Abstract
Despite the continued growth of the gaming sector, media conglomerates have recently begun a disturbing trend of downsizing their gaming-oriented publications, leading many journalists to pivot towards independence. This paper analyses the current moment in games journalism, highlighting how search engine optimization (SEO), artificial intelligence (AI), and guide-based content have motivated this pivot. Following this we show that some creators have used gaming podcasts as an opportunity to provide independent games coverage. To examine these issues, we draw on interviews with eleven gaming podcast creators which highlight their perspectives on the medium and why gaming podcasts have become a viable alternative. We conclude by contrasting the differences between influencer-focused games coverage and games journalism. This paper therefore emphasizes the importance of continued analysis of gaming journalism to studies of games media—illustrating how the issues that these journalists face are relevant to the broader online media sphere.
On October 15, 2019 The Washington Post officially introduced Launcher (Hume, 2019), a new section of the newspaper dedicated to news, reviews, and analysis of video games. Announcing the venture, editor Mike Hume stated it would “help bridge the gap between an audience unaware of the modern gaming landscape and those who inhabit it daily.” Highlighting the increasingly central role that games play in the daily lives of younger generations, Hume’s (2019) introduction worked to position the sub-site as a key pillar of the newspaper that would sit alongside its existing coverage in other fields, noting that over the past 140 years The Post has “cover[ed]the stories that deserve to be told.” Video games, the subtext of the article states, are worth paying attention to, and The Post will not be left out of the conversation. Indeed, the end of the article boldly proclaims, “This is only the beginning.”
Just over three years later, on the 24th of January, 2023, the end arrived. That day, The Washington Post announced that it would be discontinuing Launcher amidst broader layoffs in the newsroom (Ellison & Izadi, 2023). On the 31st of March, Launcher published its final article, a perspective piece from Hume reflecting on Launcher's life. Amongst other things the piece highlights the myriad of important news stories which have been inspired by games culture, stating “We ignore issues fomenting in the gaming space at our own peril. Overlook them or dismiss them and we’re more likely to be caught surprised and off-balance when they manifest in other aspects of society” (Hume, 2023). The piece ultimately concludes by restating the importance of video games to modern culture and reaffirming the need to have journalists continuing to cover the field and hold it to account—both at The Washington Post and elsewhere—even at a time of layoffs and downsizings.
Unfortunately, despite the piece's plea for further journalism in the gaming sphere, the downsizing has only continued. During the drafting of this article two separate websites—Vice Media's Waypoint and Gamur's The Escapist—announced the firing or departure of most of their staff, with Waypoint shuttering completely. The Escapist started as a traditional print magazine before transitioning into an online site, while Waypoint was Vice's gaming website launched in 2016. This downsizing is also not confined to the gaming verticals at larger sites like Vice or The Washington Post; enthusiast outlets like Fanbyte, Giant Bomb, Kotaku, GameSpot, and IGN have all encountered layoffs in the past year (Liao, 2023c; Rousseau, 2023; Sinclair, 2022, 2024), and Game Informer was shuttered completely days before this article went to print (Peters, 2024). All of this led former Launcher employee Shannon Liao to post a tweet that has only become more relevant in the time since its inception (2023b): reflecting upon how that dream job in games journalism just doesn’t exist anymore. it doesn’t exist.
The tweet struck a chord with others in the games media field, some of whom—like Liao—shared their own stories of layoffs or firings which highlighted the volatile nature of the field and its uncertain future (Dean, 2023; Grayson, 2023; Scotti, 2023). Yet while there has recently been an increased emphasis in the academy and the general public on bringing attention to the precarity of work conditions for game developers embodied in practices like crunch (Cote & Harris, 2021, 2023; Keogh, 2023; Valentine, 2021), the volatility of games journalism encapsulated in Liao's tweet has not yet received a similar analysis. That is what we address in this paper. We begin with a literature review in which we take stock of contemporary scholarship in games journalism and the games media ecosystem more generally, before then relating our methodology, which involved often lengthy interviews with eleven gaming media personalities both currently working in the space and retired or partly retired from the space. We describe our process of coding and data analysis before then moving onto our discussion, in which we examine the key economic, technological, infrastructural, and political changes that have led to the almost disappearance of Liao's “dream job in games journalism,” and in turn how many of those working in the field—or who might have moved into that field had it been more presently viable—have instead shifted towards games-related podcasting. We emphasize what this shift towards a more “influencer”-driven gaming news model means for games media, and the potential issues that may arise as a result. We then conclude by restating the need for a robust games press, calling for more in-depth examination of the field and further analysis of the possible futures it faces.
Background and Literature Review—The Precarious Position of Games Journalism
The gaming media ecosystem is not yet a central concern within contemporary game studies, but there is a notable—and growing—body of work dedicated to its analysis. One key theme here is the role that gaming news and media have played in constructing and marking the boundaries of what it means to be a “gamer.” Some of the earliest research in this area comes from Graeme Kirkpatrick (2015) in his book The Formation of Gaming Culture: UK Gaming Magazines, 1981–1995. This work highlights the key role that gaming journalism—in the form of periodical magazines—had in creating many of the stereotypes that exist around games, “gamers,” and gaming culture. Many of these stereotypes, Kirkpatrick notes, were formed in part due to the marketing from developers and publishers that appeared in these magazines which were created to appeal to the imagined demographic of the straight white male “gamer”—a sentiment further explored in the work of Amanda Cote (2018).
