of all the people who used to make money writing about games, who realized they needed to switch to basically just being glorified youtubers to keep up.
Kotaku is still putting out gems like "The tik tok ban shouldn't happen because memes are funny" so you know. No great loss.
Games journalism needs to cover industry practices as well as current releases. Both are done by Polygon and Kotaku and the like. But games journalism also needs to discuss the scene, what players are doing and not merely what the industry is doing. That, I feel, has nearly disappeared as some of the biggest gaming scene news have gotten at most quiet whispers at those sites. That demise has made me wonder how long it would be until the other two major areas of game journalism would fall.
If you are telling your gaming journalist site to no longer do journalism, that's a sign of surrender. It's an admission that the site is going to be dead soon.
Hopefully this Aftermath place blooms. We need new platforms. It's a tough world because there's no money in advertising anymore and you are competing with AI nonsense. Hopefully someone figures it out because an artistic scene without anybody covering it is a bit lifeless. I mean, even now where nobody covers what players are doing it has become a bit empty.
As it has been written, they who would produce rage-bait, manufacture outrage and who despise there target audience will ultimately eat shit.
Congratulations, you played yourself.
Game “news” doesn’t matter anymore. No one is clicking on an article besides old boomers like me. Everyone is either seeing the news on Twitter or some podcast/streamer is talking about it.
Pivoting to guides isn’t going to same them either, unfortunately. Again, no one wants to dig through a however many word guide to see “you need to put this thing here to solve this puzzle”, they want Google to feed them that specific 5 seconds of a video when they google it.
Gaming journalism is pointless anyway, a dude in his room with a pc making essays has more influence in the gaming landscape than these companies full of college graduates lol
And also a lot of 'professional' reviews suck, people who can't even play games and have little media literacy are the ones evaluating them a lot of times, saying what's right and wrong, organizing online witch hunts...
Game journalists did this to themselves and Kotaku was one of the biggest contributors to it. A steady stream of low quality clickbait destroyed any relationship they had with gamers and any reader loyalty. Clickbait was great at getting clicks, but terrible at retaining readers. Nearly everyone participated in the race to the bottom and this is what the bottom looks like. Youtube became the go to place for game reviews and information.
Guides are the only thing left they can use to drive traffic. It is guides or shut down.
I remember getting into 1up, Kotaku, and N4G around the time the PS3 and 360 were announced and subsequently released. It felt like a pretty good time for game news but with the rise in popularity of YouTube, Podcasts, and Twitch, I just stopped caring about news sites altogether. Was big on NeoGaf and ResetEra forum style sites during the One and PS4 era, but I just feel like I can get all of that news and discussion from here now so it just doesn’t cross my mind. Though, I will say my tastes in what I enjoy definitely changed with age. Reviews and speculation just aren’t nearly as important to me as 10+ years ago.
So publishers had like multiple reviewers with each their own preferences, genre choices, etc etc. Naturally the person viewing is drawn more so to a personality in order to convey a "static mean." You can still watch everyone sure, but there's that guy that likes niche-roguelikes and played KoToR back in the day so you are more drawn to their views.
Well you might as well watch a singular youtuber for straight reviews where you respect the reviewer more than the publisher itself. This is why gaming journalism and literally every type of journalism is suffering versus an online personality. CNN? Why? The high brow Movie critic or random youtube but relatable essayist? Included in your internet price anyways vs paying for shit ass news?
Polygon basically went from having a focus on stories that few others were writing, to focusing on top 10 guides for everything. There's no money in gaming journalism anymore.
There hasn't been money in it for a good long while now. Almost every gaming site has been bogged down into a general IGN-styled pop/nerd culture clickfarm. GamesRadar used to have good articles and great podcasts, then was just reduced to churning out articles that were just "The Defenders: When They Might Show Up Again Now That Netflix Series Has Wrapped" which is then a long-winded article that boils down to "We don't know" Polygon is now just "Top 10 Anime to Watch if You Loved Playing Game X", and the demise of GameFAQs means any guide for a game is either carpet bombed with ads or is a bloated article that spends the first five paragraphs explaining what the game is before ending with "Below you'll find the solution to X"
>general IGN-styled pop/nerd culture clickfarm It feels like a sign of how far we've fallen that this is being referred to as "IGN-styled", given that there was a time when even IGN wasn't quite like this (at least not to the same extent). We can no longer imagine a time when this wasn't the default for games writing.
I was referring more to their topical coverage, as even IGN was never a games-only publication outside of its first few years. They had a *lot* of coverage in the day spanning many a topic: Video games (broken down into sections for each platform), tech, sports, cars (yes, cars), comics, movies, TV, babes (yes, you read that right), and anime.
Right, that's fair (and god the "babes" thing was cringe). As somebody who spent a fair bit of time on IGN in the early 10's, I just have fond memories of some of the writing that used to be done on it. I think back to stuff like [Greg Miller writing about inFamous](https://www.ign.com/articles/2011/05/05/playing-through-the-pain-with-infamous); it wasn't necessarily the deepest writing in the world, but there was a sort of base-level passion behind it. Then IGN spent the next decade pivoting toward just spamming its front page as hard as possible with every little crumb of pop culture news.
IGN actually seemed to have had a fun atmosphere to it in its heyday. Co-founder Matt Casamassina called it "the only job where you could keep a bottle of vodka at your desk with no questions asked", and fellow Nintendo editor Mark Bozon (who is coincidentally the brother of Shantae creator Matt Bozon) likened it to almost a playground. I remember their year end awards coverage from 2006-2008 was actually pretty well done because they did lists for nearly everything they covered. 2011 was when things really started decline, and I remember they stopped doing IGN Weekly and started to push their forums a lot more. They also removed the links to their old-school sections so you had to finagle a bit to access the old PS1 or N64 sections.
Probably not coincidentally, that was also around the time when they pivoted away from old-style guides (as in guides that were singularly authored, cohesive, and totally unique) and toward wiki guides, which would increasingly both rely on user contribution and atomize their content as time went on. People forget that there was a time when IGN was essentially making their own GameFAQs-style walkthroughs for every game that came out, complete with [bespoke graphic design](https://i.imgur.com/WSHETIv.png) and some genuine personality injected into the writing.
Dude Matt C was the man back then. He was basically in the late 90s the only guy who had as much knowledge of Nintendo and their inner workings as someone working in there. Loved his coverage and passion and how it didn’t have the corporate bias of something like Nintendo Power. Made speculation during the N64 and GameCube era a real treat.
