Gaming Journalism Is Lame 

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I remember when sports journalism was the laughing stock for journalists Thanks gaming "journalism"

I love how Husky the Snowman was made to prove a point in the marvel video and now he's officially become a recurring mascot of the channel

The incentive structure is pretty simple and well laid out here: 1. Reviewers need to get their articles out as fast as possible. This usually means getting access to the product before the general public. 2. If a reviewer gets the access they need and churn out a negative review, the publisher/studio won't give them access in the future, hurting their ability to earn revenue. 3. Therefore, it is always in the best interest of the reviewer to give positive reviews. In other words, you write positive reviews, you make money. You write negative reviews, you lose money. That's the system. You can disregard advertising dollars spent on banner and video ads, exclusive content, etc. With this alone, the "review" industry is nothing more than an extension of every studio/publisher's marketing arm.

I've always been surprised that gaming journalism is even an industry.

I loved how EGM would, before their review section, give a little history on each reviewer that issue and then had three of them review each title for the month. That way, when the two guys who love 3D platformers says Tonic Trouble is amazing and the one guy who hates them says it sucks, it made sense why. It also instilled in me at a young age to actually know who's opinion I am reading, and "IGN GIVING IT A 10/10" means nothing.

You know... I'm starting to think that having everything revolve around profit is a bit... not swell.

I like how much use he’s getting out of his silly little snowman he modeled

It's baffling how some people deny that "access journalism" is an oxymoron, and the influence companies have.

I miss the days when we would get demo discs with our gaming magazines. Growing up throughout the 90's & into the Y2k early 2000's was such a unique experience. I'm glad i got to grow up thru that era because nowadays it is so different & i never thought we were going to lose so many aspects that we used to have.. i just assumed things would evolve, improve but weirdly enough things have actively changed for the worse... So ya i miss the days of demo discs with our gaming magazines and so many other things from that era.

Aside from the last part this can basically apply to all forms of journalism

I think that's what most people forget about the news industry in general, not just games and movies: They are in advertising business, and journalism is just a side product.

FYI. Postal service revenue is at an all time high, and physical media can compete in one important metric. Nostalgia. Theres still something to be said for having physical media, something tangible. Some may call this niche at this point, but it still holds some point of relevance.

TL;DW: The entire industry is literally worthless from top to bottom.

I think a large part of the problem, which is also present in regular journalism, is that the current generation of journalists mostly come from homogeneous backgrounds. They all went to the same schools, came from the same demographics, and if they transitioned from another industry prior to doing journo stuff they often come from the same places there too. This basically results in people whose job is dependent on being in-touch with the subject matter just being more in touch with each other than with the field they're reporting on more often than not instead. Back in the day journalism was more informal (less dependence on accrediting, and degrees to get the job) and folks often came from the areas/fields they reported on. Eg. prior military often became war correspondents, folks with labor union connections reported on labor adjacent stuff, local activists got on the local paper to report on local issues they worked on, etc.

I was offered the Editor in Chief position at Next Generation in 2000. Upon meeting with the higher ups at Imagine/Future publishing, I got pulled into an executive's office who proceeded to tell me, "Anyone can write a good review about a good game. We need people who can write a good review about a bad game." I didn't take the job and Next Generation Magazine didn't make it a year after that interview. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The plot twist about Nintendo Power being owned by Nintendo, is the fact that they gave their own games harsher scores than other games compared to other outlets.

So it turns out society and problems are way more complicated and systematic.

Ahh man, I miss magazines. Fr tho, they maybe only came out once a month but as a kid you bet your behind I'd be pouring over every screen shot, reading every word, pawing at every page in bed at night, or the back of my parents car or with friends during school lunch breaks. I swear the quality of journalism and reviews was so much higher because it cost so much more to produce and distribute and reputation actually mattered, accountability mattered and journalists were hired on the basis of their skills as writers and storytellers, not how many clickbait rageclicks they could generate on TXXTer or FaceMuck.

Also gaming journalist used to be passionate about gaming and would give honest opinions. Now they avoid reviewing bad games almost entirely and praise even the most broken AAA game simply because a popular studio is attached to it. Modern gaming journalists have zero integrity and zero passion.

