Does journalism on video games have a future?

By every statistic imaginable, the video game industry is thriving. By 2030, industry-wide revenue projections are expected to surpass $500 billion, up from a projected $184 billion in 2022, a very slow year. At any given time, Twitch, Amazon's live-streaming juggernaut, has around three million users tuned in. From the luxury of soft silicone recliners, users may watch prominent streamers lose themselves in sluggish "Call of Duty" marathons. If you include the non-players who sometimes play a round of "Candy Crush" on their iPhones, that makes 66 percent of Americans gamers. Many of them undoubtedly purchased tickets for Ryan Reynolds' 2021 parody of "Grand Theft Auto," "Free Guy" ($331 million at the film office), and more are watching "The Last of Us," the HBO series based on the 2013 PlayStation hit and the hottest prestige show now airing. Famously, Roger Ebert originally said that video games could never be considered art; but, now, Pedro Pascal's performance is receiving glowing reviews on the late master's website.

All of this is to imply that any media committed to providing thorough coverage of pop culture must have a specialized video game desk, or at the very least a tenacious video game reporter. We are undoubtedly in the middle of a paradigm change when Ilhan Omar is flaunting a massive computer setup and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is playing "Among Us" as part of a voter registration campaign. Yet even as the hobby's stifling nicheness disintegrates, many journalists covering games have found themselves abruptly without employment. The field is now experiencing a harsh, paradoxical contraction. The gaming business is receiving urgent investments from the world's power brokers, but gaming media is a very other matter.

Launcher, The Washington Post's gaming vertical that debuted in 2019, announced last month that it would be ceasing operations and laying off five of its employees. (The editorial staff of the Post lay off a total of 20 individuals.) The announcement followed the management-ordered staffing cuts at a number of smaller, more enthusiast-focused magazines. When 2023 rolled around, two pillars of gaming news, GameSpot and IGN, were downsized by their respective ownership organizations, Fandom and Ziff Davis. Cuts made last summer by parent company/Chinese entertainment behemoth Tencent have turned Fanbyte, which mastered a light, conversational, even Gawker-like approach to industry news, a ghost ship. Even G4, the venerable early-aughts cable TV network focused only on video games, which reappeared in 2021 with a bevy of famous personalities, lasted just over a year before being discontinued by Comcast in October.

Those who want to make a living writing about video games are becoming weary of the devastation. There are so many untold tales in this field just waiting to be discovered, and interest in it supposedly has never been stronger. But who precisely is interested in publishing all of that labor of love?

Merritt K, content manager of Fanbyte and one of the few staff members of the website who was unaffected by the layoffs, doesn't think games journalism in the form we've known is going to survive in a few years. There will be a few individuals covering major topics, either prompted by major media publications or funded via Patreon, but there doesn't appear to be much need for conventional game journalism on either the supply or demand side.

Merritt, like every other writer in the topic of video games, is aware that certain macro tendencies in a volatile economy might be blamed for the present gloominess of the games media industry. All media outlets are cutting costs, and several of the impacted offices, including BuzzFeed, Vox, Bustle, and Gannett, aren't covering "Final Fantasy XIV"-related news. Even still, it's noteworthy that the video game personnel was so exposed when The Washington Post started its layoffs.

The concern is that these sorts of pivots represent a persistent difference in how gaming media companies manage their bottom line. Fanbyte has abandoned its blogs and posts in favor of serving only as a library providing walkthroughs, manuals, and explanations for a number of well-known video games – the help you may go for when you get lost on a "Zelda." Such material generates a ton of SEO traffic that is very easy to monetize, and ideally, the resulting income would be spent in the more creative aspects of games journalism. Editorial mandates, however, have returned to their most avaricious versions at a time when every venture capital analyst is predicting an impending recession.

GameSpot and Giant Bomb, two seasoned video game media firms that were once owned by CBS and were both sold to Fandom in 2022, suffered the same fate. The Wiki system in Fandom is its unique feature: The business maintains a sizable network of Wikipedia-style wikis with popular media franchise themes (such as the Marvel Database, Resident Evil Wiki, and others), which offer vast expanses of blank HTML stubs where a large number of anonymous amateur writers can contribute questionably sourced treatises on the history of the X-Men. The difference that matters? Whereas Fandom is owned by a Dallas-based private equity business, Wikipedia is a nonprofit. Understandably, Fandom is not in the business of supporting professional editing firms or having to pay individuals who provide material to its wikis. So no one was too shocked when the business reduced its payroll and fired around 50 people across both of its newly acquired properties months after the acquisition. The goals of Fandom's subsidiary organizations conflict with those of the people who now control and run the gaming media. The marriage was doomed from the start.

The mercenary meaning of this tactic is that both Tencent and Fandom have a very pessimistic view of the overall worth of games journalism. They have chosen to create a nameless, faceless empire out of the mud of SEO optimization rather than investing in something additive for the hobby. These cynical choices may be simpler in the world of video games, which among the graying cadre of media executives still exudes a kiddish, low-art atmosphere.

