Freelance Video Game Journalists Are Propping Up The Industry, And Many Are Being Paid Dogshit In Return

This article was written by Luke Plunkett, who used to work at Kotaku. Some of his past articles include real whiz-bangers like: "Oh No, There Are Women In Battlefield", and "There Is No Saving Cyberpunk 2077." That pretty much tells you everything you need to know.

Sensationalist e-begging for clicks with ragebait articles. Nothing new from a former Kotaku employee.

the only person on the planet that believes influencers as far as I can throw them.

This phrase doesn't work though. Unless you're some body builder type, and can throw them really really far.

But even that doesn't make sense either. Because if you said

"I only trust this guy 18 feet....."

the other person would say

".............18 feet? What? What does THAT mean????"

And you would say "What??? You think you can throw a man 19 feet??? Ok. Go grab him. Go. Go grab that man, and throw him 19 feet. Show me."

At about this time I think they would just call the cops, assuming you have mental problems, and violent tendancies.

Which to be fair.....yeah. You're over here talking about how far you can pick another man up against their will, and how far you can throw them.

Although, how have we never made that an olympic event? You get a bunch of fat guys in a bar, and some body builder muscleheads, and see who wins. If the fat guy can escape, his time to escape is measured. Fastest fat guy gets the medal. Or, if he gets thrown, farthest throw distance wins the medal.

I'd watch that.

Who reads written text over their favorite YouTube personality, or the SEO garbage that pops up first on their search, or first party articles/recs on steam, and so on?

Few layers to that.

SEO still heavily favors sites like IGN and Eurogamer. Most people aren't looking at the by-line to see who actually wrote the article.

The other much more insidious aspect? A lot of the legacy influencer outlets ARE still using contractors.

Remap (formerly Waypoint) is awesome and are generally well regarded for having great rates for both written and on-air content. They are also a very "lean" org consiting of three people but pay Janet Garcia to show up for a podcast every week and even a stream or two a month. Janet is ALSO a "cohort" on MinnMax where it is less clear who are contractors and who are core staff.

And, to clarify, I don't have a (significant) problem with that. It is how you get a broader range of voices out there. But it is still similar to having most of your writing team be contractors (... also, Remap contracts out a decent number of articles).'

But then you look at other outlets. Gamespot spent years HEAVILY dependent on "reaction" content. If you ever watched Jonathan Ferguson talk about guns in video games, that was Dave Jewitt's work. And... they fired Dave two-ish weeks ago. Haven't heard if Jonathan plans to still do reaction content for them but you can bet they can find other contractors (like the douche bag who rants about armor).

And... on the other side of the Fandom family you have Giant Bomb. Who have outright fired two core staff members (Voidburger and Jason Oestreicher) as well as a regular collaborator from Fandom proper (Bayley) all so they could repurpose that funding for contractors. And... at this point there are good arguments that Mike Miniotti is in more content than most of the core staff.

So the influencer based outlets are rapidly doing the same. Some of it is just the necessity of working in a dying industry where funding is mostly dependent on whether fans "vibe" with you. But it is only a matter of time until we have the same content farms. Hell, I want to say that is exactly what Fandom DID until they bought cnet gaming.

From the reader's experience, sites like IGN became completely unusable without ad blockers; I still remember the X-Men (2? Origins: Wolverine?) ad where Wolverine slashed through the page in a flash animation that prevented you from clicking on the thing you wanted to read underneath it. Then the information that you wanted could have been communicated in a headline, and it just becomes frustrating. That said, I'll still reviews if they didn't annoy me too much on my way there. I'll still read Schreier when it isn't paywalled. I read NY Times articles like the one they just did on Alexey Pajitnov. Rebekah Valentine and Jordan Middler do great work. In a lot of other cases, opinionated essays on video games benefit greatly from supporting footage in video format, and even without ad blockers, the YouTube experience is far less annoying on average.

only casually read stuff on hardocp around the sandy/ivy bridge generation. but yes a good chunk of it died to video coverage of the content. its why for example Gamers Nexus has the reverse approach where the video content is their main priority (and audience) and they maintain their own website because thats what they wanted to do.

It's all about the money. When they give honest bad reviews they'll end up not being invited to play early review copies, thus missing out and falling behind on the wave.

I think true journalism hardly exists anymore. Feels like most genuine reviews come from people that aren't paid to do the reviews by either the site/magazine publisher they're working for or the developer/publisher offering the game for review.

So many articles on big websites feel like they read entirely like AI-generated content. Some don't even bother to hide it, they might just as well be old school RSS-feeds at this point.

I'd accept the job, and then write the WORST assballs articles about how Mario isn't trying to save the princess. He's hunting her down to get more mushrooms. She's not being kidnapped. She's spending quality time with her husband. She's not a princess. She works at a white castle. Which back in the 80s, still had some of the old royal castle buildings in use.

And Luigi isn't his frightened little brother who won't go on adventures because he's scared. He's just some guy who cleans and flips houses.

And Princess isn't surrounded by her toads loyal servicemen. Those are dildos. Yes, ALL of them.

And then when they reject my work, I'd be like "Oh.......then you are NOT going to like my article of pacman taking drugs and being racist....."

1 article and $20 per day 💀

Great contribution to the conversation. It's short. It's direct. It leaves a huge amount of confusion what you're even saying. Are you saying the industry doesn't underpay? Are you saying the writers don't prop up the industry? Who's to say? Certainly not you! Because you didn't say....