The whole Nintendo team was great. Matt and Craig's coverage in the late GC days during the run up to the Wii was stellar. I swear those guys never left their desks when all the demos and spiel about the "Revolution" hit. Later on Craig would even mention network quality and voice chat quality in his DS game reviews.
That’s the attitude the magazines had in the day too. Jeff Green of Computer Gaming World game talks about how everyone in the office used to clock in and immediately jump into Quake with the rest of the office. He has no idea how they put out some of those magazines. It sounded like the coolest job as a teen but it’s gone.
When IGN was a website with a black background with red icons for each console. And none of the sites that were linked even noted IGNs overall ownership.
Gamefaqs guides have always been user-generated. Fandom owning the site has not changed that. There was a bounty system at one point to incentivize guide creation for new releases that were in demand, but I'm not sure if they've brought those back, as I'm not in the FAQ-writing community. There’s a news tab on the site as well, but that’s always been aggregated from Gamespot and other websites.
Fandom? As in hot piece of garbage formerly known as 'Wikia' fandom? They bought gamefaqs??
Redventures basically bought a portfolio of websites just to get CNET (which they horribly devalued; just recently they got caught using AI to write articles)… they sold the rest to Fandom a bit ago. Honestly as a long-time user of the site I don’t think it is the worst thing that could have happened to it, but in this day and age once you’re sold off, the future of your site is at the whims of the suits anyways, as we’ve seen here with Kotaku…
It could be worse. Half of Gamespot's "articles" these days are "This gamer product is on sale, but supplies are running out fast!" headlines for pages filled with sponsored links. Though I might find that preferable to this annoying trend from PC Gamer and GamesRadar to write these 30-word long quippy hipster headlines.
This crap didn't just kill games reporting either. Android Police is 99% sponsored cancer now.
If anything, Gamespot managed to actuall innovate within the gamespace by offering articles related and/or interesting to gamers. After Ahoc left a vaccuum with his gun videos, Gamespot pushed an excellent trend and made Jonathan Ferguson internet famous
Ferguson is the only reason I still know GameSpot exists
I think there is money in good gaming journalism, but it's a lot harder to make it as a website exclusively dedicated to it. A lot of the best gaming journalists have either been scooped up by major *paid* general purpose news publications (think Jason Schreier at Bloomberg), or have shifted over to YouTube and Patreon. A big reason for this is that ads on news sites do not make the kind of money they used to. Advertisers get a lot more bang for their buck advertising on social media platforms that offer much more effective ad targeting, so that is where they spend more of their money.
> A big reason for this is that ads on news sites do not make the kind of money they used to. Advertisers get a lot more bang for their buck advertising on social media platforms that offer much more effective ad targeting, so that is where they spend more of their money. The EIC of a popular political blog (I think Talking Points Memo?) was saying a few weeks ago that ad revenues have dropped by something like 80% over the past ~15 years. No business can survive that without major changes. Ninja edit: this is the post going into details, with a top-line ad revenue decrease of 95%, driven mostly by the drop in ad rates, but pushed lower as they diversified revenue sources away from ads. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/josh-replies-to-the-slings-and-arrows-of-those-claiming-digital-news-advertising-is-going-great
>I think there is money in good gaming journalism, but it's a lot harder to make it as a website exclusively dedicated to it. I think this also has a lot to do with the slowdown in development. There just isn't as much gaming news in general compared to a decade ago. Games cost so much and take so long to develop now. That, and publishers typically have their own news delivery platforms and streams now. Gone is the day of big press conferences that news media would be there reporting on. Now, publishers speak directly to their audiences.
> and the demise of GameFAQs Huh? GameFAQs is still around though?
It’s a database of plain text that has no significant editorial content and is largely user-generated; in short, it’s cheap as hell to run.
I can't stand all of those sites as a result. I hate how Polygon/GamesRader and their 10 clones all churn out the same padded How-To articles for the most obvious and mundane things in games that should only take a sentence to answer but they manage to do it in five paragraphs.
Journalism was never supposed to be about the profit so therein lies the rub. Capitalism can ruin anything
Talkradar was fantastic back in the day!
> GamesRadar used to have good articles and great podcasts TalkRadar 80ish-120. If you know, you know. One of the podcasts that made me fall in love with Podcasts. That year or so they did was fucking incredible. And in like 2009 it felt revolutionary.
It's a universal problem in publishing, not just gaming. The interesting, thoughtful stuff rarely pays the bills. You either focus on that and cultivate a smaller but appreciative customer base that reliably pays up front, survive on investments or donors, or churn out the dogshit that draws in crowds. Pamphlets in the 1700s and newspapers in the 1800s had all the same problems. As in other areas of publishing, more special interest outlets like this new "aftermath" site will appear and disappear as someone gets a bug up their ass about doing "real writing" and then run face-first into the problem of real funding. Any number of amazing literary and film journals have come and gone in the last many decades. I've already seen this cycle happen in gaming several times. The fundamental problem is that the market just doesn't sustain very much serious publishing. If you want to be paid, you're going to have to get someone to pay you--and that requires making something they want enough to pay for.
People complain about the quality of content nowadays, but the sad truth is that nobody cares enough to pay for good content. Otherwise, companies would still be paying writers for it. People put out shitty top 10 lists because that's what people actually consume.
> People complain about the quality of content nowadays, but the sad truth is that nobody cares enough to pay for good content. Yup.
The industry is too big to follow now. This isn't the 90s where you were getting ~5 quality releases a year. We're getting 5-10 a month sometimes now. And hundreds of great indie games. It ain't worth checking news sites to find some drip of info about a game that won't come in for 5 years when you can play good ones now. And even if someone does in depth journalism about some game chances are I haven't played it and never will because there are too many games to play them all.
> This isn't the 90s where you were getting ~5 quality releases a year. We're getting 5-10 a month sometimes now. And hundreds of great indie games. You'd think that would make curation and critical evaluation even more valuable.
The current state of almost any video game discussion shows that critical evaluation is *not* what people desire for game journalism, at least not in the genuine sense. A good handful of people seem like they want to be told how to feel about the latest game release, then go and regurgitate that elsewhere on the internet. Genuinely insightful discussion or evaluation isn't inflammatory enough to warrant engagement.
I wonder how many people who complain about "journalism" are paying, or even have ever paid, for content directly? From what I've seen the people complaining about the quality of writing on news sites are the same people who laugh at the idea of paying for content as they run ad-blockers to make sure they never have to see any advertising. Where do people expect the money to come from in these situations?
