The Great (Games) Media Contraction

Or How I Learned to Love Paying for Games Coverage.

So little cash, so many things to fund.

Games Media, as we know it, is over.

Corporately owned video game media sites have declined over the past few years, and for good reason: no one knows how to monetize them properly, and people are getting their informational needs met in different ways.

This is a new challenge for the industry as a whole. In some ways, it has always been an issue, but not until the last decade or so have we seen the decline of the traditional, corporate-backed, high-headcount outlets that have been the norm since the early adolescence of the internet and the nascent online discourse about video games on the web.

Back in the late nineties and early oughts, the three great unifiers of culture in media and entertainment were: television, print media, and the internet. With the sudden rise of social media and the significant adoption rate of smartphones by regular consumers, we have been slowly witnessing the death of the entertainment “monoculture” we were raised in. Times have changed drastically since the turn of the century.

Niche culture is here, and it’s here to stay. Gone are the days where everyone gathers around the same TV set to watch ‘appointment’ or ‘event-based’ television made for the masses. This new landscape of splintered interests for short attention spans has come to supplant the old ways of enjoying media. You don’t have that one television show to look forward to that you can’t readily watch at any given time now. Instant gratification for media has never been more prevalent than it is these days.

Television has had a difficult transition with the changing times. Rates for paying creators and artists to make higher-budget media have been rising, with costs for film, TV, and video game production in the States and abroad skyrocketing with inflation, as a result.

The SAG-AFTRA actor’s union strikes from the past couple of years have been proof of a rocky relationship with the creative forces behind the film and TV entertainment we enjoy, and the studios that are financing them.

New collective bargaining between the two has been agreed upon, but even still, concessions had to be made. For some, that fight is not over, with some folks still fighting for the protections they need. In recent months, a cottage industry filled with burgeoning AI and generative machine learning programs with hefty corporate backing has been used by studios to automate the artistic merit vital to the making of their entertainment products. AI art and generated media have been popping up in mainstream television shows, TV commercials, cartoons, music videos, and recently, feature films. It’s an evolving situation, but my heart goes out to all the actors, the creators, and the artists affected by this recent avalanche of plagiarism, and AI ‘slop’ flooding their creative mediums. AI is the scourge of modern creativity, in my humble opinion. It cannot create something from nothing, and is unable to be inspired by art it witnesses. It only knows what is fed to it, and like the machines they are, they churn out only imitations or remixes of the types of art that it has been given. Relying on these learning models to create art we enjoy is a fool’s errand.

AI, and creative automation as a whole, should only be used to make easier the tasks artists and creatives don’t want to do, not take the place of those talented individuals. Corporate greed has taken root in the creativity of artistic endeavors, to deleterious effects. Art is, in many ways, the reflection of the human condition and a physical representation of the ‘soul’. It is an outward expression of inward feelings, ideas, and creative opportunity. AI, not having a ‘soul’ to speak of, cannot inherently tap into the same things as people can for this very reason. AI art and generated media, by its very definition, is a soulless and empty imitation of humanity’s artistic achievements and their unlimited potential. Remixing and shitting out cheap imitations of better work from real humans, is not art. It is plagiarism, flat out. It’s a tangent, for sure, and I digress. But this issue affects all the media we enjoy in our daily lives.

Print media has also flown the coop and gone mostly digital in the past decade or so, especially in the video game media space. Sites that ran editorial and review coverage in print magazines have either pivoted out of physical production and distribution of their products and have gone digital, or they have straight up ceased operation due to high expenses to keep the lights on and the quality high for their print magazines.

Gone are the days when we had access to high-quality information from people who professionally cover the industry, with the glut of AI misinformation and poor SEO algorithms burying essential voices that cover the space.

When I was growing up, we had a lot to choose from in this realm. Electronic Gaming Monthly, Official Xbox Magazine, Nintendo, Game Pro, PC Gamer, and Game Informer, to name a few.

Now? Only one of those publications mentioned is still in print currently, and that’s after being shut down in the past year by their corporate parent, then getting revived by a game developer purchasing them.

That company? Game Informer.

The fact that they’re around to do that work is baffling to say the least, given the trials and tribulations they have gone through as of late.

