Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.10-001341/https://aftermath.site/video-games-journalism-2025
We’ve (sadly) covered a lot of games media stories thatinvolve writers being laid off, sites being shuffled around and sometimes even whole companies shutting down. For Inside Baseball week, I figured it might be a good time to check in with some of the few people left still making a living in video games journalism.
I spoke with a number of writers and voices who are a) drawing a full-time salary writing or talking about video games, and b) are working at what I’d call a “major” site, the big ones with historical brands that are still in a position to be paying people decent wages. These folks are the lucky few survivors, those in jobs that a decade ago were relatively common but which today–thanks to the aforementioned layoffs and closures, not to mention other contractions like a growing reliance on freelance and guides– are increasingly scarce.
I asked a number of questions about their past, present and, perhaps most pressing, their immediate future, with their answers to each below. To protect their identities and jobs their names have been changed, and outlets omitted where requested. By way of introduction, I spoke with:
No sympathy, industry has never been something to be particularly worthy in a long time, if it ever was.
If it creates a vacuum for others to have a go, then I am all for it. I have no loyalty to the status quo.
Robert knows what’s up.
If you want to see where this goes check where mobile gaming journalism is currently. After Touch Arcade went tits up last year there’s basically nothing that isn’t 90% sponsored content or a SEO farm.
I never paid much attention to “game journalism” because every time I did I saw “sponsored content and SEO farm”. So I really doubt we ever have a journalism, not just advertisement selling.
This is incredibly ironic because if you follow the history of this stuff somewhat rigorously there is a very good case to be made that the “pivot to video” beginning of the end starts when Jeff Gerstmann gets told by sales people at Gamespot to mellow out a review for advertising purposes and he aggressively refuses (as this was not at all a usual request), gets fired and starts Giant Bomb as a video-first outlet.
This is one of those things where an insider could have a very nuanced set of opinions about the relationships between the game marketing industry on one side and the craft and art of game criticism and journalism on the other, but it has somehow seeped down into mainstream opinion as “games journalism was all paid for”, which is definitely wrong.
When it was still possible to support yourself from journalism you could see concessions being made and certain news being definitely sponsored but it was never as bad as it is now. If you subscribe over RSS you can see how much crap is being created - every new game release means my feeds are flooded with dozens of „Best places to farm underpants in Zenless Zone Zero” or „How to beat minor boss in episode 27”. Google broke the internet.
We had walkthroughs for that. But now everything must be a 20 minute video. So not Google overall but concretely YouTube is to blame.
YouTube is Google though :)
It was fun in the 80s when we had no internet, video games were a niche, and crazy people could talk about all the new games, but that era is no more.
If that’s what the vacuum allows for then that’s why I am kind of for a collapse. If the industry is no longer profitable, it will go back to passion projects and from there hopefully we can recapture what was where hobbiests who were also good writers could do decent ‘game journilsm’.
Remember the days when a critic could trash a bad game without fear of never getting a review copy? Mostly because the just bought it and played it on release.