I disagree on that -- there have been folks who have made the pivot out of 'gaming journalism' into another field, although those that do are people who are able to conduct themselves as professionals, approach their job as exactly what it is: a job and have a modicum of talent.
You have to understand, Games Journalists are basically an extension of the PR arm of gaming companies. People in the gaming companies share some of the same wokeshit beliefs, so they're allowed by their corporate masters to write this shit, and always shit on Japan because the East is now starting to rape the Western gaming market, just like manga is raping comics.
This is a really salient point. Going back through old issues of GamePro or EGM (or whatever) and you'll see a crapton of ads. I was working on doing some writing looking at the history of gaming journalism and, if I remember correctly, gaming mags had roughly 30% of their pages devoted to advertising, compared to roughly 20% of contemporary hobby magazines. That doesn't include contest pages or reviews (which, generally speaking, were almost always positive and were basically house shilling.) Actual content (interviews, features, codes/walk throughs/tips/etc) was fairly low. (Full on didn't matter for me: I loved that shit and have fond memories of those old rags.)
EGM originally was published by a tradeshow magazine company for home electronics (again, if I'm remembering correctly -- I trashed a lot of the research I had done and it's hard to find information on long dead publishers) while GamePro, PCWorld and Computer World were all owned by
IDG, who are basically a market research group in tech/computing. Then there's house mags like Nintendo Power and the Playstation mags.
Game journalism is in a weird position -- unlike, say, books or movies, where you could have someone like
Roger Ebert come out and torpedo a movie because it was just that terrible -- games journalists never really had that luxury. Games have long been viewed as juvenile things for children and legitimate criticism was seen as laughable. Thus, it became really hard to bite the hand that feeds (see: Kane & Lynch.)
I think that the woke bullshit didn't originate in gaming companies, but came about as a result of the gaming press smearing their feces on the wall. It's hard to criticize a game and say it is bad. It's a lot easier to publicly shame a company for being sexist/racist/offensive/homophobic/whatever and gorge on the public outrage that your Joe Q. Public would see. It worked in the 90s with shit like Night Trap and Mortal Kombat, which brought about the ESRB. It worked in the 00s with shit like GTA's Hot Coffee scandal where even a company like Rockstar had to backtrack and apologize profusely over what was essentially incredibly dumb shit or, going back to Ebert, the whole "are video games art?" crap that went on for a few years. Games journalism had some (
SOME) power as the industry exploded and the growth of web journalism took off, but they squandered it trying to pick really dumb fucking fights.
Of course, the concern with all of that shit has always been regarding the bottom line. Getting rid of booth babes? Okay, it's not really professional for a multi-billion dollar industry that is purportedly marketed towards a wide range of demographics so you might have a point. Arguing that there aren't enough transexual genderfluid Hispanic anarcho-communists in your World War 2 game? Fuck off, especially if the game that has your transexual genderfluid Hispanic anarcho-communist womyn main character tanks in sales.
The answer is no. Games Journalism is a dead field. It is literally, not figuratively, the very bottom of being a writer. It is not entry level, it is dead end level. More and more companies are just using these outlets for press releases and they realize for a copy of a game, a YouTuber or Streamer will bring them more revenue than any games journalist ever could.
You're seeing an increasing trend, though, with modern day journalism actually bouncing over to their field of coverage. There are sports journalists who have hopped the fence and become part of the sports teams they've covered (some in analytics/management roles, some just doing communications or PR roles), for example. Same thing with games journalists -- you're seeing them jump over to working directly for game companies.
A lot of these morons are prestige seekers and want to do something that is 'cool.'
They generate no revenue, are becoming a liability and more people treat them like a joke. The next phase is YouTube and Streaming, because they focus on the game. Nobody wants to read some C- English major from a no-name liberal art's school's recycled paper on Colonialism as it relates to Monster Hunter.
Which is a damn shame, in my mind. I'd really like to see some video games actually become a lot more engaging. It's why I enjoy shit like the nuanced storytelling that exists in, say, Dark Souls. Reading (or watching, since as you said we're moving increasingly towards a streaming/video based medium online) longform journalism breaking down games and shit
could be potentially really interesting. Unfortunately we ended up with a group of underqualified hacks who only really wielded the literary equivalent of a hammer (spastic progressiveness, for lack of a better term) and viewed everything around them as nails.
twitter.com
