“For quality games media, I continue to believe that the best form of stability is dedicated reader bases to remove reliance on funds, and a hybrid of direct reader funding and advertisements. If people want to keep reading quality content from full time professionals, they need to support it or lose it. That’s never been more critical than now.”
The games media outlets that have survived, except for Gamespot and IGN, have just about all switched to this model. It seems to be the only way it survives.
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.
Nobody is stopping them from buying their own copy, and reviewing at release with an honest review.
Yeah but by then there would already be hundreds of reviews out.
Tradition, their egos, money and entitlement seems to be doing a fine job. (but yeah the access journalism model has to go)
Those same outlets still review Nintendo games. They just review them late.
Journalism at large is dangerously close to dying. People favour free click- and rage-bait headlines on Facebook over quality journalism. The latter can’t compete because quality costs money, while cheap quality articles oversaturate the market. AI only exacerbated the issue.
Which is why the free democratic world has to keep subsiding quality journalism that sticks to the facts. Sadly that‘s dying along with private newspapers because governments believe people just don‘t want it and it‘s not worth keeping. They treat it as entertainment and that‘s a huge problem because it‘s a pillar of democracy. Defunding it is dangerous.
As for games… well, there‘s plenty of ways and different mediums to consume games nowadays so it makes sense magazines are vanishing along with game events despite the medium being bigger than ever. Most of the older game news outlets have overstayed their welcome.
I think they’re almost kinda right.
I think these platforms need to adapt. They need to make short form, entertaining videos like The Washington Post or the break off with Dave Jorgenson called Local News International.
There is too much news for anyone to actually bother reading the long form articles that theyre used to having awfully agitating formats designed to get the reader to read the whole thing and scroll past ads.
Short form, entertaining, and factual is the best route. Do a little skit, explain the concept simply, bingo bango.
Journalism at large died a while ago, gaming journalism has been an absolute joke for over a decade.
I have no respect for 99% of modern journalists, they just push 1%er propaganda and post mugshots while jerking themselves off as being self appointed “guardians of democracy.”
There are some who are trying to do some good and they have my utmost respect but they’re needles in haystacks.
Getting my news from reddit or Lemmy led to the same problems, and neither actually gave me the news, so in the past couple of years, I have definitely budgeted for a news subscription as well.
Getting news off Lemmy is a shit-for-brains idea. It’s 70% bias saturated US politics links. I have no.idea how people keep lapping it up, but I hear that’s the culture of Americans being told what to believe and do based on their feeds.
You can block keywords, though, so if anyone posts any interesting news, you may even get to see it.
The problem was more that people are more likely to submit stories that continue to get you angry about the latest thing. It won’t be a deep investigative piece about the corporate interests that led to some strange move and hid some shady dealings; it will be a third or fourth article about the latest thing we all already know Trump did, but it adds like one detail and focuses on it. It’s easy to fall back on by default and think you need nothing else because it’s free and major events will get shared instantly.
but I hear that’s the culture of Americans being told what to believe and do based on their feeds.
Hate to break it to you, but this is becoming the norm globally as more and more people got addicted to smartphones and social media.
You even see it here. People will post “quality journalism” and then it gets attacked because its nuanced and doesnt extrapolate into extreme claims.
People are so used to the rage-bait and bad journalism that its hard for actual reporting to break through. As well as it takes 1000x more effort to gather the evidence and story for quality reporting. Its bad, we need to start supporting journalists through gov subsidies and donations.
click- and rage-bait headlines on Facebook over quality journalism
Gaming journalism has been overrun with that.
What I, and I think many people, want are trustworthy, knowledgable reviews.
I can’t trust any of the major publications. I trust a small handful of YouTubers who are giving me more of what I want than the entire professional industry.
Good riddance to any gar journalists who rate games on a 6/10 to 10/10 scale. I insinuated because sponsors, but fuck that.
