Legacy games media is dying. Hyperbole, you say?

Call it ignorance, but I think major gaming outlets have an opportunity to improve, so long as they’re willing to change with the times.

History tells us that the games industry is fully capable of confounding, crashing, and recalibrating. Take the video game crash of 1983. A gluttony of half-baked titles bred an apathetic audience that eventually refused to participate altogether. It wasn’t until games started offering products of worth, largely led by Nintendo, that consumers decided to come back. I’m hoping the media space will see a similar rising from the ashes.

I won’t pretend to know what a successful phoenix would look like. I do, however, want to share a couple of things that I would love to see as an avid consumer of some of these half-dead entities.

Varied, Long-Form Content

Brevity is over-rated. Do you know why we only half-pay attention to all the articles, posts, and video clips that we consume? It’s because we know that no single one of them is going to fill us up. They’re not supposed to. They’re adverts: SEO tailored to hell and back and more than a little underwhelming. We skim through articles to get to the meat and potatoes. We get through all the uncooked, unseasoned veggies of preamble copywriting to get to the singular sentence of useful information that the title alludes to. We pick at hundreds of these little content hors d’oeuvres, hoping that 45 minutes later when our eyes start to glaze over, we might eventually be full on… something.  

We’re eating empty calories. Near as I can tell, conventional games media is centered around regurgitated press releases, listicles, previews, reviews, and guides.

There’s a place for all those things, without a doubt, but I’d like to think that the general gaming audience is interested in consuming more than just that. In fact, I know that they are. You need only look to independent creators to see that there’s clearly a market for more. Noclip offers documentaries about how games are made. Last Stand Media hosts podcasts that regularly pass the 2-hour mark. The Besties is a weekly game club where four best friends get together to dissect a new title every week.

Seemingly, people are fully capable of sitting down and consuming something that’s longer than the length of a bowel movement. Some of these major outlets consist of 500-word fluff pieces, and it’s no wonder that they’re in need of resuscitation. I want to consume my articles the way that I consume my books. I want them to have weight and length. And not just length for the sake of length. I think games media can have the same immersive effect that novels can offer you. Why not? We’re talking about the most interesting form of entertainment to ever shoot dopamine into human brains, and we can’t come up with anything truly interesting to say about them?

Studio Deep Dives and Check-Ups

In the year 2023, over 10,000 developers lost their jobs. In the year 2024, that number was over 14,000. It’s high time we start putting the practices and the health of studios at the forefront of games journalism, because it’s hard for companies to abuse employees in the harsh light of day. Writers, pundits, and interviewers in this space have the opportunity to hold companies accountable for their actions.

Most gamers don’t know how the sausage is made. They don’t know that American game development is one of the last untamed frontiers in unionization. This means developers don’t have collective bargaining power or any job security to speak of. They don’t know that there isn’t a playbook of best practices like you might find in literally every other industry. Their favorite studios are flying by the seat of their pants with every title, even the GOATs. They don’t know that crunch, the practice of developers overworking to ship a game, is no longer something that gets done only at the home stretch. Rather, it’s something that can go on for months, sometimes years.

Can you imagine being creative for 60 hours a week, for an entire year, at financial gunpoint? Most developers, I would hope, know what game development entails at this point. And yet, they choose to make games anyway, fully aware that they’re about to be put through the wringer. Games have always been made this way, right? Well, if a company can’t make a game without squeezing a human being for all they’re worth, then they have no business making games to begin with.

I’m all for the creative process and I get how volatile it might be. As the caretaker and writer of a blog, I create even when I don’t feel like it. Most of what I write on a daily basis gets stuffed in a folder, too grotesque to ever be witnessed by mortal eyes. That tends to fly in the face of keeping a consistent schedule, meaning I work outside of work hours. And, the same can be said for any artist, programmer, or level designer you’ll ever meet. I understand that practices may always vary from studio to studio and we may never come to an agreement regarding what cohesive, ethical game development is “supposed” to look like. But, as producers, studio heads, and money hats are figuring out exactly what the hell they’re doing, it’s their employees that are experiencing the brunt of the growing pains.

How About You?

I suspect my dreams for the games media space are unlikely to be adopted by these major media conglomerates. And, maybe that’s okay. Perhaps a mass audience exodus from legacy games media to these smaller, more nimble independent operations is exactly what the doctor ordered. Maybe there’ll be a BitWorm or two, feasting on the remains of the IGNs and Kotakus of the world, thriving as a result.

What do you think it would take for legacy games media to recapture the attention of gamers?

What are some of your favorite independent video game content creators?