The money is on Youtube. People can make decent money running their own channel, but there isn't much reason to go through a website.
Right - it’s self publication with YouTube as the distributor. It pays well for a lot of people.
And the issue is that there aren't many great YouTube journalists. Like most of the big channels just repeat stories written by other people, often get facts wrong, or do good work but release very very infrequently especially compared to written sites
thats pretty much all of youtube for most topics and subjects. These are just people regurgitating wikipedia and other peoples reporting to their niche audiences. You will never learn any actual new information that was gained by them exclusively.
I'd argue there is, especially in niches, they are just, well, niche. The proper long term well analyzed stuff doesn't get as much clicks but clearly well enough that channels like [Resonant Arc](https://www.youtube.com/@ResonantArc/) can make it into a job
Personally - and I don't say this with any grudge or anything, games journalism just kind of stopped being relevant to me. When I was a wee lass, magazines were this outlook at gaming that I could not get anywhere else and it was coupled with an infectious excitement for the medium. To me, both of these qualities got lost sometime after the transition to game blog style media. To me, it's too much rage, hate, anger, bait, grandstanding, incitement, hatebaiting, accusations, slammings and what not, for me to be something I enjoy reading. Yet joy was all I ever wanted out of my games media. I hold no ill feelings towards folks. They're perfectly in their right to write how and what they want and it seems that angry media paid a lot more bills than media that brimmed with joy and optimism. I get it. Still I've made it a habit to filter my entertainment media so it's not constantly gutpunching me with negativity. It's cool if folks like that. But it's not relevant to me. I am obviously just one figure but I'm saving a lot of money by no longer buying magazines. Money that goes towards gaming content creators that better meet my desire for what I want.
>To me, it's too much rage, hate, anger, bait, grandstanding, incitement, hatebaiting, accusations, slammings and what not, for me to be something I enjoy reading 100%. I'll also bullshit articles like one that suggests they have some info on a new Red Dead game and when you actually read it it's just some baseless speculation from nobody associated with RockStar at all. It's just a useless article. How many of those can you be tricked into reading before you just tune them all out? I certainly had a number.
Yeah why would I want to go on a website that's ostensibly about entertainment that I like, and get constant negativity, reports about companies acting shitty to their employees, or just straight up be scolded about something. Does anyone writing for these websites enjoy anything
games journalists nowadays are people who think games journalism is beneath them so they bring their political journalism energy to the job as a way to live out their fantasies
> There's no money in gaming journalism anymore. Hasn't been for a long time. Over a decade ago, I worked as a "staff writer" (actually not staff, they only hired independent contractors they didn't have to pay benefits to) for a major gaming news site and was paid a flat monthly wage that barely covered about a third of my rent. I did the math to see how much that came out to per labor-hour I spent and found out that I was, on average, making less than minimum wage. So I reduced the amount of effort I put in, and ended up getting a talking-to from management about the reduced quality of my work. I told them that I was capping my monthly input at what would make me $10/hr and if they didn't like it, they could pay me more. They ended up pretending the conversation never happened.
There's money in games journalism. The problem is these corporate owners have driven away all their talent, don't invest in original content, and are so reliant on just Google traffic - all while doing the same guides, tips, tricks whatever the fuck at every website. These websites don't have audiences anymore because they just chase Google for money instead of making their own money. Subscription models, merchandise, events, work for hire projects, there's lot of ways to do it, but these old-school CFOs just want constant six figure deals that don't exist anymore for media. They don't build brands with their talent, they don't create varied sources of revenue to protect against slower quarters... nope, just Google, Google, Google. Source: Was the EIC of Escapist under Gamurs Group who does this exact same strategy and it doesn't work longterm.
> Subscription models, merchandise, events, work for hire projects, there's lot of ways to do it, Merch and events aren't going to fund journalism in any meaningful way. Subscription models can, but games aren't important enough for people to pay subscriptions to read about. Even regular news sites are struggling with the subscription model.
Yeah, that's the thing, to get enough out of subscription you'd have to actually spend some time reading what you subscribed to... instead of playing the games they write about.
Correction, there is money in games journalism. There isn't exponential growth that private equity/VC demands when they buy companies. See all the new independent sites/podcasts doing quite well for themselves (but nothing that's going to attract millions in investment).
A lot of those independents are already established personalities like Jeff Gerstmann; people who have broken off from once well-known and respected publications that succumbed to the shitdemand and already have a modest fanbase. I expect that at somepoint, that will wane too when people get tired of spending Patreon money.
>Patreon I'm pretty sure a large chunk of the world economy is built on people being too lazy to regularly cull their automatically renewing subscriptions.
We'll see. Waypoint built a brand pretty much from scratch in 2016-2017 (?). Austin Walker and Patrick Klepek were known commodities from Giant Bomb, but I don't think they were huge. They and eventually Rob and Cado (along with various others over time, shoutouts to Danielle, Natalie and Ren) built up the brand to be self-sustaining to where Remap is today. I hope they continue to grow and make compelling content.
> There's no money in gaming journalism The internet has been pretty terrible for professional games journalism IMO. I still buy physical gaming magazines because they're actually well written, full of interviews with developers/publishers/artists/programmers, actually show a wide variety of games instead of just whatever is most popular, and have a bit of integrity and you have the same writers on the team every month so you get a feel of each real persons preferences. I'd encourage more people to support magazines again. They're honestly so much better written and composed than anything on the net.
Any specific recommendations? I honestly forgot game magazines were a thing even though I spent hours reading through them when I was much younger.
* Retro Gamer is very good - has had a long tenanted regular writing staff who each get their own editorials and have their own features regularly. It's good. They cover a LOT and they interview a huge arrange of programmers and artists. * Edge is still going and still quite good * Freeze64 * I quite like PLAY - it has a lot of reviews and previews of games that are incredibly obscure. Stuff that you literally wouldn't know about if you just look on the net. It's quite interesting what they feature. * Old School Gamer Magazine * PC Gamer * PC PowerPlay There's a few more, but those are the big published ones. There's some small ones on platforms like patreon that print and ship your magazines monthly or quarterly.
I'm not the person you responded to, nor am I in the market for gaming magazines myself, but I wanted to say that I very much appreciate you taking the time to write out some great suggestions. I had no idea these were still a thing, and now I do. One of the actually great things about reddit.