These stereotypes would intersect with gaming journalism again decades later in the Gamergate harassment campaign (Chess & Shaw, 2015). The campaign was “ostensibly dedicated to reforming ethics in games journalism,” a claim which Andrea Braithwaite (2016, p. 1) dismantles in her article about the movement, instead laying the blame on the toxic culture which propagates the straight White male as the typical gamer; the culture which, as Cote and Kirkpatrick argue, is one that has a legacy intertwined with the construction of the gaming press’ history. Indeed, as their work points out, the games press has historically been constructed in a way which caters to the typical “gamer,” a legacy which it continues to reckon with. 1
The tensions in the relationship between gaming journalism and marketing have notably been analysed by Perreault and Vos (2020, p. 159) who concluded that “gaming journalism is discursively marked as a lower, marginal form of journalism based on perceived differences in professional values and journalistic savviness”—the close ties to marketing departments being viewed as unacceptable when compared to the “professional values” of traditional journalism. More recently Neiborg and Foxman's Mainstreaming and Game Journalism (2023) expanded on this point, examining the exclusionary culture this fostered and the perceived closeness between journalists and the companies that are their sources. Without meaning to pre-empt our analysis, this idea of gaming journalism as distinct from more “traditional” journalism was reflected in our interviews by some of those in the field themselves—numerous creators rejected the label of journalist even as they highlighted the importance of the ethical standards they set themselves. This complicated relationship between the press and publishers is at the forefront of games media and was on the minds of many of the creators we spoke to.
Games journalism may not be mainstream, but that does not mean it functions in an entirely different or separate way. On the contrary, many criticisms of games journalism's supposed triviality center around the particularly close relationship between journalists and publishers which helps provide them access to exclusive previews or early versions of games for review (Nieborg & Foxman, 2023); this close relationship was part of the previously mentioned false justification used by the Gamergate harassment campaign (Braithwaite, 2016). This aspect of games journalism is one which positions the field as often falling under the label of “access journalism”: a form of journalism—often contrasted derisively with investigative journalism—which is more focused on maintaining privileged access to exclusive sources rather than holding their actions to account or verifying their claims (McNeill & Hayashi, 2023; Rolston & Miller, 1996). In games specifically, there is a storied history of firings (Orland, 2008), blacklistings (Totilo, 2015), or other forms of singling out (Marks, 2024) which have caused gaming journalists to lose access as a result of their writing. While the field may be viewed as lesser, it is still beholden to many of the tensions and trials that journalism more broadly faces, with discussion of games journalism as access journalism being an enduring one in the field as shown in the previously mentioned discussions about the journalistic label. 2
These issues of access also recall Herman and Chomsky’s (1988) propaganda model which aims to highlight how systemic biases in mass media are exploited to manufacture consent around specific issues and control the narrative or discourse of a culture. Two key aspects of this model, according to Herman and Chomsky (1988), are sources and “flak.” In the first case they propose that mass media is “drawn into a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of information by economic necessity and reciprocity of interest…” (Herman & Chomsky, 1988, p. 18), while they describe flak as “negative responses to a media statement or program” (p. 26). Through this combination we might see that games journalism is subject to many of the same pressures and struggles that mainstream journalism is; instances of blacklistings or firings serve as flak to force journalists to comply with the demands of publishers and developers in order to avoid losing access to their sources which, as Chomsky and Herman note, is an economic necessity for them.
Nieborg and Foxman (2023) also note how the increasingly precarious work conditions those in the field must endure affect their perspectives about games journalism. Secure employment is a vanishing dream in the industry, with many in games media forced to either work precarious casual or freelance jobs for established companies, or risk it all and attempt to strike out as an independent creator. This shift is not unique to gaming media, however, and instead reflects many of the trends present in game development and production—which some in turn argue are also representative of the cultural industries more generally. In his book The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist, Brendan Keogh notes how game developers paint an image of a games field which aligns “with what we would typically expect to see in other cultural fields: precarious, unpredictable, and driven by symbolic aspirations at least as often as by economic ones” (Keogh, 2023, p. 12). This is notable in many of the large companies which make up what Keogh notes is traditionally viewed as the “videogame industry.” Liao's final article published for Launcher (2023a) was itself, ironically enough, one covering a wave of firings and hirings at a variety of games companies including 343 Industries, Google, and Riot Games.
