The recent news of Kotaku’s latest round of layoffs is no surprise. In fact, it’s just another footnote in the long book of grudges of failing news outlets. The website had long since gone downhill. What was, some 15-odd years ago, a website filled with passionate quirky writers became a festering hellhole for political activists and untalented hacks to spread their hateful messages.

Now, I don’t want this to sound like a hit piece. It is not, but I certainly won’t shy away from harsh criticism either. I also want to preface this: I’m in no way, shape or form defending these websites, as they stand for everything I’m absolutely against. I’m not a journalist, this isn’t my job, and I’m just a (mostly) unpaid hobbyist who does this for fun.

In this article I wanted to examine what went wrong with websites like Kotaku, G4TV, and Polygon, to name but a few. How did these once mighty institutions in gaming, where you could reliably get some of the best information around become so hated and disliked by pretty much everyone? Where and when things went wrong? How have you come to this? What does the future hold?

No Strangers To Controversies

Since its early days, gaming has always been embroiled in controversies. First, it was the classical: “Videogames cause violence”, said newspapers, parents and evangelical associations from America. The idea that people could become so embroiled in a fantasy world that they would lose all connection to reality and try to perpetrate what they saw on a videogame in real life was a tangent fear, particularly in the early 90s: Mortal Kombat, Grand Theft Auto, and Doom have been pointed out as causes for terrible actions, committed by terrible people, who had nothing to do with videogames, as the passage of time would make that clear.

Then came the problem of video game addiction, a problem that, unlike violence, has some scientific basis to it, and you can become addicted to video games. It’s not common, but it can happen. As always, the boomer media completely over-inflated this issue to unreasonable proportions, and it became a widely accepted fact for a while that gamers were base-dwelling creatures that have been screengrabbed to a point of no return. The passing of time would soon dispel this idea as well.

In the late 2000s, the discussion matured a bit, and academia and gamers started to ask the question if games could be considered art? Both sides of the aisle argued yes and no. It wouldn’t be long until games were, in fact, to be widely accepted as complex forms of art.

In 2014, gaming journalism found itself embroiled in a massive controversy when a blog post called “The Zoe Post” came out, accusing Zoe Quinn (a game developer) of receiving favourable reviews because of her sexual relationship with game journalists. A massive online movement sprung up to expose the corruption in mainstream journalism and to promote ethics in gaming coverage. This went as well as you could expect, with unhinged lunatics on both sides of the aisle hurling insults and threats at each other for years, with nothing of substance to ever come out of it.

In my opinion, the whole gamergate thing only became as widely known as it did because it was the moment the damn finally burst. You see, for years, gamers and journalists had been somewhat at odds with each other, with the former calling out gaming journalists as corrupt for publishing favourable reviews of bad games. Access journalism was also a massive cause for suspicion, with journalists being flown all over the world and pampered by companies before game releases to sway their opinions. Alongside this, also floated accusations of laziness and complacency with the state of video games, which was less than stellar in the early 2010s.

So, I really don’t think that Gamergate was what started this divide between gamers and journalists, that divide can be traced back to the late 2000s. No matter your opinion on this subject, the fact is that the rotten core of gaming journalism (or the perception of it) has been exposed and it reached mainstream audiences and media.

By the end of 2014, the seeds of the divide between gaming journalists and gamers looked to be unmendable. Things would only escalate. But since this all began with the accusations of gaming reviews being rigged, let’s start with that.

The Skill-Issue Of Critical Skills

I also believe that there’s a massive skill issue with gaming journalism these days (pun intended), and that is that most game reviewers are… well, really bad at their job. Reviewing games isn’t all that different from reviewing a movie, a book, or an album: you need to be knowledgeable about the medium, know its history, understand its references, and understand what your audience is looking for, to make an informed decision if a video game is worth their time and money. This is an unending job that requires you to always be informed, become specialized in a couple of genres, play the games and articulate what makes them good or bad in an interesting, quirky and fun way.