Professional gaming journalism sucks, because the professional reviews will not end up liking good games. They will like games that are flashy, and easy to get through, because they have to go through so many so quickly.

Nice try Husk, I know for a fact that we've never had to live without Funbooks or Tic-Tacs. I love a good work of fantasy imagining what life was like without them tho

On my Home Screen, this video appeared directly below an IGN post showing screen caps of random people on Twitter reacting in utter awe of the new episode of Loki... because "journalism"

Awesome Whimsu cameo, you guys should do more collabs

I feel like we should Goncharov the AI journalists into making articles saying that Nintendo is Buying Disney

hello mother

A profession we no longer need.

I have never gotten over that gaming and tech press conferences look and sound like political rallies.

I find it amazing that PC Gamer got to do an interview to Valve and actually was a good interview

I always appreciate a person that can properly use Jonathan Frakes poses to get points across..

What a perfect ending. We could explain all the different nuances of how both sides cheat their way into comfort and profit in ways that most peoples' solutions won't do anything for, but underneath it all we are trying to "regain" the integrity of people whose job has always been just telling us what to consume next.

Best frame in this video is where you said "best possible setting" for The New Star Wars and its just Lego Yoda on the screen. Absolutely flawless

I give this video a 7.8/10 too much water

there's a specific term for the type of journalism you're describing, it's called "yellow-page journalism"

>Spider-Slop 3 with a Cuban flag in the background, referencing how Insomniac got Cuba and Puerto Rico mixed up Lmao this guy gets it.

All gaming magazines were much more interesting back in the day than the IGNs and other gaming websites of 2023. Not even a contest.

All that you said might be right on the US market but it's not elsewhere. In France we have Canard PC (Duck PC, a joke made from the Canard WC brand of gel for WC) that does in depth articles about the industry, the games, everything related to the media and more (they even have an off-shoot called Canard PC Hardware for, well hardware) and they're completly independant. And guess what, they SURVIVED one of the hardest crysis to hit newspapers in France (Prestalis scandal) and they still operate to this day.

Reprinting press releases doesn't really count as journalism for me

You're correct about the survival tactics part. Just see the internet's reaction whenever an article with a retarded title gain popularity. For me personally, I stopped looking at those sites when I realized I can enjoy games without caring about other stuff that's happening in the industry. It's much more fun like that.

Man, am I glad that now we have youtubers who review games independently and will never be paid or invited to a press event to promote a product! Right? Right?!

It reminds me of "Manufacturing consent" from Noah Chomskey

My irony meter cracked when it was crushed between the sponsor and the topic.

"In the words of Huey Long, 'Every Man a Mega-Man' and 'a DLC in Every Pot'"

Yeah I quit clicking on bait articles back in 2017. I finally realized what I was doing for those websites. Only time i comment on a kotaku, cbr etc is if it’s on my Facebook timeline and I’m usually just trolling while I’m on the shitter!😂

It's crazy to think that only half of earth has never played a video game

I miss the excitement of receiving a brand new gaming magazine each month. Each time it was cram-packed full of news, reviews and info on all upcoming games. I miss level layouts and, of course, demo discs! Oh yeah, and I really, really miss when the industry was creative and driven to push the boundary of what was possible in a game. Nowadays the industry only pushes the boundaries of how broken and incomplete a game can be and see if people will still buy it 😔

Nice Whimsu crossover, you should have him on more often.

It used to be that people writing about games seemed to actually like them. I'm sure that plenty of them were faking that, but they at least understood that it was something they needed to fake. Now it feels like we get stuck with a lot of people that couldn't get jobs at The Wall Street Journal and, not only are they not the sort of people who consider the next Nintendo console to be more important than the sociopolitical issues and current events of the day, they don't even seem to believe us when we tell them that we do (or that at the very least we do when we're in the mood to read a gaming website).

In other words don’t trust reviewers ever. Just wait until it has been out for a while and listen to what the actual people say about it

That's exactly what happened with that Galactic Starcruisers and those influencers that were invited to be there first. You could see how bad it was but they were desperately trying to find anything positive to say.