Those executives were obviously wrong to disregard the dignity of gaming culture out of hand, but recently, like Merritt, several experts have been doubting whether there is a genuine audience for the kind of creative, in-depth reporting on the sector that might persuade an idealistic J-school student to apply for the job. Why are the walls squeezing in on you? Are the squeeze and juice not worth it? Stephen Totilo, a stalwart of the beat who formerly worked as the longstanding editor-in-chief of the groundbreaking gaming site Kotaku and is presently a games reporter for Axios, completely disagrees with that assertion. He believed that a successful games media company needs a consistent vote of confidence from top management. Totilo is familiar with how that appears: The website consistently attracted 16 million readers each month during his most well-funded period in charge of Kotaku.

Gaming media does need to be paid for, and leadership at publications like the Post and others must sell enough advertisements or subscriptions to fund it — or, get this, not expect this beat to instantly justify its cost, added Totilo. For gaming sites, it needs leadership that recognizes that reporting involves patience, competent editors as well as excellent writers, and that it will finally pay off."

The site's investigations into the grimier corners of the hobby—mismanaged e-sports groups, poor labor practices, etc.—were among the best-performing pieces, a source at Launcher informed. You should never accept the venture capital brokers' consensus as gospel. In the wake of Gawker's closure, Jeremy Gordon hit the nail on the head when he said that some owners of digital media really feel that "that anything unique or smart or fun has to be dumbed down for readers to get it, but when you dumb it down it turns out nobody wants to read that either."

The fact that hugely influential content creators like Felix "PewDiePie" Kjellberg and Mark "Markiplier" Fischbach provide their commentary about the games industry in direct competition with reporters puts games journalists at a distinct disadvantage when compared to the rest of the cultural conversation. This is due to the expansive alternative media ecosystem that exists on YouTube and Twitch. It's true that PewDiePie doesn't conduct the kind of in-depth investigations you could find at a more traditional media outlet, but he does have millions of fans who depend on him to explain and expand on the daily news in the hobby. Several young gamers believe that a coalition of their favorite talking heads, each running their own unique social brand, serves the same function as the IGN site. It makes you question if there weren't a solid base of YouTubers sharing the same fundamental bandwidth, the sudden increase of jobless games journalists may be felt more keenly by the general public. After all, mercurial ownership can never control a YouTube channel.

The Washington Post's Style desk writer Gene Park, a former reporter for Launcher, concedes that some gamers think that channels like YouTube and Twitch have diminished the importance of the jobs of games reporters. Yet he also observes that those who report the news and those who repeat the results on camera work in tandem. Many of those producers depend on the journalism published by outlets like Bloomberg, Kotaku, or IGN, all of which have the type of backing and security needed to carry out such coverage, said Park. The business is a massive beat to cover, and the general public, that holy grail for everyone in the media today, will only become more cynical of corporations that look out of touch, said one media expert.

Merritt hypothesizes that this laxity makes creators more open to cozy ties with games industry agents even if some influencers produce work that is similar to journalism on YouTube since there are no ethical standards or fact-checking procedures attached to a YouTube video. She argues that engaging with them makes publishers and PR happy. They are more likely to accept agreements in exchange for favorable press.

Assuming that the media industry is durable, despite the pervasive sense of precarity, we'll always be able to find a new audience for quality work when the previous one closes its doors. here's no denying that the number of dream positions in games journalism is drastically declining. You won't likely find such thrills on this beat right now if you want to relish the joys and sorrows of the reporting process and if you want to immerse yourself in a story without being distracted by engagement requirements or daily blogging responsibilities. Wired and Bloomberg both employ talented games reporters who are given the latitude to pursue ambitious projects, but for the most part, writing about games during this labor shortage requires one to grind out an endless slew of skeletal, AdSense-mining templates that have been carefully purged of the slightest whiff of voice or verve. Consider the Wordle part in Fanbyte. Every day, one of the staff members, whose numbers are falling, squeezes out the last of the available ambient Google traffic to put out a brief guide to the most recent answer to the daily problem. That is what a position in games journalism will look like in 2023.

In any general news medium, there has never been much coverage of the arts. There appear to be a lot of possibilities to work in the gaming industry, but if you want to do the sort of journalism that requires attorneys and document research, I do believe that there aren't many options available. That is a heartbreaking fact.

Park's observations remind of another discussion with a Young reporter who wanted to stay anonymous. She revealed that her longtime dream of working for The Washington Post as a sports reporter had finally come true. She might finally enjoy the rock-solid stability of legacy media after a lifetime of errant bylines and institutional insecurity. Yet no place is secure for very long, not even a newspaper run by the wealthiest man on earth. The reporter is now considering a sobering truth as she strengthens her resume and starts a new job search: There isn't another position for her to land. The top of her field was represented by Launcher. It's gone now. She is contemplating switching to a new rhythm as a result. In her next location, she could work as a tech journalist rather than a games journalist. There may not be anybody around to cover the video game explosion in the near future.