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:
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.