This might be fun, but certainly isn’t easy, particularly if you consider that on the other end of your internet connection is a real human being, with a job, a life, friends and family that’s looking for a legitimate and accurate assessment of a title to make a purchase decision. While it’s easy for gaming journalists, who get games for free, to be a bit more laissez-faire with their impressions, the matter of fact is that spending 60 or 70 dollars- a lot of money for something that’s absolutely not essential, especially when you have a house to pay or kids to take care of- in a game is an important decision for a lot of people, and can dictate what their entertainment is going to be for the next couple of months.

Video Game reviews are, in my opinion, one of the cornerstones of gaming writing and content, just due to the sheer amount of influence it has on the decision-making process of a lot of people.

Working alone in Strategy and Wargaming I know how hard it can be to do a proper review of a game, and how long it takes, since you have to play the game at a deep enough level that you understand its mechanics very well, and that you then need to output your thoughts to paper or video in a way that makes sense and it’s entertaining to read. Another problem with these gaming outlets is that gaming reviews started to dwindle, and got replaced by easier-to-create and pump-out content. I hear the argument that’s done because of SEO reasons, and that might be true, in part. However, I don’t think that’s the whole story. Working for SEO is fine, and it needs to be done to capture new audiences. Everyone does it. I think the problem is that there’s just a lack of interest in writing reviews for all the reasons mentioned above.

There’s also another problem I would like to touch on, and it’s that some of these websites became too big, and lack any kind of specialization. I found myself more often than not looking for specialized blogs and YouTubers, whose sole craft lies within a couple of genres they know really well. As a consequence of that, their opinions on a given title can be seen as a lot more accurate, or at least in line with what fans of those particular genres are looking for. Why should I visit Polygon or Kotaku to read a review, if I have zero confidence in what the people writing it? If what they’re looking for in a game is the complete opposite of what I care about?

What I try to do in Strategy and Wargaming is making very clear that I specialize in these two genres, and that my reviews are, for the most part, positive reviews that highlight games that I think are good. I play a lot of games, but since I have limited time on my hands, what I try to do is just stick to the ones I believe are worthy of your time and money. I think this is paying off here, as my reviews went from a couple hundred views to several thousand as the years went on. Trust is built, but it also needs to be maintained.

This leads me to another point: Audience disconnect.

Fighting Your Audience and Political Activism

Every business owner and sane person can tell you that fighting your own audience (your customers) isn’t the best course of action because – surprise, surprise – they are the ones that keep your lights on and your stove pot steaming. For some unfathomable reason, I’ve always failed to understand, that gaming outlets and journalists think this is nonsense, and they should actively attack their audience.

Also, until a couple of years ago, I never thought this needed to be said, but some people really need to hear it: no one, and I mean no one, wants to be lectured on, or be talked down to. It’s a basic human sentiment. For how compassionate these people want to make themselves out to be, and how humane they think they are, they show an astounding lack of empathy for people with different world views and life experiences. Besides, dear gaming journalists, the world isn’t only America.

It was really weird to see hit pieces pop off like mushrooms after a rainstorm that started to generalize all gamers as sexists and phones if you didn’t agree with some spicy politics that a faceless gaming journalist with no credentials had. How do you expect people to react when they’re online looking for a game review and mid-article they’re insulted and their morals are questioned in something completely unrelated? Well, you just lost a customer.

This is particularly egregious when these sorts of preachy narratives and holier-than-thou takes are being done by people who, for the most part, have done absolutely nothing to fall in the good graces of their audiences. Unlike Youtubers or personality-driven content, the matter of the fact is that most people writing for games websites are just nobodies. Remember the PS5 review that went on a wild tangent about how the world was dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and how playing PS5 was a privilege? How do you think people feel when all they’re looking for is to know if the console is good or not? Well, they look at that, feel like garbage, and most of them will describe you and ignore you going forward.