The idea of ranking games on a numerical scale is inherently flawed. I suspect many publications still use it as a way to make nice with game publishers. Text that’s lukewarm can slap a 9/10 score on and a lot of people just jump over the review to the “objective” score.
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.
Yeah, it turns out people don’t like advertising pretending to be reviews.
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.
They were useful in the past as a magazine by the toilet really helped.
Yup, I remember even back in the print era there was significant criticism about the relationships between games publishers and various magazines resulting in what was essentially advertising disguised as articles. Payment was either indirect (exclusive access to preview builds etc) or direct via in-magazine advertising. Can’t badmouth the big flagship game releases too much when EA just paid big bucks to advertise the very same title for the next view editions.
Absolutely agree. A youtube video where you can mostly ignore what theyre saying and just see the game and problems with it along with some benchmarks is all you need.
If its online, watching someone play online to get a feeling of how the community is also works, particularly if its just them playing solo for a long stretch of time not editing out toxicity.
Very tiny outlets that try to do better should be supported.
Back in like 2012, a gaming journalist would write an honest review of a game they tried or they would give an update on the industry or they would share interesting tips and info about certain games and franchises. The sites would be clean, maybe a couple of ads here and there, but the overall atmosphere is driven by genuine passion.
Today, you don’t get any of that. Instead you get an advertisement masquerading as an article. The reviews aren’t authentic, the updates are basically a part of marketing campaigns, and the info they give is there to push readers to buy something. The sites are all completely cluttered with ads, a lot of the articles are just AI slop, and the industry is driven by greed. Why would anybody go there anymore? Might as well just go see a youtube review or get the game and try it out yourself.
You have a much more optimistic memory of gaming review platforms than I do.
I remember getting several different magazines in the 90’s and they were always the same thing. Any “professional” journalist knows that their livelihood is based on selling games. Journalists have to strike a balance between their audience and publishers, which makes negative reviews incredibly rare.
It’s not just videogames. Music, movies, TV shows, books, comics, consumer products. Unkess you’re paying out the nose, reviews almost always have some sort of bias towards trying to sell things. I find the best opinions come from other sources: people I know personally, organic community discussions on the internet (though those are not immune to corporate influence), or when products are only mentioned in contexts where the author clearly will not benefit. For example, a journalist making a list of the top-10 games of all time putting Ocarina of Time on it is probably not incentives to do so… Unless Nintendo is trying to promote a re-release.
There was a brief period of time on the internet between the late 2000s and early 2010s where gaming journalism was genuinely decent because it was driven by passionate people who were trying to appeal to the gaming communities they were apart of. They were there to provide the community with good info and honest opinions first, and any money made was just a bonus. At some point, these priorities flipped, and internet journalism became job and then it became an industry that’s soulless, faceless, and driven by endless greed.
Yeah, review have always had a slant and people forget just how bad they where in the past. I would rather watch someone play the game and skip the reviews, however it must be said the old slanted review model has largely died off. We don’t buy magazines with advertorials anymore, and the appetite to pay for such content is at a low point by both consumers and advertisers.
Do you feel that way about the site reporting the linked article?
And I know the likes of IGN have been a mess for far longer than 2012.
Do you feel that way about the site reporting the linked article?
Yes, although I am not the first dood, but posting as someone who did read the linked article it is a barely veiled attempt to support the “writer’s” media and looks more like a lazy filler article to meet a quota. I use quotes around writer as the article in question is 2/3s quotes more in the style of an interview with “Veteran games journalist Alex Donaldson” and a few comments from “Press Engine co-founder Gareth Williams” (nothing wrong with that per say). The other 1/3 is “data supplied to VGC by Press Engine…” (again nothing wrong with this on its own). The issue is when we take the article in its whole this seems more like someone talked to a colleague or two then put a header on it using in house data from a “… popular PR tool used by developers and publishers to distribute codes and press releases to a global database of journalists and content creators.” and adding a few other comments from the very founder of the program used in house to round it out making a very thin and kinda lazy article. This reminds me very much of the stuff written I saw many many years ago when I worked at a newspaper watching that media circle the drain.