I don't think it's particularly "nobody wants to read it", just that effort to put one is greater than low effort content, for similar return. So why pay good journalist to do 2 articles a week when mediocre can 20 fluff ones. The "how to do a thing in a game" also googles well. Also I feel like "srs game journalism" and long form gaming related content moved to podcasts and youtube
There is barely money in regular journalism.
There’s no money in genuine internet writing, period. This internet is quickly becoming a toxic waste dump of SEO engineered AI generated blogs and fake web traffic for to pump up paltry ad sales, ad sales that pay less because it’s not leading to purchases for ad buyers anymore.
Half of the crap on the front page are guides for menial shit in FF7 Rebirth. “How to steal Tonberry King’s crown” something the game tells you how if you use Assess. Spanfeller is such a shitstain.
Can I just take a moment to say how awful a lot guides are? A good chunk of guides on gaming websites I've used are pretty much unfinished and how often some of the most balant examples are often at the top of Google? Like it has been a pain to find a decent guide for some of FF7 Rebirth's side content.
I suspect a lot of these guides are just scraping content from other guides, with AI or an author who didn't actually play through the content.
A lot of that, a lot of rushing stuff out to be the first, and a lot of being more concerned with SEO and showing off ads over a good guide.
100% You can find the same exact guide posted across multiple publications/sites. Hell even Sports Illustrated was posting this crap before their sale last week, because they went 100% AI.
IGN's guide format is unreadable and blatantly prioritizes click count over functionality.
IGN has been hit or miss for me when it comes to guides, but the site game8 can straight up go to hell. They have such an awful UI and when Xenoblade 3 released, they plagued the search results especially when you were trying to find an certain items.
Also Game8 guides are just straight up *wrong* and quickly outdated half the time.
It also has the worst mobile site, and you're just bombarded by ads as soon as you click.
Their guides are really detailed and descriptive, but the website, even on pc, is such a pain in the ass to use that I never use it. I use gamefaqs or neoseeker instead usually. It's a shame really.
And No one who writes or works on those guides want them like that. That is 100% a management/marketing decision for ad revenue.
Even the people who make the management decision to make them that way often don't *want* them that way. The biggest culprit is google's algorithm. If you don't game it, you're beaten by the people who do, who never get penalized. It sucks. It's like steroids in pro sports - at this point, if you're not doing it, you should just be in another industry. The battle is lost.
I'm playing RDR2 right now and sometimes when I Google something, I find an IGN page on it with no actual information, just "more to come soon!"
They are usually all garbage. Every time I try to look up something for a game, "how to get the omega weapon", you get articles which spend 50% of the length explaining what the game is, "X game was released to critical acclaim in 2017, as a follow up to...", then 40% of the time explaining what weapons are "when you start X game you will want a weapon. Weapons are useful for doing damage to enemies, which is important to progress the game". Then finally in the last sentence it will say "You can find omega weapon at the end of the True Blood questline. Subscribe for more information on X game!" Like why explain the game to me if I'm obviously already playing it and looking for a particular weapon. I assume making detailed guides are pretty costly for these websites, paying someone to not only beat the game, but 100% everything and write up the best way to do it. So to wring the most money out of the article, they fill them with bloat to retain people longer or just AI to do the same thing.
That's like when you go to a movie theater and they advertise themselves. "No shit. Im here watching a movie aren't I?"
It does make me wonder how in the 90s and 00s, nerds on Gamefaqs put untold, unpaid hours into making guides upon guides, really well written ones too. Nowadays it's like no one has the motivation to do it.
>Nowadays it's like no one has the motivation to do it. I've noticed that game wiki's have been suffering too. A lot of them are nowadays very barebones, even for the newest games. Feels like everyone and everything migrated to discord servers, which sucks since discord is a shitty place to seek game guides.
God wikis are so garbage now. As a kid going on a wiki and reading everything about a thing I liked was what helped me become a super fan of a lot of properties (shout out to the Transformers Wiki, hardly "professional" but is written with love and tongue firmly in cheek). Now, I checked out the Dune wiki after watching the 2 films and it is tiny and incredible dull, read the God of War wiki recently and the "trivia" was full of speculation and conjecture, and the less said about the Dark Souls wikis the better.
A lot of that is due to how ubiquitous Fandom/Wikia is, which is an absolutely dogshit series of websites currently owned by yet another group of private equity shitheads.
Thank Fandom for that
The UESP for Elder Scrolls is great, but that's because it isn't on one of these aggregate sites
Who the fuck would write an entire game guide on discord? What a massive waste of time that would be.
That's the even worse part: They don't. That is to say, the information is there on Discord, but it isn't presented in an easily-parsed, straightforward guide format. Rather, the information all exists in scattershot conversations, loose collections of pins, the odd FAQ channel, and linked-to Google docs that are impossible to find on your own. You have to manually sift through all of that yourself if you want to actually learn anything.
The absolutely worst part is that stuff on discord is not indexed by search engines. How am I even supposed to find these crappy FAQ channels, when I don't even know which discord server has them? Unlike forums or wikis, discord is walled off from the internet. My earliest memories of using the internet is searching for game guides and cheats on various websites and forums. Back then stuff like this was everywhere; huge communities working on writing it down. I never would have imagined it but it seems that despite there being so many more people online today, the net nowadays feels much smaller.
>How am I even supposed to find these crappy FAQ channels, when I don't even know which discord server has them? I've had multiple cases of needing to find guides for specific characters in a character-based game, going to a Discord server for that information, and trying to learn from it... Only to way later learn that there's actually a different, larger Discord server for the same character that's considered significantly more reliable. There was no way for me to even know that another server existed without someone telling me directly. It really is a crapshoot.
People still do that kind of thing, they just put it on YouTube. It's an objectively worse format for users, though. I don't want to watch a 10 minute video, I need a two sentence explanation for one specific thing. It was so much easier to use ctrl+f to find what I needed in a .txt file back in the day.
I really think think we might be in the minority here and it's a self-selection effect inherent to Reddit. I mean I obviously agree with you, I'd much rather read a text guide than watch a video. But also, we are here in the comments on a primarily text-based social media platform. I bet if you asked people who frequent TikTok and YouTube they'd say that they prefer the video guides. And there are a lot more users on those platforms than on this one.
I think it's more that the people providing the content (in this case game guides) want different things than the people who are consuming the content. I want to find an explanation on how to do something in a video game, YouTubers want to convert that into views on their channel that would otherwise go unnoticed. The same problem has infected most of today's media. It's not about informing, it's about getting you to watch by any means necessary and keeping you watching to maximize profits.
