How I Learned to Stop Worrying about the Future of Games Media

By all metrics, video games media is fucked. So is every other kind of media.

2023 seems to be the year that everyone got laid off, starting with Tencent—yes, that Tencent—fucking over Fanbyte in late 2022. Fandom royally screwed Giant Bomb and GameSpot employees in January, and the Bezos-owned Washington Post shut down its gaming vertical, Launcher, a month or two later. Game Informer saw another round of layoffs in late 2022 as well, following a bad one in 2019. Vice closing Waypoint was the final indignity.

Somewhere in the middle, I also lost my job at EGM Media. The layoffs there weren’t as epically numerical as at some other outlets—literally just me and another writer lost our jobs—but it still hurt, gosh darn it. Truthfully, I already felt like EGM was over when we lost our freelance budget at the outset of the pandemic in April 2020, but Josh, Mollie, Matt and I at least kept trying to produce the best writing we could with the limited resources we were given, and I limped on for two-and-a-half more years. In the end, losing my job almost felt like a mercy-killing at that point.

So why didn’t I pursue another job in games journalism? Maybe a few of my experiences in games media scarred me. Maybe I just didn’t have the passion for it anymore. Maybe I had other plans that were put on hold by the WGA and SAG strikes. Maybe it’s because all of the VCs who owned the websites that I would have liked to work for fucking killed them already. Most likely, it was a combination of all these things.

The truth is, I’ve never felt like a “games journalist,” and before I started working at EGM, I never intended to become one. I’ve never really even had a career plan, just a bunch of ideas and ambitions. I tend to follow my nose, go where the wind takes me… which is probably why I’ve been what my therapist refers to as “underemployed” for the past eleven months.

Anyway, when I landed my gig at EGM in 2017, it was mostly by happenstance. Just prior to that, I was working as a cashier at an overpriced burger shop in Silver Lake. One of the cooks played Overwatch with a writer at a video game website, and he heard they had an opening. Knowing that I had several degrees in writing—and that I, too, was a fellow “gamer”—the cook offered to pass my resume along. Soon after, I got an interview. I think Josh just liked that I could string a few sentences together in some kind of logical order and that I was okay working for relative peanuts. Those seemed to be the two main qualifications that EGM’s owner was looking for in new recruits.

I saw two different rounds of layoffs while I was at EGM. The first was in 2019, when half of our already small staff was laid off. Our revenue was based on online advertisements and print ads sold in GameCenter, Walmart’s gaming vertical that we also published. While I’m not sure of the exact reasons behind these layoffs, I was told that it was either a) we all lose our jobs, or b) we pivot to something that’s a little more agile, with the intent of eventually transitioning into subscription-based model like The Athletic was doing, relying on a freelance budget to produce high-quality, daily feature stories. Right from the get-go, our traffic numbers were increasing. People were reading the feature articles. Not only that, but the EGM brand was experiencing a sort of renaissance of legitimacy. We were told we’d have two years to prove this out, and we were confident that we would continue to see significant growth.

Then the pandemic happened, and we lost our freelance budget. That was nine months after we relaunched. The second round of layoffs came two years later. That’s when I lost my job. From what I understand, the social media traffic we were relying on basically stopped working for us nearly overnight and our revenue plummeted.

I’m not saying this to garner sympathy. Shit happens. I was grateful that I was able to keep my job for as long as I did, especially during the outset of the pandemic, and I did feel protected and cared for by my superiors.

I’m saying this to paint a picture of how even a smaller outlet can suffer from the same thing that caused layoffs at much larger and more widely read websites (and even the short-lived resurrection of G4): ownership that’s constantly pivoting when the going gets tough and a revenue model that’s way too reliant on advertisements.

That’s all been pretty well laid out in Khee Hoon Chan’s GamesIndustry.biz article, “Why do games media layoffs keep happening?” What’s also expressed in that article is the idea that “many journalists are pessimistic about the future of games media.” That article continues:

Several uphill battles lay ahead, be it the constant struggle to outpace the whims of an SEO-dominated industry, or that the problem is just more fundamental: that digital media has not found a way to remain profitable enough for its key stakeholders.

I can’t say I’m optimistic about the immediate future of games journalism. At the moment, it seems like nothing is working. It’s especially upsetting when otherwise successful-seeming verticals at more widely read institutional publications can get shut down. Not to mention the amount of hatred that gaming social media, streamers, and YouTubers heap on journalists that are literally trying to help people with their reporting.

It’s easy to blame the overbearing power structures that control the resources required to produce compelling coverage of a billion-dollar industry, as well as the underlying historical foundations of games media (and games advertising in general) as a “safe space” for sexist, judgmental, reactionary nerds who felt ostracized by every aspect of society that didn’t involve video games—which, decades later, would make the conditions just right for GamerGate.

But it’s not just games journalism that’s struggling. Employment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. reported that the media industry announced over 20,000 job cuts in 2023, 2,681 of which were in the news category. It goes on to say that November 2023 saw the “lowest year-to-date total” of announced plans to hire since 2015.

Seemingly the only media company that has truly weathered the storm is the New York Times, and it did so—as detailed in a recent episode of On the Media—by becoming a “tech company.” In other words, it basically made it so that readers didn’t have a reason to not be part of the Times ecosystem, even when they weren’t particularly looking to stay informed with news, by making other aspects of their output—namely recipes and games—part of their audience’s daily habit energy.

But how does video games media do that? IGN has somewhat succeeded at this (even if, as the Doughboys would say, their app is crap), but pretty much every other outlet, even the big ones, have struggled to figure out a way to make sure that readers never have to leave. Polygon came pretty close at one point with its video output, and it’s making a notable attempt with its recent Puzzmo initiative, almost as if taking a page out of the Times’ playbook, but I don’t see that providing long-term engagement. (You can’t compete with the NYT crossword and Wordle, sorry.) Even still, is that what we want from video games journalism? A place that we can never leave?

The sad truth might be that, at the moment, because ad spend is in the toilet, there just isn’t enough work to go around for as many people as there are who want to write about games and the games industry. On top of that, there isn’t enough of an audience for serious games journalism and criticism to fork over the cash for a dozen different Patreons every month. That leaves us with a games media that’s basically streamers and YouTubers who don’t have the same kind of overhead as traditional games websites, and whose audiences basically just want to watch them play games all day. What little ad spend still exists pretty much goes to them.

I’ve made it to the point of this rant where I’m wondering why am I even writing this. Well, I miss writing about video games, so I might do some more of that on the side, and I figured this is as good a place as any to start.

I also feel that, despite all the doom and gloom about games media this year, it’s worth celebrating how much games journalism and games criticism has matured over the years, and how much good writing there is about video games, even under such strenuous conditions. Critical Distance still hasn’t run out of articles to gush about, and that’s a good sign. And I do think there’s a potential, worker-owned future for serious writing about video games, or that there can at least be a series of worker-owned efforts whose eventual rises and falls will lead to a cycle of new worker-owned outlets, and so on and so on.

Really, these things go in cycles. I’ve lived through enough of them now to see that. We just have to white-knuckle it until the next one. In the meantime, try to do what makes you happy. Don’t take it so seriously. Just do what you can, when you can, and treat yourself well. Protect yourself. Care for yourself. And just try to enjoy it.

At the end of the day, video games are supposed to be fun.