Also on the point of:
The sites are all completely cluttered with ads, a lot of the articles are just AI slop, and the industry is driven by greed.
This is not AI slop but good old fashioned 4:30 on a Friday human slop covered in ads, for example I got 2 pop ups with ad block reading it. This is what it looks like without ad blocker:
But then again, you get what you pay for and I guess the irony here is that the article (that could be used as a captain obvious joke) pointing out the collapse of games media is in itself an example of a degrading quality of writing leading to the demise of said media. The real joke is that the article does not even touch on the degrading quality of the writing and experience (other then a “…lack of diversification in content…”) but instead putting the blame on every thing else (thanks google, AI, COVID and advertising spending I guess?).
What would the “good version” of this article look like in your opinion? VGC doesn’t have quotas, btw.
The real joke is that the article does not even touch on the degrading quality of the writing and experience
I’ll say that you state that as fact, but it’s a perception that not everyone shares.
I’ll say that you state that as fact, but it’s a perception that not everyone shares.
I’ve said this in my own top level comment but it’s worth reiterating here to just make the point. Nobody trusts games media anymore and they don’t trust them because they do things like the above screenshot and engage in articles for access, in real journalism stuff like that is supposed to be disclosed. However the only ones that actually ever seem to bother are YouTubers with integrity.
I think the idea that quality is degrading is not a niche opinion by any stretch of the imagination. It’s basically the majority viewpoint of gamers.
Is it? How do you know?
I’ll say that you state that as fact, but it’s a perception that not everyone shares.
Not everyone shares the perception that we live on a sphere, what is your point?
This reeks of wilful ignorance to the facts of the state of the media currently.
I have old some old magazines that are at least readable with ads that don’t move. This is not a radical take, just like all corporate media the quality has declined in general (not suggesting that there was a lack of bad journalism in the past). Also, they may not have hard quotas there but the writers are paid to make articles and content to fill the site (it is like how best buy did not do commission vs future shop but where both the same company and fired those that did not make sales regardless).
As for how to improve this particular article, I would say a good start is to pick a format, is it a op ed or an interview? Or is it a report on events? I would go the op ed direction myself and rely less on the quotes from other journalists and data from the weird internal marketing source. I would have likely incouraged having a message and then sprinkled in actual employment numbers from major publications throughout the article and not done what this one did that was “this program sends out less free codes” as a data point. The data used is too weak for anything other then an opinion piece but the article is too light on the writer’s input to be one.
There is also a big “citation needed” part that should have set off a editor.
“If amateur, part-time, or freelance writers are included, the number of departures from the games media swells to more than 4,000 people since October 2023.”
“If” indeed! They went from 25% down and then if you include free lancers swelling to more then 4,000 people. That’s just sloppy writing. At least give initial numbers and keep the format consistant.
Also, they may not have hard quotas there but the writers are paid to make articles and content to fill the site (it is like how best buy did not do commission vs future shop but where both the same company and fired those that did not make sales regardless).
The incentives are very different when the writers own the company and are largely paid by monthly subscribers.
There is also a big “citation needed” part that should have set off a editor.
How would you have cited “declining quality of writing” as an inciting factor? How would you measure it? And why did it just become a problem in the past few years rather than any of the problems that are listed in the article?
How would you have cited “declining quality of writing” as an inciting factor? How would you measure it? And why did it just become a problem in the past few years rather than any of the problems that are listed in the article?
The part I am talking about is below the the part you are quoting. It was a critique on the part that goes:
"According to Press Engine’s database of ‘tier 1’ publications that cover games (which is defined as major websites, both specialist and mainstream, with seven-figure-plus audiences), the global pool of game journalists has declined by 25% in just two years. The vast majority of these departures were from specialist games websites like IGN, Polygon, or Gamepot.