Yeah that's definitely a problem too. Many, many people don't even realize they are being manipulated in such a way. It's insidious.
Yeah I audibly groan when I go to True Achievements and the guide is just an embedded YouTube video. Text is so much quicker.
The 30 second ad before the video even starts is going to eat more of my time than spamming a few searches on a .txt file.
>Nowadays it's like no one has the motivation to do it. Back in ye olde days there was an actual community built around this stuff. People knew the writer behind the guide, they'd participate on the game's forums and field questions and source some solutions. People would be ostracized for failing to credit someone else's work. I think there *is* a lack of motivation to do the work properly now because someone can put all the time and energy into that and within a day of posting you'll see dozens of people ripping off the content without assigning credit while monetizing the hell out of it. Who wants to put in 100+ hours of work only to watch some youtuber make bank off it?
Also the expectation for a guide in the past was some plain text formatted well. People expect images, movies, and much more on guides or wikis now. The barrier to entry was raised and the rewards (station/status in the community) was lessened.
> The barrier to entry was raised Clearly you haven't witnessed some of the peak ascii art present in old guides.
I gotta imagine back then a lot of guides weren't rushed and often were put together viva an community effort. Like to this day, somehow fucking Gamefaqs message board can be more helpful then most gaming sites guides sometimes.
Yeah, the GameFAQs guides were product of love from people who liked the game enough to know everything about it and wanted to help people get through them. Modern guides are just pumped out as fast as possible, so when people google "how do I x" the site gets traffic. And once the hype dies, the guides die too. So if it was half-done, its going to stay half done, no use spending time on guides when its not gaining traffic and you can instead make a "guide" on a new game that just came out!
[удалено]
It's because they're hidden. Google's search algorithm did this. It just prioritizes those ad-riddled AI written "guides," instead of providing results to communities familiar with the game. Once guides stop showing up in results, people don't want to waste time writing them.
Intrinsic motivation often produces higher quality, albeit more slowly. Extrinsic motivation can produce something fast, often at the expense of quality. If you asked me nicely to make a hamburger, it'd be excellent. If you paid me $8/hr to make hamburgers all day, they'd be crap. If you paid me $100 to make hamburgers for an hour, they'd be great.
A lot of people still put in that effort, but that effort runs opposed to SEO, so you won't find it via Google.
I use a couple that are decent, but more often than not, it's just either blatantly missing information or wrong. There was an IGN guide I looked up for how many Magnify Materia there are in Rebirth, and it's blatantly missing one that you can get.
Most 'guides' are now written by IA, unfortunately it feels like no one bothers writing the kind of content we could easily find on gamefaqs 10 years ago.
All the top results when you search for game tips are SEO-optimized garbage where you gotta scroll down half the page to find the one sentence that's actually important. The same garbage as finding cooking recipes where they tell you their life story first. SEO optimization is a plague.
I bet a lot are AI generated, especially if it’s at the top of google
> and how often some of the most balant examples are often at the top of Google? Google somehow prioritizes those seemingly auto-generated garbage pages over wikis and discussions. I think its pretty undeniable that Google search has gotten far worse in more recent times.
So this is something I've often ran into when trying to look up Guides for Builds for various cRPGs over the years and I swear to God 99% of them are written from the perspective of somebody having borderline as much knowledge as the person making the guide, even if the build is for a "newbie" or "noob". No explanation of mechanics, no explanation of *why* something is chosen over another thing, etc. Or the information is straight up completely and totally wrong. It's seriously frustrating when you're trying to find things that synergies well together, because often, nobody actually explains why they do or how they do leaving the player with a build they can follow, but they will not *understand* why it works or functions like it does.
I've notice that JRPGs at least the classics, tend to at least be very well documented when it comes to guides. Like games such as Final Fantasy 7, Chrono Trigger, and Persona 4 are so popular and beloved, that finding any help you need with those games is no problem. But modern ones on the other hand are just a complete dumpster fire for finding a decent guide. Sure you have some gems like CrycZ's guides for any Yakuza game. But a lot of modern JRPG's such as FF7 Rebirth, Xenoblade 3, Tales of Arise, Final Fantasy 16 etc all suffer from the exact issues plaguing any recent video game guide.
I’ve noticed that almost every guide for a minigame I’ve looked up has incorrect information in it. Like getting the chapter # wrong, the region the minigame takes place in wrong or saying the recommended level for a colosseum fight is 28 when it is actually 38.
PowerPYX on top
Atomise guide into dozens of pages get moar ad impressions. Enshittification in action.
Earlier today I was talking about this with a friend, and I gave a quick example off the top of my head: For a game like Elden Ring, a website like this might write an individual guide for e.g. how to find Reduvia, how to start Yura's questline, how to get through Murkwater Cave, how to unlock Patches as a vendor, and how to get Margit's Shackle. For those who haven't played Elden Ring, the bit here is that all of those actions essentially can't be done independently - all of them happen within the same vicinity, and it's difficult-to-impossible to trigger one without triggering (or at least being put in an intuitive position to trigger) the others. They're basically all individual steps of the same process. It was meant to just be an exaggerated, demonstrative bit. But then I got curious, so I looked it up to see if anybody had actually done this. And, sure enough: Game Rant has an individual guide on every single one of those things. I tried to exaggerate for effect, and I accidentally demonstrated the literal truth of how absurdly atomized video game guides have become.
I think the post-Google King of Search is going to be one with *aggressive* moderation that mutes domains with SEO spam and AI generated trash.
Those articles exist because there are always going to be hundreds of idiots googling very basic info and they want to have the top search result. I'm not going to say it's inherently bad because it's not like they're tricking anyone or lying, they're just providing a service that there's clearly a demand for, but it's gross how it's become the only revenue stream for sites that actually used to report on stuff.
I miss the days of Prima Guided, back in the PS One era where you could buy a game and it’s complete guide book together. I still have the guide books for FF 10, 10-2, and 12. Got me through alllll the extra content and planning ahead for bosses and stuff. Now we have half baked user “guides” worded horribly, formatted horribly, and with pics that barely help lead you correctly.
Depended on the Guide. Unfortunately if you would like to read the rest of this post, go to the playonline website and put in the search code FF9BR4DYG1UD3
Oof, that stings. Those articles showing up in Google have helped me with like six things in the game so far and I still haven’t finished it. One of them was the Tonberry King quest (I couldn’t figure out how to “steal” the crown, like what do you target with the steal command?) 😅
Equip the steal Materia on someone and once you stun him, his crown drops. Use the Steal command (NOT MUG) on the Crown on the ground, not on the Tonberry. It took me a few tries to understand what it meant because I kept trying to mug it and it wouldn't work lol. My dumbass figured that both would work, but only the Steal command will allow you to target the crown and yoink it.