They’re still doing it.

The old guard may not be there anymore, for the most part, like Andy McNamara, Andrew Reiner, and Ben Reeves, who have each gone into either game development or game publishing, after many years working at the company. Some of those guys I mentioned were essential editorial staff who were working at GI when I was reading the magazine back in the day, and not having them there to guide its new iteration just feels odd to me, but I digress.

From what I can tell, it seems like they are still doing good work over there and have fired up the printing presses again to churn out more print coverage of video games.

They’re the only site in town doing that work, and I gotta say, getting a physical thing in your hand to read every month containing a look at the newest and hottest video games never gets old, for me. Print mags historically get long lead times for product reveals, and early coverage for new video games, because of the production pipeline they have to keep to, to keep it all running smoothly.

12 months with an issue released every month is a tall task, but the folks at GI have been doing it for so long, how could you balk at their track record of continued consistency?

It’s kind of a marvel that they still are doing it at all, given that it’s pretty much a miracle they are around to do the work after the trauma GameStop as a corporate parent put them through. Seems like all the staff who were let go at the end have since been hired back too, which is a lovely turn of events, in my opinion.

Anyways, print media outlets for video game coverage have either contracted into small pockets of boutique a la carte magazines, or have died out completely. The reason for that is simple, I think. The internet.

The initial symbiosis of the consistency of the print magazine and the immediacy of the information at hand for the internet was good at first. But as the years went on, people’s attention shifted to the web for the instant breaking news you could only get from the internet.

Print mags had one flaw after all, and it’s that they age immediately upon their release. If you think about it, each magazine printed is like a time capsule for the moment and month it is sent out to readers.

The one boon to the privilege of the format was the inside scoop on unreleased video games, but as access to companies and the developers behind their products became more widespread, and more in-depth on the internet, the need for print media with dated information fell out of fashion.

Why wait for a magazine when you can go find exactly what you need whenever you need it? That specific perk of the immediacy of the Internet’s informational convenience trumped journalistic quality in this regard, and more people were going to more sites for their news instead of waiting for bits of information to be doled out to them in a physical way.

So what’s left?

After the winding down of the television ‘boom’ at the end of the century (followed by the beginning and end of the proverbial ‘golden age’ of prestige landmark TV shows from the oughts), and ‘the fall of print media’ (the advent and collapse of physical publications printing issues containing information about the entertainment industry), you only had one place to turn to.

The Internet.

Sure, TV and print are still a thing, but the time of each medium being the place to go to stay up to date with the entertainment and current happenings of the world has long since passed. Ratings for basic cable and television providers have never been lower, and most media conglomerates have turned to the internet and ‘streaming’ services to offer their services and products to people on the move from traditional models of viewership.

The last holdout to move entirely over to this new frontier of streaming content for paying subscribers in the traditional television market is sports entertainment. Slowly but surely, however, this is changing too, with the NFL, NBA, NHL, and to a small degree, the MLB turning to streaming in small doses to test out the market. There is a symbiosis of relationships between sports and television advertising that hasn’t quite caught on in this new streaming landscape, but with money to be made, you can be sure it will be harnessed and sussed out.

Every year, more games are played internationally and are more widely available on streaming platforms around the globe, with some sports even leveraging low-risk, free platforms, like Tubi and YouTube, to spread the word that they are willing to do business for the proper ad spend.

The internet, in some ways, is still the wild, wild west.

It morphs, changes, and grows with each calendar year, and with all those happenings, so too does content ebb and flow on the web, year to year. Trends come and go like the wind, news stories pass by quickly, and politics are as prescient as ever with this new and instant way to hear about current events.

So too, has games media changed on the internet, and this time it may be for good.

For the longest time, you had folks making their way in the world and carving little niches for themselves in the ecosystem. Back in the day, there seemed to be just as many games media outlets starting up as there were new video games releasing every year. Everyone and their mother wanted a piece of the pie.

You had sites like IGN and Gamespot, two of the giants of this industry, making their hay back then, with other smaller publications trying to co-exist alongside these larger outlets. Newspapers and entertainment magazines, like Variety and the Washington Post, created digital safe havens to replicate the coverage they had in print form, on the internet.