If amateur, part-time, or freelance writers are included, the number of departures from the games media swells to more than 4,000 people since October 2023."
I am not sure if you are just a touch upset that everyone does not agree that your writer owned slop factory is of high standards or if you just missed the part where I was trying to point out the weak writing as asked. But if I was to “cite” the declining quality of writing, I could do so by referencing old popular articles compared to current ones, I could show screen shots of the ever mounting assault of ads, or I could do what I am doing here and just assume that my audience is not wilfully ignorant of the current state of the format.
You can not out of one side of your mouth state the industry of writing is dying then say out of the other that the writing has not suffered.
I know you were talking about another part of the article, but you had a similarly uncited reason for the shrinking games media work force. I don’t care if you don’t like VGC, but I really don’t see a time when the writing was better, and I wanted to see what you were expecting.
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.
Go to Steam page. Scroll to bottom. Filter out negative reviews. Read 5-10. Update filers to only show negative reviews. Read 5-10.
That’s never let me down when it comes to determining whether or not a game is one I’ll enjoy.
Most “reviewers” get a version of the game with infinite money and health to get through the game quickly and only talk about story and size.
I bet there’s bosses and quests that have a special place in our rage that these people just breezed through and they don’t remember them a single bit.
I’ve gotten release copies of games for review. Unless they have another secret tier of pressers, this is nonsense. If anything, review copies are more likely to have bugs that making completing the game harder.
Indie or AA and AAA?
Indie and AA.
The most I’ve heard about reviewers getting extra help is that they have a small tip sheet for the trickiest parts, and only sometimes. If they need extra help beyond that, they’re messaging their colleagues on Discord who are also under embargo.
It would be difficult to measure if that was the case, but what does seem to be the case is that the old revenue model these outlets relied on just paid less and less over the years.
I miss Total Biscuit 😭
They’re really aren’t any other good game reviewers. They used to be Nerd Cubed but he doesn’t seem to do game reviews anymore. There’s Sid Alpha, but if he feels particularly frisky he’ll put out a whole two videos a year, so that’s not very helpful.
Feel like you get enough information from steam reviews and watching literally anybody posting the gameplay.
I’m not sure how much more info you need to decide.
Legendary Drops seems to have some solid takes. I find I get more of watching people play the games though these days.
Anecdotal, but I have never read a game review in my life that was from a journalist. It’s always been in forums, and lately some small youtubers. I want to hear from normal gamers, not people getting a paycheck for it.
Back in the late 90s-early 2000s the PCGamer magazine was actually worthwhile. It had reviewers who specialized in different genres and if read enough you could get a feel for their writing style and critical voice. The fact it was a monthly publication meant they weren’t racing to get a review out in the first 24 hours.
Nowadays it all seems like publications race to put reviews out online for relevance, and the reviewers often seem to have a disdain for video games and even if they don’t they aren’t genre experts.
I don’t like fighting games. My review of a fighting game would be trash. Yet major publications just pump out reviews by whoever.
Individual youtubers at least can develop a recognizable critical voice and stick more to genres they know and enjoy.
Embargoes exist to prevent that race. Your fighting game problem has been solved by assigning fighting game reviews to the “fighting game guy” on hand, which is why you’ll see the same byline on games in the same genre from major outlets.
I‘d rather read a well articulated opinion that is embedded into a rich cultural context than some rambling from strangers. I know the former is hard to find (Eurogamer and RPS are good, but suffer from layoffs, too). The latter I only skim through to find things I might find distracting that were omitted by others.
Shout-out to Nextlander and Giantbomb for keeping gaming journalism alive.
And sites like Aftermath.site
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.
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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.
Lol.
Games “journalists” have always been awful at their job and the entire industry is so incredibly fucky with nerds power tripping on the tiniest modicum of power they’ve been given.