Amiga Format was responsible for most of the Amiga piracy

That thing about the time factor is why we tend to distinguish between 'news' content and 'feature' content tbh (I am not a games journalist, but I know how it works). Short bulletins for the small stuff, long-form analysis and opinion for the stuff that's longer term. The trouble comes, as always, when opinion columns come along and blur the line.

RyanF9 talked about the exact same incentive ring with motorcycles, and I've seen the same thing in gun magazines. It's in every industry that has products worth being reviewed. Easy way to tell if a website or magazine is writing trash reviews is by seeing if they've ever written a bad review. Was it a contrarian opinion, or was it an obviously bad product that wouldn't burn bridges with a negative review?

Game journalism websites rely on ad revenue from game companies to stay alive - for the most part they basically just **aren't allowed** to give bad scores to games published by their benefactors. Look up the story of Jeff Gerstmann, who was fired for giving a bad review to Kane and Lynch - one of the worst games ever made.

When I read the news I always read multiple websites takes on it because I feel (and know) I am getting incomplete information without it but it is unfortunate people dont do the same

In the 9th year AGG (After GamerGate) I thought this was self-evident but thank you for the explanation, but an upload from you is always a welcome treat.

The problem is simply that it's obvious gaming journalism isn't done by people who have actually played even a single game in their lives, never mind gamers who have played thousands of games as a hobby. It's like a load of people tried to get into journalism but couldn't get anywhere in the topics they are passionate in, so they had to resort to gaming. If you want to get into journalism of any kind, it doesn't matter how interested you are in the subject, it matters if you have some English degree.

So it’s all just a game of marketing?

gaming journalists are the scariest Halloween horror of all.

Great analysis KH, I just fast forward through spanwave in the morning and listen to the segments that interest me. He seems to be fairly objective.

There's an undercurrent that doesn't get mentioned here, which is that what all the gaming journalists started doing was posting on Twitter, because all the game devs were there. They did not know any better than anyone else at the time that Twitter would go for algorithmic engagement and what that actually meant, but once it did, which was in 2012, one year later there was Politics in Video Games and Ethics in Game Journalism. The period before that was quite hopeful about what all the new voices found online could do for gaming's conversation, which had been in a stagnant good-old-boys mindset roughly since the time that the market consolidated into a few publicly-traded publishers(basically, the mid 90's). But what jumped ahead of the line in this new era were extremists with career ambitions. And part of that is also that we're talking about a bunch of Millennials who were not getting anything like what they were promised in the post-08 economy, so they didn't want to go along to get along. The grievances were going to come out somehow and gaming was an easy space to do it. Gaming isn't unique in this, just maybe more visible. In general, industries do harm because they're there to support the goals of nation-state elites, not the things they say they're about. It's not solved within the politics of the state: the access to financing and legal structures to have a big organization with a large reach derives from partnering up with the state, so everyone on the ground ends up being dependent on doing things that advance someone else's power play. And whether it looks left-flavored or right-flavored, someone is pulling a string. Avoid being part of an industry if you can help it 😂

I can't believe there's so many people trusting game journalists that it's become an industry.

Man, I remember reading through LEGO catalogs with my brother back in the day. Good, simpler times. 😭

a snowman with a tropical shirt is neat

Why do gamers find Gaming Jurnos so lame? *Wind whispers GamerGate*

2:40 This made my day. I needed it.

Where can I find the outro music?

But how els will the drama RU-vidrs get their money.

Truly a husk of knowledge

The 'editorializing' Gaming Journalism is what is dying... It is easy and simple, they are adding things in that don't need to be there and not actually covering the games and news on the game, they're falling in to the 24/7 issue of having to create news in order to keep 'relevant', see CNN/MSNBC/Fox. Contrariwise sites like GameFAQs are picking back up in popularity, because they're telling you about the games and moving on.