Where advertising money goes, so too do the publications that need that funding to operate.

For a long time, it seemed like corporate parent companies that owned games news outlets and news publications were just content enough to fund the coverage of the industry in this structured sort of way. Advertising agencies bought space on your site to sell something, and the company offering that aforementioned space used those funds to run the site, pay for essential expenses, and pay its staff. For a good part of 30 or some odd years, this was the case, it seemed. From the early 90s to the mid-2020s, this was the way the ‘bread’ was ‘buttered’.

Nothing was perfect, of course (and I am sure I am missing a few things…), but for a long while, things were stable. As stable as things could be, that is. For many years, sites like IGN, Gamespot, Kotaku, and Polygon (to name a few) were sustainable business ventures with mostly reliable reporting on industry news and good reputations. This period between the late 90s to the mid-2010s is what I think should be considered as “The Golden Age of Games Media”: where you knew where you could go all the time to get your needs met as it came to the video game industry. Every site was good at a different thing, but each site’s content was of a ‘quality’ for the most part, so as not to lead their loyal followers astray.

This was also the height of the games industry writ large, with huge leaps in console technology being achieved each generation, the rise in popularity of personal computing and gaming on PC coming into fashion in general, and industry events like E3 reaching a fever pitch with audiences tuning in on the internet in record numbers to see the newest products the industry had to peddle.
The big games media sites back then would cover these events, and write about them in large articles, previews, and sneak peeks at unreleased video games. Each site’s editorial and production staff were mandated to cover the industry in person at these big events, to let their audience know what was going on.
From the early 90s to the late 2010’s the industry was a mix of old and new media, fighting it out for the same pieces of the video game pie. A monolithic media war of epic proportions to cover the industry and all its happenings, backed up by greedy corporate interests to cover the hefty costs of doing business.

For the longest time, this was the case. Until the bottom dropped out of the industry with the biggest global shakeup we as humans had experienced in the modern era. COVID happened.

The pandemic was merely the quickening of the beginning of the end. The end of the ‘corporatization’ of the mainstream games media outlet, as we know it. Algorithms in search engines were changing, and the advertising powering the main pillars of the internet had been slowly changing too. Coverage of products and new coverage of games had gone primarily to streamers and ‘influencers’, with viewers latching onto personalities rather than the faceless gaming sites of old.

Brand loyalty changed in the game industry, with the rise of streaming and subscriber-supported, personality-driven coverage. An early adopter of this idea was Giant Bomb. When the creator of that site, Jeff Gerstmann, was fired unethically for scoring the first “Kane and Lynch” low on Gamespot during a featured ad-spend for it on the site, he broke out and founded Giant Bomb with ex-staff from the previous site wanting to create an ‘anti-Gamespot’. It’s a fascinating tale, and maybe some day we will hear more than just anecdotes about it from former staff.

The Giant Bomb story is still being written, and Jeff has long since left, but the creation of Giant Bomb as a personality-driven outlet sparked this new phenomenon of subscriber-backed support in corporate games media.

As the industry as a whole retreated into the safety of its abode, everything changed. The way people interacted with one another had been irrevocably altered, with people moving out of corporate offices and into their homes.

This happened throughout the industry, from game development, game publishing, to media coverage, the entire structure of the industry had been completely shaken to its core.

The rise of subscriber-backed coverage of video games is not a new thing, but with the contraction of games media after the events of COVID, more and more kinds of these sites and independent publications have sprouted up, with Patreon being a key player in the landscape to house them.

Companies like Kinda Funny, Last Stand Media, MinnMax, Nextlander, and Remap have come about in recent years, with many key members from those sites leaving positions at traditional outlets to embark on these independent subscriber-backed endeavors to cover the industry, away from corporate meddling.

Hell, even Giant Bomb recently went independent!

Both Giant Bomb and Polygon got gutted on the same day, in a cruel twist of fate, and that felt like the death knell for the traditional ways games are covered in the corporate world. Giant Bomb ended up being okay, it seems, but Polygon has since had its entire staff of union workers let go amidst negotiations with its former corporate parent, Vox Media.

