Journalism at large is dangerously close to dying. People favour free click- and rage-bait headlines on Facebook over quality journalism. The latter can't compete because quality costs money, while cheap quality articles oversaturate the market. AI only exacerbated the issue.

I mean I'd like to be upset but honestly video game journalism has always been the lowest form of Journalism. Mostly it's just pure propaganda and press releases from major game companies. 90 to 95% of Articles written by these game journalists were just useless fluff.

Anecdotal, but I have never read a game review in my life that was from a journalist. It's always been in forums, and lately some small youtubers. I want to hear from normal gamers, not people getting a paycheck for it.

The entire industry was flooded with mouthpieces for developer statements, and opinion piece hottakes. How many of those people does an industry really need? (Or more importantly: How many of those people can it financially support?)

As for reviews, they are for the most part similarly worthless and hard to trust. There's about five YouTubers who I actually trust the opinions of, and I haven't felt left out at all with that as the extent of my gaming journalism intake.

I can't be certain, but I suspect a lot of gamers are completely burnt out on the professional gaming journalism industry.

Yeah, it turns out people don't like advertising pretending to be reviews.

That's because a lot of the reviews weren't been read because they weren't trustworthy, if you reviewed a game poorly (even if it deserved the poor review) the journalist wouldn't be invited back to review the next game that studio put out or were still the publisher could blacklist you blocking you from potentially dozens of games every year. Nintendo do this all the time.

Back in like 2012, a gaming journalist would write an honest review of a game they tried or they would give an update on the industry or they would share interesting tips and info about certain games and franchises. The sites would be clean, maybe a couple of ads here and there, but the overall atmosphere is driven by genuine passion.

Today, you don't get any of that. Instead you get an advertisement masquerading as an article. The reviews aren't authentic, the updates are basically a part of marketing campaigns, and the info they give is there to push readers to buy something. The sites are all completely cluttered with ads, a lot of the articles are just AI slop, and the industry is driven by greed. Why would anybody go there anymore? Might as well just go see a youtube review or get the game and try it out yourself.

Special interest journalism is usually overrun by corporate interests and inflated reviews. Find someone who knows the history of the industry and was fired or left an organization for something like reporting a low review to search out integrity for individuals.

Shout-out to Nextlander and Giantbomb for keeping gaming journalism alive.

It's so bad now that nearly all the articles are mainly clickbait or written to favor a particular game (no matter how mediocre), and someone had to create what's called Saved You A Click.

They don’t need humans to write the engagement slop articles anymore.

Personally haven't really read gaming journalism even before. If I want to see what score a game has, I'm much more likely to check How Long To Beat or Backloggd, where users rate games.

Or, as has been mentioned in this thread, Youtubers, if I want a singular subjective opinion as opposed to a "out of 5" or "out of 10" score which, admittedly can be tricky when different people have a different view on what each number should mean. For instance, a 5 (on a 10 scale), is average for me when I rate anime. But most of the anime community uses 7 as the average, so a 6.2 show on MyAnimeList, which you would think is above average, is actually below.

I hate games journalists. I'm sure there are some good ones but most of them are corporate trash and their reviews are thinly veiled ads. They dont care about the games they write about. They dont take the time to learn the games and are just generally bad at games. Basically the entire industry is just shitting out the most dogshit video game opinions 24/7. I'd rather go to Lemmy or Reddit and read what actual players have to say about games.

Um, that's how it always should have been. That's how journalism in general works, going back since pretty much the dawn of newspapers: readers pay for copy, and advertisements subsidize it.

Like the games industry, publications that cover video games have been rocked by a turbulent market since the highs of the COVID-19 pandemic. Media owners like IGN, Fandom, Gamer Network, and Valent have all cut jobs in the past year.

Is it turbulent though? This article goes over video game spending by year, and it has largely plateaued since 2019. There was a pretty big jump in 2020 due to the pandemic, but the market seems to have returned to a normalish trajectory and mobile revenue seems to be plateauing (I guess it's saturated?).

I think what happened is that people are shifting where they get their information from. Instead of relying on game journalists, who seem to be paid by game devs (hence why any big game rarely gets below 7/10), they rely on social media, who theoretically aren't paid by game devs (there's plenty of astroturfing though). The business model where they're not paid by game devs should always have been the case, since when people are deciding what games to buy, they clearly would prefer a less biased source.

IMO, games journalism should have multiple revenue streams, such as:

• fan revenue - either donations or subscriptions should always be primary
• curated game bundles, like Jingle Jam - run a charity event where a large portion is donated (be up-front, and have a slider so donators can decide how much goes where, even 0% to one or the other)
• merch
• game tournaments w/ prizes - would be especially cool to focus on indies
• maybe have paid questions from fans that gets answered in a podcast or a paid video to discuss topics of fans' choosing

They can get very far before needing to run ads. Produce quality journalism and have some additional revenue streams and it'll work out.

I don't consume much gaming journalism because it's largely BS that praises big AAAs and generally ignores indies unless they get viral. I want honest opinions about games, not some balance between sucking up to who pays the bills and mild criticism.

I blame AI

I've never remembered seeing quality video games journalism.

The tyypes that they're describing as that always seemed hacky and liable to push very subjective opinions as facts.

Their scores almost always seemed wonky and part of that is probably because individual scores for something as complex as a game don't really make sense. They rarely make sense for anything.

Instead what you want are scores in multiple areas with no single amalgamated score.

Anyhow, for the longest while video games journalism has been rife with controversy about pulling negative reviews for ad deals etc.

I think unfortunately written media is pretty much dying due to finances, and for video games, due to never being all that good in the first place.

The details I care about, like monetization, grind, and performance, are the details that most games journalists just completely skim over or they'll glaze game companies while they perform awfully here.

My way of buying games is basically watching video reviews of someone playing and mostly ignoring their commentary to figure out those details for myself.

That and benchmarks of course.... and figuring out whether they're owned by the saudi government....

Anyways, yea, video content for games both makes more sense, and more money.

I can totally get this feeling for PC/consumer electronics hardware related articles and reviews, but for video games? Meh. I won't cry.

Their game reviews are worth shit all, so their only worth is reporting on the game industry itself. And that's a niche area that not many people are interested in.

I tried contributing to game8. They only accept payment through paypal. I've closed my paypal account.

An effort was made.