So happy Escapist is dying. I got banned during gamergate for "whining" when in reality all i did was make a post asking "hey, its been a week, can we stop? My entire feed is arguing, and its making me want to leave the site. Mod comes in, "Okay then, bye" perma ban. I had an OG account, posted every day, and had been donating money since i joined. Only for one guy to tell me he didnt want me there, no priors, no warning. Just gtfo.

We really need some way for publications to get guarantees that, if a publisher hands out early access codes, they will be able to get them regardless of their previous reviewers. If it was standard to at least always give early access codes to some list of the most popular sites that would probably give reviewers significantly more freedom. Advertising would still be an issue though, so maybe the best way to get reviews is to follow independent critics of platforms like RU-vid who don't get early access codes.

It's always been weird. The old magazines would be written by people barely into adulthood working for a pittance. Imagine having to stretch a two-page spread out of a busted Breakout clone. The current sites use a rolodex of faceless freelancers. Below that, you've got influencers who are entirely self-employed and rely upon views and watch time. There's honest in there but there is no editor or a second opinion to at least offer the illusion of checks and balances. And then you've got anyone booted from gaming publications/websites. The patreon mob that just can't quit. It's an industry that can support a few hundred people globally. The rest are just crabs in a bucket. The only thing that's changed is the sheer, terrifying volume of it.

11:55 this right here is the problem. People support these bad behaviors by either talking about it and making it this week's relevency or they go out and buy the thing they just complained about. It doesn't matter if they buy it to make fun of it or not because that company just got the profits. It doesn't matter if you go to the article to laugh at it, you just gave them your views. These youtubers even reporting this stuff are part of the problem because they are broadcasting it, thus making it "relevent"...everyone just needs to stop.

I expected a mention of Kane and Lynch at the end when talking about relationships between publisher and outlets, because that was a big deal in 2007.

I can't believe you got Wimsu to make a cameo. So cool

Still remember getting Game Informer in the mail every month or whatever, remember learning that StarCraft 2 was in development through the magazine.

"It's not about greed. It's survival tactics." 5 seconds later: "That political nonsense you all really hate, it makes more money than anything else they publish."

I’ll never forget that the first place I got news of Minecraft & Fortnite was through reading GameInformer as a kid.

I think reviews are such a weird thing to count as journalism in the first place. To consider a personal opinion on the quality of a piece of art "news" in any way shape or form is... kind of stupid? This is why I only ever watch youtube videos for reviews, trying to find channels operated by a single person rather than an entire organization like ign. Reviews shouldn't be news, they should be opinionated pieces of discussion. It's just the kind of thing you can't tack any kind of reliability or credibility behind at the risk of making an opinion something grander than it is. Best you can do is find a platformer fan to review a platformer game, and that's what you should do, because anything else feels disingenuous. And it sucks too, because the people who really care about talking about games, the kind of people to make hour long dissections of their favorite games, are the people who are doing the best games coverage on the internet. I don't hate websites like ign and kotaku but I wish their writers were allowed to make something more passionate for this artistic medium rather than simple observation every once in a while, and god forbid the outrageous opinion pieces on things no one really believes.

You still are one of my favorite content creators ❤️

Just wondering what the outro music is. Tried to Shazam it but it came up with nothing. Did you make it yourself?

The problem isn't money, ambitious greed, or wanting more money. It's much more. It's what the money represents. Money is power. Power is control. Control needs money. And it's harder to keep money than make money. The root of the problem is people don't know how to use power responsibly. Use power with discipline. Power is used to serve life, not take life. And with great power comes greater responsibility.

Lately, I have only been "interested" in reading about the industry when it does something stupid. I've been keeping up with the industry a lot this year.

im glad gen 2 KH art is back and sexier than ever. i missed it.