Vox Media, in a gross and underhanded deal, sold the entire company to Valnet, a mysterious enigma of an entity with a shadowy history of corporate ownership with various companies. The entire site had changed overnight with the new owners. Expectations are that Polygon will now become a ‘guides’ mill and AI content farm as a result of these changes.

It’s a sad state of affairs for what was once one of the most reliable places to go to read quality game journalism on the internet.

Giant Bomb, as I said, not without its bumps and bruises, seems to have come out of this whole situation unscathed for the most part. After years of corporate ownership and being passed around, an opportunity presented itself in the wake of several key members leaving the site. The last parent company, Fandom, made an offer to sell the site back to its former staff: Jeff Grubb and Jeff Bakalar, in a move that still baffles me even as I write. This sort of thing doesn’t happen!

It’s a miracle, honestly, but I am very happy it came about.

Giant Bomb is in many ways the example to use when talking about the nature of games media and how it ebbs it flows.

Its entire history as a site is a reflection of the environment the industry has been in over the years, in my opinion.

These are just two of the recent things that have happened in this new frontier of games media. Over the years, many sites have come and gone, however. The Washington Post’s “Launcher” vertical for games was shuttered, leaving only one journalist covering the industry for the publication, Gene Park. While he covers the industry and makes appearances on the Last Stand Media family of podcasts on Patreon, he is the only one still doing it at the Washington Post. Also, a reboot of the popular gaming news and review show G4 came and went quickly after years of not being on the air, and in a similar situation to the Giant Bomb news of recent weeks, Vice shut down their “Waypoint” vertical for games, and sold it back to the former editor in chief of the staff, Patrick Klepek (also formerly of Giant Bomb). Since then, Waypoint has been renamed to “Remap” and has gone completely independent, relying solely on subscribers to fund the work they are doing.

It’s a wild and ever-changing landscape of sites doing this line of work, with the two big industry institutions, IGN and Gamespot, still leading the charge for the old guard.

The entire industry has been whittled down to the sharpest point, with many veterans of the media either starting things for themselves independently, joining the game development scene, or even leaving the industry altogether. It’s never been a more uncertain time in this space, and here’s hoping that once the dust has settled, we as the gaming populace are better for it.

So, where does that leave us?

For me, it’s supporting the outlets and people I trust and care to listen to, monetarily. Putting my money where my mouth is and backing independent sites doing good work is the way of the future, and I want to support the good folks doing the hard work on their own. The work still needs to be done after all, but it’s harder than ever to figure out who still can do it. It’s crazy given that games themselves are better than ever, and the industry desperately needs the right folks to cover them.

We are on the precipice of both a new console launch in the Switch 2 and the release of Grand Theft Auto VI in a year or so, as of the time of this writing, so it’s not like the industry is slowing down!

The costs of doing business in game media have always been expensive, but it seems like corporations have just lost interest in supporting the people who are doing the work. They would rather automate it or completely shut down quality work they deem as unimportant or unnecessary, rather than pay for the vital services those talented folks can render.

I spend a large portion of my disposable income supporting the people in media I want to see succeed, and I think you should too. The only way through is to persevere, and a lot of fine folks are making it only with the help of a loyal few.

The internet is a wonderful and awful place, at the same time. As misinformation and change have become the reality of the web, so too must we arm ourselves with critical thinking and a better understanding of the world around us, in the digital realms we frequent. AI ‘slop’ and generated sources of information are sprouting up everywhere, so we must seek out the few bastions of good information we can find and support those pillars of optimism amidst the raging sea of negativity and low-quality content being generated on the internet.

The ‘enshittification’ of the internet is only beginning. Soon, it will become harder and harder to distinguish between our reality and the AI-generated misinformation on the web, as time passes.

This is a long, messy post that may or may not be correct in some ways, so I implore you to take my words with a grain of salt and seek clarification on the topics I spoke about.

I tried to do my best to speak from the heart, but even I can fall short in both correctness and recollection.

In short, be the change you want to see and vote with your wallet. If you support what you believe in, put your dollar where your mouth is.

Support the creators’ voices you want to succeed, hold on tight to your proverbial ‘anchors’, and as always…

Keep Gaming.

Thank you for your time!