The ubiquitous nature of this kind of preachy articles led to an even wider disconnect between what average gamers want and what gaming journalists are willing to create content on. Here’s what people look for, online, pertaining to videogames:

• They want to know what’s going on with their favourite franchises or genres;
• They’re looking to discover new games and experiences;
• They’re looking for credible advice on which games are worthy of their hard-earned cash;

Here’s what they’re not looking for:

• Being insulted (called a fascist, a nazi or a phone) by people with zero moral authority whose job is to write about videogames;
• Being preached on world views they disregard as Americanized insanity from people whose job is to write about videogames;
• Being politically indoctrinated by people whose job is to write about videogames;

These websites, which have once been run by people with legitimate love for what they were doing, often and unfortunately, most of the time while earning the most minimum of wages, increasingly found themselves transformed into outlets for people whose sole agenda is to poison the well of gaming discourse with no endgame in mind. It’s the act of writing to please a subset of industry friends in an echo chamber that thinks exactly the same as you. Or, most likely, it’s just a way to farm Twitter points to be seen as some good person and get a higher-paying job at a videogame company. I would say the latter is the most likely, and the agenda-pushing is nothing more than a false facade.

Let’s not forget the amount of recent articles popping up defending video gaming companies and studios if these toe the political-party line, and attacking others that don’t. The most recent example is Black Myth: Wukong being smeared online with accusations of sexism and racism, which ended up being absolute lies, and the rush to defend Dragon Age: Veilguard and Avowed. Let me just say this: your job is not to decide what gamers want, or to decide what games get to succeed or not. Your only job is to protect your customer’s wallets from greedy corporations. And let’s be real about this, games only exist to make money, so there’s no moral grandstanding here to be had. The fact is gaming journalism got lost in the sauce while searching for modern audiences, and ended up losing the only audience they had.

In the end, what gamers want is other gamers, creating content and writing for gamers. Let them decide what’s good or bad, what’s worthy and what’s not. Your job should be to give them the best information to let them reach their own conclusions.

Why Is This a Good Thing?

The clear disconnect between average gamers and gaming journalists has reached a point where this relationship is pretty hard to fix, and I would say it’s downright impossible at the moment. Once trust is lost in media, it’s extremely difficult to get it back.

As proof of this, and what’s already happening is that most of these websites will, inevitably, lose their audience, shrink their staff, lose even more audience, shrink their staff again, and enter a vicious cycle with predictable results. It is unsustainable. It’s the natural cycle of every media ever. Newspapers, Radio Stations, Websites, and TV channels all come and go with time. Things come to an end, and renew themselves, better adapted to their current audience, until they too, lose their touch and are in turn replaced by newer, better versions.

I really believe we’re seeing the end of a cycle, but another has also started and has already taken over.

So, What’s The Future?

For years, I’ve been theorizing that the future of media is going, for the most part, smaller scale, grassroots creators, and the last 10 years did nothing to change my perception of this, with classical news outlets views and relevance (as well as consumer trust) going down, and small blogs, Youtubers and even Tiktokers gaining massive ground. Long gone are the days when news outlets and television channels on the flow of information, and they no longer act as gatekeepers – They sure try to hold those gates closed, don’t get me wrong, they’re clinging to everything they can to stay relevant, but the problem is, while they’re holding the gate, the walls have been breached and everyone is already inside the city.

New websites, blogs and YouTubers are popping up every day, and some will nurture to fruition and be as successful as the ones that are already ceasing to be. The audience of gamers is still growing, and in this massive industry, which happens to be the largest in the world in terms of entertainment, there’s still a lot of space to be occupied by passionate people to once again become something from gamers to gamers. Where trust and conversations replace hate and agendas.

As for the format, we’ll keep seeing a bit of everything: videos, writing, podcasts. But you’ll see a growth in specialization, where YouTubers, writers and podcasters have picked up the torch and moved on.

I hope that when the dust settles, and this stupid culture war is over, we can go back to talking about the thing we enjoy the most: video games.

What we’re currently seeing are the last embers of a dying flame. One that’s unlikely to be rekindled, but will be lit up again, by someone else. The king is dead, long live the king.

Support Strategy and Wargaming

I do what I do in Strategy and Wargaming because I love to do this, and I’m never going to stop. If you would like to support me with that, you can buy me a coffee for a dollar if you’re feeling generous. If you can’t, no worries, Strategy and Wargaming will always be free, and I’d love to have you around!