TBH I did try stealing from TK too instead of the crown.
Listen I agree with you mostly but I *did* have to look up a guide on the Tonberry King’s crown, I didn’t know you needed to use Steal on it
Man, around 2010 I used to love browsing Kotaku during work breaks. I slowly backed away from the site over time as the content got worse and worse. Now I almost never go there. What a bummer.
This absolutely feels like a way for Spanfeller to shut Kotaku down and attempt to escape the blame without directly firing everyone. Well, what skeleton crew remains at least. Even those people who do read Kotaku don’t read it for guides. And putting out 50 a week??? That’s absolutely absurd.
Or a way to gut the staff and replace them with AI.
That’s more likely. AI can certainly put out 50 guides a week and most of them will be trash if not outright false
AI can't put out guides in a week for games that just dropped. That's not how Gen AI works, but I wouldn't put it past management to think that's precisely how it works.
What do you mean? I've asked ChatGPT for a guide on how join the Thieve's Guild in the Elder Scrolls 6, and it's given me a nice 7 step process for how to become the leader of the guild.
To think all this happened because their parent company Gawker decides to out a Billionaire and then report on Hulk Hogan's sex tape. I hate that all the affiliate blogs got caught in the crossfire, but with the way Gawker conducted themselves they absolutely had the lawsuit coming.
Ever website on the internet gradually turns into SEO slush. I bet they’re just getting them to write all those guides so they can train AI on them and then replace the human staff.
The internet *bare* has gotten near unusable. Do a search on Google without any adblocker enabled. It's like 4+ ads up top for results now.
I've worked for a high profile game journalism company like this and been through the interview process with others. "50 guides per week" is more than just a matter of shallow content and insane work load. It's also that guide writers are paid by the word, and if you're making any effort to write good words, you're making less than a homeless person sitting outside of a low population area with a cup. That's if they're paid at all. These sites have a long list of "contributors" on their staff lists who are hired as freelance, or illegally as "interns" but make literally zero dollars. They're community members happy to "pay their dues" to get their feet in the door of game journalism. As Tim Rogers, who left Kotaku in 2020 at 40 years old, recently said during a live stream: "You want to know how I got where I am today? I did exactly what I'm doing now for 20 years without pay".
> It's also that guide writers are paid by the word I guess that and the need to hit all the keyword scraping search engines is why every "here's how you do X" guide to a game takes about fifteen paragraphs to get to the point and keeps repeating the full name of the game.
Couldn't they explain how to do it quickly and then word vomit afterwards? I mean, they don't seem to so there must be a reason why not I guess.
The more fluff they put before the more you scroll down and see the ads on the site. If they give you the info you want upfront you'd leave without seeing more ads.
Makes sense, but I've got firefox and won't be seeing ads no matter how far I scroll.
Just to give more info to what u/Fiery1ce said, the longer you stay on the page, the better it still is. If you click into a guide from Google or any other search engine and don't immediately return, you're telling Google that the guide helped you. This can lead to higher page positions for that guide and then ad revenue from other users who may not be blocking ads.
50 guides a week??? What the fuck are the execs smoking lmao.
By "Guide" they mean "Single webpage that tells you how to do a single thing in a game". Like: >**"How to get to Flontopia in Mission Red Planet"** >[Two paragraphs of nonsense] Go east from Skwrj until you see it! [Another paragraph of nonsense] That's all the websites are anymore. --- **EDIT**: Sorry, I forgot the most important part. >*[Ad] [Ad] [Ad]* > >**"How to get to Flontopia in Mission Red Planet"** > >*[Ad] [Ad] [Ad]* > [Two paragraphs of nonsense] *[Ad]* *[Ad]* Go east from Skwrj until you see it! *[Ad]* *[Ad]* [Another paragraph of nonsense] *[Ad]* *[Ad]* *[Ad]* *[Ad]* *[Ad]* *[Ad]* *[Ad]* *[Ad]* *[Ad]* *[Ad]*
Basically, they don't want to own Kotaku or pay its employees, so why not just churn out some AI blogspam before shutting it down? 'guide' blogspam like that is honestly so annoying to stumble across
Is this a surprise to anyone? Gaming journalism has been having this problem for the last 15+ years. I remember when Jeff Gerstmann was fired from Gamespot, that’s when I realized nothing was going to be the same. Corporate culture started to scrap good content and talent a loooong time ago.
Then he went on to create Giant Bomb, a previously-awesome site that's now owned by (surprise surprise) a private equity company and which is now (surprise surprise) a shell of its former self.
The best thing that came out of late-stage Giant Bomb was Waypoint, which (surprise surprise) got annihilated by VICE
A shell of a shell of a shell... That said, props to the people running it now (Dan Ryckert?), I totally expected it to be dead by now after all the OGs left
Everyone, Gerstmann included, has moved to podcasting with their own patreons. Nobody really does written content anymore, which is a shame, but at least there's still people out there that love games covering games.
Yeah it’s a surprise to me
what are you talking about? Gerstmann came back into the Gamespot family so everything is fine now.....oh wait never mind he got fired again
This mirrors the "stick to sports" edict that led to Deadspin's demise. Non-sports stuff like history and media crit and haters guides got tons of eyes.
It's astonishing how blind they are to the business they're in. Becoming a purely utilitarian, 100% SEO-oriented, guides site is a race to the bottom in every way. When you give up editorial identity (regardless of what you believe of Kotaku's) you also become completely replaceable. You're just another guides site, and competition is *insane* there. They will f\*ck around banking everything on AI then find out that there are tons of people more agile at it that operate on much smaller overhead, and don't have to turn millions of dollars in profit every quarter to justify the acquisition of the site. They'll sell the site in a year, like Deadspin and everything else.
It’s unfortunately not that they’re blind, it’s that they literally do not care. None of the people involved in these decisions give two tenths of a hamster shit if their companies exist a year from now. They exist as human pump-and-dump schemes. Get in, maximize SEO-ability, ride the wave of temporary non-retentive traffic to a single fantastic quarterly report, and then jump ship with a golden parachute to the next thing they’re going to ruin. They have no sentiment or concern for- honestly a lot of the time no real *consciousness* of- the businesses they run. They want to see “line go up”; all of these companies are just the titles of the graphs. They’re not stupid, or naive, or inexperienced- they’re evil. And I know it sounds hyperbolic to label them as that but I just don’t know what else I can call a person that is motivated solely by the pursuit of wealth to the exclusion of all other aspects of human experience.
yes its a death spiral. the point is to cut staff, boost numbers, sell.