I think the biggest reason people hate games journalism is the games journalists. They hate their audience, are patronising and condescending to everyone, often have a poor understanding of the things they talk about leading to consistent factual errors, tend to have really shitty attitudes, treat people badly, are really bad at writing and they have this assumption that their own opinions are superior and the only opinions that matter, and that anyone who disagrees with them must be a terrible person who must be shunned and attacked. Obviously such people are going to be disliked by a lot of people and would attract a lot of ridicule. Games journalism can work out when the journalist in question is actually somewhat of a decent person or actually does a decent job. Take Totalbiscuit for example, he managed to build up such a huge following and still to this day years after his death is regularly talked about as being games journalism done right, and he did this by talking to his audience like actual human beings, caring a lot about his work and the topics he talked about, putting in the effort to make sure he does good work, and not demonising people for daring to have different opinions. Because of this he was successful despite people's general disdain for games journalism, proving it can be done well with the right journalists. These companies like Kotaku and IGN really screw themselves over by hiring the worst people to do the job.

I still can’t wait till that new spider slop comes out

Great vid Please reconsider the droning ambient music in the future

Gaming probably doesn't really need too much journalism behind it. As you said, it used to be a niche thing with magazines catered exclusively to the niche of the already niche hobby. Gamer mags weren't akin to gossip news and tabloids, it was more related to transportation (cars, buses, trains, boats, planes), fashion, design, manga/anime or any other hobby that never caters to everyone, but instead something that a certain type of intellectual elite wants. Train geeks, industrial design geeks, car people, all of them have (or had) a magazine or book or any sort of e-publication centered in the specific type of car company design house, etc. that the reader wants to see. Manga mags used to cover the recent premieres and manga publications with reviews, pictures and other articles for a broad anime audience while at the same time understanding who that audience is. Meanwhile, most modern gaming sites (IGN, Kotaku, etc.) try to cater to a lot of kinds of gamers, PC gamers, Play Station gamers, Nintendo Gamers, heck even phone gamers. Needless to say, a lot of these audiences are very different from each other and different regions/markets do not make any favours to the journalists trying to write articles about games and such, since a lot of games aren't distributed equally throughout the world (PS, Steam, PC). I do believe that this might be the real reason for why modern games journalism is so out of touch as the old school spetialised journalists that wrote only for the niche sector now were put in charge of broader appeal publications, which in turn makes it harder to actually connect to anybody in said niche. Think of it this way, there are a few cars magazines centered around companies like VW or Nissan, car companies that aren't just huge, but they also have a huge following of owners, fans, and maybe even future buyers. It would be unreasonable to ask those kinds of publications to start creating articles that talk more broadly or even about other car companies without making the old fans and followers feel betrayed or dissatisfied. Either way, as long as we still have open discussion forums and sites to communicate freely with other gamers in our field, platform, game genre, games and the like, there will not be too much of a need for these sensationalist tabloids passing as gaming sites, as all the information that we can want and get will be available to the community and still be created and maintained by most communities around it.

I'm enjoying the snowman IP you created a few videos back

I just straight up stopped reading reviews for games a while back. I did so again with starfield, and then when I played it... It was clear the reviews were straight up lying about everything. I wonder how much bethesda paid them. It's fair to say I won't be reading any reviews for any games again.

Alright Ty, let’s go. Strapped in, got my helmet on.

I wonder how would a subscription based model for gaming or entertainment news in general work. It works for serious journalism like say those focused on politics or the economy because yeah there are people who'd pay to see well researched articles on them, but are enough willing to do so for game industry stuff ?

give this guy the award for the most original video on this website

I can sum up Gaming Journalism in two words: "Very Cool"

Wanna hear a joke? Gaming journalism.

Love the video but what's the song playing at 13:30

I used to work as a volunteer at a small gaming print that focused on reviews and news about video games. We would get sent preview codes and stuff for pretty big games (Battlefield, Call of Duty, etc). And we were told to just write whatever we wanted. And I did. I gave lots of big games pretty bad scores and we kept getting preview codes because we were so small that it didn't matter for them. So it seems to me that this is obviously true at IGN and Kotaku level, but at a smaller level it is irrelevant. The big game companies just want to spread the game, and unless you are IGN and Kotaku nobody gives a shit what score you give. Consumers and companies alike.

Does anyone know what program whimsy uses to make those shaky animations like the cat?

"Not like Scientific American" The exact same thing, though not as extreme (yet), is happening to Scientific American. They're starting to publish a lot of politically fashionable pseudoscientific nonsense.