These days you just aren't going to really see those to even read, except in Europe. And really only the UK (which for some insane reason continues to be profitable apparently) and Eastern Europe look like the US heyday. You still have magazines in some places like France because of the language stuff but even that once like it once was. When you think back, if you were an English reader during the first PlayStation era, there were like six US magazines and ten UK magazines alone for the platform, not to mention all the fansites starting up and some of them becoming "official games journalism" as what eventually became IGN.
The one gaming magazine really left (Game Informer) was being subsidized by GameStop and actually has people who like games running it to where if the last guy had stayed until this year their top three editors would have been there for 29, 26 and 22 years to start the year. And even their stuff was increasingly tied to its website content. Most niche money losing magazines still around have been basically a return to fanzines with a website as the actual thing. Even the EGM reboot I think is like this.
When you have sites like Kotaku and others that hollowed out the need for actual writers, and even more so then actual editors, for the need for a soulless content producer that regurgitates what every site does but hopefully faster it degrades the quality of the writing. Even terrible OLD fan writers like Jake Alley got worse at writing as this was occurring. They all got extra worse when their jobs became to fuck around on Twitter all day since that was their "sources" for stuff.
Game Informer was never amazing writing or anything, and they've had their share of issues over the years, but that insulation from the rest of the industry plus the fact that they had established editors who taught their writers how to do longer and focused pieces in a traditional style. They were spinning out fairly successful people into the actual industry (well PR), people like Dan and Jason to Giant Bomb (two of the best imo), and a couple others who had they not been revealed as creeps with weird fetishes beyond their Nintendo fanboyism probably could have been at least Jason Schreier level successful. Even they weren't immune as things shifted online though, they hired the GAF/ERA guy who then tried to harass CDProjektRed/GOG/THQNordic through e-mails for crimes against troons to produce their clickbait. When they had to downsize though he was the first one they fired though and he cried on Twitter about it for weeks lol ("THIS IS WHY THE GAME INDUSTRY NEEDS TO UNIONIZE! THEY DIDN'T EVEN WARN ME SIX MONTHS AGO!")
But I digress, I think you could actually be fairly successful with a website that tried to ape notions of late 90s/early 2000s gaming journalism culture, along with "modern video content" not anymore complex than Giant Bomb's stuff, but it'd again be a situation where you probably need old hands still around like Jeff/Vinny or the GI editors or the kids don't learn anything about the history or purposes. Other than to see it as a Waypoint to becoming a serious journalist when they have their late 20s/early 30s age crisis about their life.
It seems like that period where people were doing gaming journalism to get into working on games didn't even last that long, some of those have been the better "new" journalists post, say, 2007-ish. Now it's blatantly obvious when they're doing the whole "entry writer" through games shit, as mentioned their audience isn't actually the readers it's the people they want to write for about like, they don't really know but it's gotta be more important than games. They've actually gone past the whole "games need to be treated serious like movies are" to "games need to be serious art so I can use them as a stepping stone to becoming serious" with Patrick Klepek as an Ur Member of this mentality.
The reason I look back on those eras is because they liked games and they had senses of humor, even if a lot of it has not aged well. (More so because a lot of it is things like spending issues quoting Ren and Stimply and saying NOT!)
archive.org has a bunch of old gaming magazines up from many many countries, the era I'm talking about above, especially defunct stuff from the 90s, but some farther in, it can be really fun to waste a couple hours just looking at them and seeing some of the nonsense but also how you never doubted that they did it because they wanted to write about games for their fellow gamers. Then you see stuff like the old EDGE/NextGeneration magazines and there's nothing really like them now. With that industry focus, hitting every angle of the process in games, not just as a buyers guide all about the reviews*. Even GameDeveloper ended and the whole run is up there. Foreign language ones too.
*This is one thing that I noticed once while going through these, and then also looking at GI. The review was the last part, you spent a year reading about the games, learning what it was going to be, seeing interviews and then at the end GI/EGM/EDGE/etc. would say whether or not it lived up to their own expectations, they were responding to their own coverage, not some nebulous company controlled "hype" for a review score with some thrown together text written by a freelancer who you've never heard of before who was the first one to finish it before the embargo could lift or whatever.
One other trip looking at like 2002 era GI magazines is how often they mention something being "problematic" and your current brain is like "oh no" but then it's just like "the camera is shit" or "the framerate can get very unstable" or "the controls make no sense" or whatever. From when I looked at some of those last year the only "content" like complaint I remember is them talking about breast physics that Dead or Alive started and it was more that they were making fun of them for how unrealistic they had gotten than actually being upset. I remember one reviewer "protested the treatment of the women" in one DoA by only capturing screenshots of the women characters in skimpy outfits so that the "reader can be better informed about this degrading treatment" with the page then being plastered with them.