It doesn't help when one of your writers brings a massive defamation suit down on your head after using a national platform to attack a minor who wore facepaint to a sports game.
Deadspin died a few years before that.
lol not reporting on sports is what killed deadspin
Yeah I feel like the dialogue with Deadspin is matching the dialogue with Kotaku. They are nominally about sports/gaming, but they do a ton of drama/rage bait/political commentary, which makes them appealing to an insular bubble of fans (of which, r/games is a part of apparently), but turns a bunch of people off outside of said bubble. I don’t think that core fan base is enough to sustain itself.
Was it not the defamation lawsuit from that kid's family?
Deadspin was circling the drain before then. Most of the staff went to Defector around 2019 or so.
This new directive from upper management prob means that they want to sell the site (what they did with deadspin) although this time they don't want to pay severance fees so they want all the staff to quit on their own Mark my words this site is about to get sold in the next weeks/months
Maybe start hiring people that don't hate their audience. That would be a good place to start in games journalism. Also not click baiting everything. I understand the nature of it and I understand it's always been a thing, but the way it done today is so ridiculous.
and absolutely nothing of value was lost. Can Kotaku die and stay dead please? Thanks!
Quality gaming publications don't really seem financially viable at this point; at least purely written content. The only content that seems to generate any buzz or engagement amounts to rage-bait, but at the horrible cost of having writers (and sometimes whole publications) targeted by over-emotional gamers with a chip on their shoulder. These executives want publications to be operated as lean and barebones as possible without realizing if you want good content you're going to need some sort of money put into making sure good content can be written. The fact that major publications with (what would loosely be considered) prestige and reputation don't even bother doing things like interesting documentaries or developer interviews. Everything is always a thinly-veiled advertisement for a game, a review for a game, or occasionally some stupid shit to get Capital-G-Gamers riled up.
>Quality gaming publications don't really seem financially viable at this point; at least purely written content. The internet media ecosystem has proven to be a rat race of VC gamblers, overinflated ad valuations, fraudulent "pivots to video" and short term blindness. Remember when Vice was valued at **5 billion dollars**? It collapsed in months, what a joke. In the case of G/O media and others, they're now in a desperate race to turn a profit on the preposterous acquisitions they made. They will fail. I'm sure there is a possibility of a sustainable games journalism reasonably scoped, but competition in that market is poisoned at the moment. Outside of two or three massive institutions, the only outlets that seem to survive are modest, personality driven media (the Aftermaths, Second Wind, Remap, MinnMax, you name it).
I think long term, everything becoming based on Ads killed these places. Ads pay pennies now, and everything has become getting clicks at all costs. Dunno about the others you listed, but places like Second Wind survive mainly due to sites like Patreon allowong them to get funding them directly from viewers. Ads just don't pay anymore, and while I'd like for subscription models to come back, people are too used to free articles. I don't think quality, written journalism is possible in the gaming sphere any more.
And then you look at their patreon revenue and can already see the decline month over month although the patreon members are rising. Like you said, there is no money in it long term.
We'll see. I think the Second Wind team themselves knew the initial spike in revenue was an anomaly. That's why they didn't take salary at the beginning. The issue is not that the revenue is falling, but rather where it'll stabilize.
I forgot about Vice's valuation. They had some interesting stuff, but 5 billion? That's up there with FAZE Clan being valued at 1 billion, then trading at like $0.50 five months later.
Quality publications in general aren't financially viable right now, sadly, outside of a few mega-sized outlets like NYT/WSJ.
Didn't the NYT/WSJ lose significant amounts of money in 2023?
NYT at least was very profitable in 2023 > Meredith Kopit Levien, president and chief executive officer, The New York Times Company, said, “2023 was a strong year for The Times that showcased the power of our strategy to be the essential subscription for every curious person seeking to understand and engage with the world. Our market leading news and lifestyle products commanded large and deeply engaged audiences, and our multi-revenue stream model contributed to improving profitability. We realized strong annual growth in earnings per share, adjusted operating profit, and free cash flow, which each hit their highest point since our digital transformation began more than a decade ago.” https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2024/02/NYT-Press-Release-Q4-2023-Final-gYtpe4NB.pdf
I don't read NYT or WSJ, but I'm glad to see going to a paid model is actually working out well for them. Exclusively relying on advertising was never a healthy revenue model for journalism. Not just because ads pay shit, but also because it creates such a strong and clear conflict of interest.
It's true, and I'm also happy. But it's also part of a larger and sadder story for journalism. NYT is the exception to rule right now. Even very prominent news rooms are seeing brutal cuts. LA times for example. And no matter how good the NYT may be at news, local news sources have an irreplaceable role in journalism below the national level. Someone needs to keep politicians and corporations and others accountable with investigative reporting on the local level as well.
> The only content that seems to generate any buzz or engagement amounts to rage-bait That's a self fulfilling prophecy though. If a site posts stuff that makes people mad they might click on it to seethe about the contents of the article on social media and it might go viral as youtubers in turn farm it for their own outrage bait which is gonna drive traffic short term.. but people also remember which sites pissed them off and will be less likely to go there otherwise. Because they got a bad impression of that site.
The smaller staff owned outlets are the only way to deal with the executive stuff, but they'll never be big enough to fill the gap. I'm thinking about places like Remap and Aftermath.
> Quality gaming publications don't really seem financially viable at this point Look at gaming magazines (the few that still exist) - they have everything you want. Really well written articles, informative, quality, variety. I wish more people would go back to magazines instead of perpetually surfing the net.
Kotaku’s been scraping the bottom of the barrel for over a decade now. Do you know which media outlet did the most to uncover the sexual misconduct scandals at Activision? The Wall Street Journal. Somehow the biggest news story in video gaming escaped every single gaming “journalist” out there.
Jason Schreier claimed he had been investigating the story for years but didn't publish anything because he couldn't corroborate it. Which is strange because it didn't stop him or other Kotaku editors from publishing without corroboration all the time, including when it came to accusing other game devs of sexual abuse
>The only content that seems to generate any buzz or engagement amounts to rage-bait, but at the horrible cost of having writers (and sometimes whole publications) targeted by over-emotional gamers with a chip on their shoulder. So when Kotaku writes rage-bait, deliberately manufactured to enrage people, the blame falls on the people who respond? In what way is that a 'horrible cost' and not simply the consequence of their own actions? Kotaku and other outlets CHOOSE to be contrarian and combative by nature rather than being genuinely hobbyist oriented.