I tried contributing to game8. They only accept payment through paypal. I’ve closed my paypal account.
An effort was made.
Um, that’s how it always should have been. That’s how journalism in general works, going back since pretty much the dawn of newspapers: readers pay for copy, and advertisements subsidize it.
Like the games industry, publications that cover video games have been rocked by a turbulent market since the highs of the COVID-19 pandemic. Media owners like IGN, Fandom, Gamer Network, and Valent have all cut jobs in the past year.
Is it turbulent though? This article goes over video game spending by year, and it has largely plateaued since 2019. There was a pretty big jump in 2020 due to the pandemic, but the market seems to have returned to a normalish trajectory and mobile revenue seems to be plateauing (I guess it’s saturated?).
I think what happened is that people are shifting where they get their information from. Instead of relying on game journalists, who seem to be paid by game devs (hence why any big game rarely gets below 7/10), they rely on social media, who theoretically aren’t paid by game devs (there’s plenty of astroturfing though). The business model where they’re not paid by game devs should always have been the case, since when people are deciding what games to buy, they clearly would prefer a less biased source.
IMO, games journalism should have multiple revenue streams, such as:
- fan revenue - either donations or subscriptions should always be primary
- curated game bundles, like Jingle Jam - run a charity event where a large portion is donated (be up-front, and have a slider so donators can decide how much goes where, even 0% to one or the other)
- merch
- game tournaments w/ prizes - would be especially cool to focus on indies
- maybe have paid questions from fans that gets answered in a podcast or a paid video to discuss topics of fans’ choosing
They can get very far before needing to run ads. Produce quality journalism and have some additional revenue streams and it’ll work out.
I don’t consume much gaming journalism because it’s largely BS that praises big AAAs and generally ignores indies unless they get viral. I want honest opinions about games, not some balance between sucking up to who pays the bills and mild criticism.
Games media worked under an ad-supported model for about 20 years though. As those in that business will tell you, the payouts from advertisers have fallen dramatically. The ones keeping themselves afloat now have pivoted to your first, third, and fifth bullet points, as well as ads on the free content that subscribers typically get to opt out of.
But weren’t game reviews essentially ads paid by the publisher? Because that’s what it looks like from the outside, since the reviews are increasingly poor quality that largely focus on positives and ignore negatives. Some games that completely flopped due to technical issues got glowing reviews by journalists, probably because they were paid handsomely for that review.
I think game journalists should avoid advertisements as much as possible because once they rely on it, the temptation to allow their content to be colored by whatever attracts advertisers is too much. They should be solely focused on attracting readers, which means they need to be reader supported.
It’s a symbiotic relationship that advances goals for each, but no, they’re not paid ads, and it’s been debunked over and over again. Some game reviews higher than someone feels it should, and they conclude it only could have been paid off, but it wasn’t. Here are a few things that do happen that influence review scores though:
- Publishers know which outlets review their games well, and they prioritize giving advance copies to those outlets and not others; this is why you’ll see the average score drop by a few points after the game’s official release.
- The person on staff who liked the last game in the series, or other games in the same genre, tends to keep reviewing them, because they enjoy the work more, and that review better serves the overall audience. This can explain why a genre-defying game like Death Stranding reviews in the low 80s, but then the sequel is reviewed by people who tended to appreciate the first game, and the sequel reviews higher.
- Publishers know which version of their game is best, and they’ll send review copies of that version. That means they send the PC version of Cyberpunk 2077 when the console version is broken, and they send the console version when the PC optimization sucks.
- When a game is online-only, publishers like to host on-site, curated review sessions with optimal network conditions in a space where all the reviewers definitely have someone to play with. Review outlets have become skeptical of reviewing games this way, and you’ll more often see “reviews in progress” of games where they want the servers to “settle” first. I was surprised to see MS Flight Simulator 2024 actually held to account over its broken online infrastructure, as you’re correct that, historically, they’re not held accountable, but that’s because of this change that review outlets have made in how they cover games like this.
