Game News 2.0

Ugh, Polygon sold off by Vox and hit with layoffs (scale currently unclear, but not looking good).

Not my go to gaming site these days but I still check in regularly and they have a lot of writers I really respect. They have done some great critical, long-form and video work over the years. Best of luck to them all and hopefully they retain enough staff to keep some sort of operation going.

Once again it seems like no traditional gaming media website can avoid the endless cycle of acquisition and sell-offs these days. Which is a real shame. Lots of cool independent work out there, but mostly in podcasting and small-scale work as opposed to the more versatile work a proper staffed website can do.

Edit: I see the great reporter Nicole Carpenter is among those hit, though seems like the cuts have been extremely deep. Editor-in-chief Chris Plante gone too. And apparently Giant Bomb being hit with big layoffs too (clarification: not layoffs but seemingly in a serious conflict with owners about the type of material they're putting out).

We’re not going to realise the true extent of the gutting of games journalism until it’s way too late to change it.

In one way, it’s a positive that we now have a bunch of small independent outlets, owned by their creators - your Aftermaths, Remaps, Nextlanders etc… But they’re also tiny organisations, employing a handful of staff.

What you lose when big outlets collapse is the institutional weight - having enough staff to do in-depth reporting, and the legal backup to fight the corporate pushback reporting almost inevitably leads to. More so, you lose the ability to build up new talent. So many of the current independent outlets exist because the people involved built a name for themselves at a bigger outlet. A lot of young writers will not have that chance, and even existing ones will need to rely on their personal profile to make an independent or crowd-funded job viable. That’s fine for people who do have a big public profile, but a lot of writers out there just don’t have the profile despite doing excellent work in their chosen areas. Plus, the more independent outlets exist, the more limited pool of people there is to support them - the enthusiast audience is only so big, and their financial support will stretch only so far.

It’s pretty bleak out there. And **** Vox media for not even having the decency to sell Polygon to an owner that will carry on or support their editorial priorities - by selling it to a trash SEO content mill, they know they’ve instantly dismantled an institution they spent years building up. The internet is an increasingly worse place the more outlets are focused on just lowest common denominator and trying to game whatever arbitrary algorithm Google has this month (before Google’s own miserable AI gibberish devours even the content mills). When you can’t even get an answer to a basic question when googling, it’s often because Valnet and the like have made it that way.

Also can’t be understated how much YouTube and podcast stuff is driven by the hosts discussing stories published by the game press. Obviously great journalists like the People Make Games team exist in that space, but they’re the exception.

I mean, even in the reactionary weirdo space, a lot of their content is often just reacting to an article they have up on screen.

Funny that Gears of War on PlayStation would’ve been major news not so long ago, but now just feels sort of inevitable. Halo next, probably.