>So when Kotaku writes rage-bait, deliberately manufactured to enrage people, the blame falls on the people who respond? In what way is that a 'horrible cost' and not simply the consequence of their own actions? It sounds unfair but that's the real truth. Until the public doesn't realize that this has been the intention for over a decade, Kotaku and whoever take it's place (if ever) will continue to do so. They know it's unethical and it's not illegal, so there is nothing to lose here. This will only stop if a shift happens in the social media space (Twitter contributes a lot to this) or in search engine rankings.
Yep. Seems a self-fulfilling prophecy to me. 1) do bottom of the barrel SEO articles to boost clicks 2) traffic increases but quality plummets 3) fire actually content creators, hire ex-buzzfeed writers, site becomes laughing stock, people eventually start moving on 4) traffic decreases 5) somehow we're to blame for the enshittification
"it's gamers that don't like to read good stuff now" is repeated thru this thread multiple times.
There’s no quality in kokatus articles.
I largely agree, one recommendation I do have is EDGE magazine. The quality is really high and has remained so for years and it’s available digitally as well as physical print.
Except kotaku never stood next to quality. They eere ragebaiting site. Perhaps to many kotaku articles proven to be blatant lies and it became a big issue. Like sbi article or claiming nintendo uses slurs in smash bros without even checking lyrics of the song.
Talking about "quality journalism" really isn't relevant to the topic at hand.
Surprised they made it ten years past the "gamers are dead" nonsense. Enjoy sleeping in the bed you pooped in, Kotaku.
And nothing of value was lost. Kotaku, just like any other ex Gawker Media publication taken over by G/O, is the journalistic equivalent of eating half-rotten food out of a garbage can. They're even trashier than McDonalds. They constantly violate NDAs and post rage bait articles for clicks harder than the Daily Mail (and that's saying something.) Best example was when they falsely drummed up headlines that Smash Bros Ultimate contained ableist slurs in a song added to the game for the Joker DLC. It's truly trash tier 'games journalism'
What NDAs have they constantly violated?
I fail to see the problem here as Kotaku these last few years became less a site for gaming news and more a site for complaining about politics and maybe a paragraph about games. Not to mention the leaks they published made sure that a fair few companies never gave them the chance to even review their games or products on time.
I legitimately thought their editor in chief was who mods this subreddit, since 99% of their stories are just delayed posts of content from this sub.
Remember when Kotaku supported their Gawker bosses outting gay people? Fuck them.
How the fuck is this site still even alive, who even reads them anymore? They've been crawling in shit for more than 10 years already
Honestly, probably for the best. Closest thing to being put out of it's misery they can hope for. Kotaku's always had its issues, but these last few years have just been pathetic. Writing about video games on the internet hasn't been a viable way to make money for like a decade already. That's why all the other websites switched more and more to video. Outfits like Kinda Funny are made up of all the people who used to make money writing about games, who realized they needed to switch to basically just being glorified youtubers to keep up. Kotaku is still putting out gems like "The tik tok ban shouldn't happen because memes are funny" so you know. No great loss.
Games journalism needs to cover industry practices as well as current releases. Both are done by Polygon and Kotaku and the like. But games journalism also needs to discuss the scene, what players are doing and not merely what the industry is doing. That, I feel, has nearly disappeared as some of the biggest gaming scene news have gotten at most quiet whispers at those sites. That demise has made me wonder how long it would be until the other two major areas of game journalism would fall. If you are telling your gaming journalist site to no longer do journalism, that's a sign of surrender. It's an admission that the site is going to be dead soon. Hopefully this Aftermath place blooms. We need new platforms. It's a tough world because there's no money in advertising anymore and you are competing with AI nonsense. Hopefully someone figures it out because an artistic scene without anybody covering it is a bit lifeless. I mean, even now where nobody covers what players are doing it has become a bit empty.
As it has been written, they who would produce rage-bait, manufacture outrage and who despise there target audience will ultimately eat shit. Congratulations, you played yourself.
[удалено]
Game “news” doesn’t matter anymore. No one is clicking on an article besides old boomers like me. Everyone is either seeing the news on Twitter or some podcast/streamer is talking about it. Pivoting to guides isn’t going to same them either, unfortunately. Again, no one wants to dig through a however many word guide to see “you need to put this thing here to solve this puzzle”, they want Google to feed them that specific 5 seconds of a video when they google it.
Gaming journalism is pointless anyway, a dude in his room with a pc making essays has more influence in the gaming landscape than these companies full of college graduates lol And also a lot of 'professional' reviews suck, people who can't even play games and have little media literacy are the ones evaluating them a lot of times, saying what's right and wrong, organizing online witch hunts...
Game journalists did this to themselves and Kotaku was one of the biggest contributors to it. A steady stream of low quality clickbait destroyed any relationship they had with gamers and any reader loyalty. Clickbait was great at getting clicks, but terrible at retaining readers. Nearly everyone participated in the race to the bottom and this is what the bottom looks like. Youtube became the go to place for game reviews and information. Guides are the only thing left they can use to drive traffic. It is guides or shut down.
I remember getting into 1up, Kotaku, and N4G around the time the PS3 and 360 were announced and subsequently released. It felt like a pretty good time for game news but with the rise in popularity of YouTube, Podcasts, and Twitch, I just stopped caring about news sites altogether. Was big on NeoGaf and ResetEra forum style sites during the One and PS4 era, but I just feel like I can get all of that news and discussion from here now so it just doesn’t cross my mind. Though, I will say my tastes in what I enjoy definitely changed with age. Reviews and speculation just aren’t nearly as important to me as 10+ years ago.
So publishers had like multiple reviewers with each their own preferences, genre choices, etc etc. Naturally the person viewing is drawn more so to a personality in order to convey a "static mean." You can still watch everyone sure, but there's that guy that likes niche-roguelikes and played KoToR back in the day so you are more drawn to their views. Well you might as well watch a singular youtuber for straight reviews where you respect the reviewer more than the publisher itself. This is why gaming journalism and literally every type of journalism is suffering versus an online personality. CNN? Why? The high brow Movie critic or random youtube but relatable essayist? Included in your internet price anyways vs paying for shit ass news?