This makes a lot of sense.
It would be nice if multiple people reviewed each game, and then they discuss before publishing a review. That’s one thing I really like about Digital Foundry, though they focus way more on technical details than overall gaming experience, but it’s very fun to see what each reviewer has to say about a given title.
That’s often a matter of resources. Staff sizes are only getting smaller at these outlets, and there are more games released each year than ever before; and they’re trending toward being longer on top of that. Being able to get multiple people to review a single game is a luxury, one that Digital Foundry can afford when they just need to benchmark a typical scene in the game.
In America, they are legally required to disclose paid reviews. If the company pays for the review they legally must disclose it
If you receive free products or other perks with the expectation that you’ll promote or discuss the advertiser’s products in your blog, the FTC Act applies to you.
Is that actually enforced? If so, what’s the explanation for reviewers giving suspiciously high reviews to AAA games?
As someone who’s done this before, let me tell you it’d be much easier for Toby Fox to pay me to give Undertale a good review than it would for Ubisoft to pay me to give Rayman a good review.
Are you talking from a regulatory standpoint or from an “I like indies so I’d give it a pass” standpoint?
I’m talking about how easy it is to deal with a singular party than a developer/publisher duo and their rotating marketing and engagement departments.
Is that actually enforced?
Surprisingly so. There’s a huge difference in online advertisements pre- and post-Fyre Festival.
If so, what’s the explanation for reviewers giving suspiciously high reviews to AAA games?
They liked the game more than you. I promise you it is that simple.
I’m not talking about my personal preference on rating, I’m talking about broad community reviews.
For example, Cyberpunk 2077 is a notorious example. It got generally favorable reviews from reviewers, and the public release was a completely broken pile of trash on console. Reviews didn’t even get the console release, yet still gave it a positive review because the experience on PC was decent. How can we trust reviewers if they don’t actually try the game? The terms of the review embargo alone should have pushed reviewers to give it net negative reviews since they’re not able to actually try the game.
For strict review differences, look at Starfield, which got 85% by Metacritic, and Steam reviews are more like 55-60%, and it got hit hard by independent reviewers shortly after launch. That’s a pretty big mismatch.
GTA V was pretty close to a perfect score, but actual reception was a bit lower (80% or so on Steam right now). That’s not a huge difference, and it could be due to frustration about not having a sequel for over a decade, but it does seem that some studios get more favorable reviews/more of a pass than others.
That said, a lot of the time reviews are pretty close to the eventual community response. It just seems that reviewers overhype certain games. I haven’t really seen much evidence where critics review a game much below where the community reception is, but I have seen cases where reviewer scores are quite a bit higher than the eventual community response.
Maybe there’s nothing suspicious going on, it just sometimes feels that way.
Reviews will typically mention which version they were, but in general, there are very few differences between them these days, unlike back in the 6th gen or early 7th gen. Games like Cyberpunk are outliers.
Starfield is not a bad game. In a lot of ways, it’s a very good one. My biggest complaints with it, personally, are all the ways that it should have been modernized but refused to, falling back on what worked over a decade before it came out without turning an eye toward its contemporaries and the improvements they’ve made to the same formula. I find Steam reviews to be a valuable data point among plenty of other data points, but user reviews being that much lower than the critic average doesn’t mean the critic score is a problem.
For an example of a game where critics reviewed it less favorably than the user score, see Mad Max or Days Gone, which might be explained as games where the initial sales weren’t strong, and people who found it later, often at a discounted price, were pleasantly surprised compared to its reputation. There’s also the likes of SkillUp’s review of Ghost of Yotei. That game has largely reviewed very well by other outlets, but he found his review to be out of sync with his audience. If you’re a reviewer who plays dozens of games per year, your opinion of a formulaic open world game might be very different from someone who plays 3 games per year and hasn’t gotten sick of it. Both are valid points of view.