It is unfortunate then that all the descriptors Keogh outlines can be applied to the field of games media. Writing about the writers who primarily work on creating guides and walkthroughs for games, former Waypoint editor and Remap Radio co-founder Patrick Klepek (2022a, 2022b) noted poor pay and working conditions were staples for the authors, despite their work being pivotal for many sites. Less than a year after publishing the articles highlighting this, Klepek and the entire crew of Waypoint were let go from their jobs amidst Vice Media's bankruptcy. But while the field may be more precarious, critical analysis of games continues to exist in popular culture, as Dan Golding (2018, 2021) has illustrated. Despite conversations implying its absence—there is plenty of good critique that exists out there. All of this works to paint a complex picture of games media. Its origins as marketing for game publishers and developers 3 have left an indelible mark on the field—both in terms of the toxic culture it ultimately birthed and in its perceived status as “niche” or subordinate when compared to traditional journalism. While quality work does exist, it must do so alongside branded advertising, guides and walkthroughs, and regurgitated press releases. At the same time, the writers of this content struggle with increasingly precarious and uncertain futures. It is in this unstable context which we situate our work, and upon which we build our analysis.
Methodology
To examine these phenomena and to understand how those in the gaming press are dealing with these changes, we draw here on eleven interviews with creators involved in covering gaming news, both in the past and present. These were collected as part of an ongoing mixed methods (interviews, surveys, and online ethnography) research project investigating gaming podcasters which aims to be the first large-scale analysis of the field. After an initial examination of the field, an illustrative set of podcasts were selected as case studies, with care being taken to ensure that this final sample represented the diversity of creators, formats, and production styles present in the gaming podcast community. Contact with creators was made through the distribution of an opening letter via email, website, or social media. In total, thirty-nine creators were contacted with twenty-three interviews being conducted between September 2022 and November 2023. Of these interviews, eleven are utilized here, featuring discussion from creators with over a century of combined relevant experience between them. Interviews were conducted online via Zoom—with lengths ranging from fifty-five to one-hundred and forty minutes. The interviews were then transcribed using Microsoft Word's internal transcription software before being cleaned up by the researchers.
Following this, two rounds of coding were done on the interviews to ascertain key themes and discussion topics—coding which was done in accordance with the constructivist grounded theory methodology. Due to the nature of the gaming podcast sphere as an unexplored field, theory generation and initial analysis were key goals of the project, both things which constructivist grounded theory is notably suited for (Charmaz, 2014, p. 22; Tarozzi, 2020, p. 3). One of the key benefits of constructivist grounded theory is the iterative nature of the methodology: insights gleaned in preliminary data analysis can help shape the data collection in later stages of the project (Tarozzi, 2020, pp. 49–60). In this case, comments from earlier interviews emphasized the interesting relationship between gaming podcasts and games journalism, which led to our final sample including more games journalists in the podcasting sphere as a response to this. Notably, these interviews were not anonymous, allowing the information discussed to be more specific without the need to deidentify all comments. As a result, all comments in this article are attributed to their direct sources. The interviews were semi-structured, with core questions centering around the origin, business, and production of the show being asked to all creators, and additional questions being included as needed based on relevant information raised during the interview, in episodes of the creator's shows listened to prior, or discussion in previous interviews.
In addition to the interviews, this paper makes use of comments and quotes found as part of the online ethnography of the case study shows and their communities. In total, over 1000 hours of podcast episodes were listened to as part of the doctoral project this article draws on, the vast majority of which involved podcasts from interviewed creators. This included both publicly available shows and episodes of shows which are only available for paying subscribers—with paid episodes often providing insights into the behind-the-scenes business of these podcasts which proved helpful for further expanding the creator's thoughts on the state of the industry and their work. Similarly, in engaging with the shows and their communities on social media platforms, relevant articles and tweets about key issues in games media were also discovered. These ethnographic finds were often found in discussions regarding five key events which speak to the precarity of the industry: the announcement of Launcher's demise, Waypoint's closure, The Escapist's downsizing, the launch of Waypoint's successor Remap Radio, and the reveal of The Escapist staff's next project Second Wind. Discourse from these events is supplemented by articles from key stakeholders weighing in and addressing the relevant issues in ways which expanded upon ideas present in the interviews.
Discussion
In this discussion section we present excerpts from our interviews alongside information gathered as part of our online ethnography highlighting the way the shift towards podcasting is indicative of broader issues of labor in the new media ecosystem and emphasizing connections to the literature that already exists regarding the precarious nature of labor in game development and gaming media. These issues were a recurring trend in our discussion, with dozens of coded responses speaking negatively about the precarity in the industry at present and its uncertain future. Following this, we argue the shifts in gaming journalism have been accelerated, in part, by the changing business model of the traditional games press, which is being forced to pivot towards “Search Engine Optimized” (SEO) Content, AI-created content, and guide/walkthrough content in the wake of advertising revenue decreasing. This shift has led to many creators exiting traditional games journalism entirely and either pursuing a career in adjacent fields, or instead attempting to navigate a career as independent gaming influencers. We then discuss how gaming influencers have only increased in stature and prominence in conjunction with the decline of the traditional gaming media ecosystem. We end by discussing how this has been further exasperated by game publishers making a deliberate choice to bypass traditional gaming media institutions to reach fans directly through influencers and social media. Finally, we conclude by analyzing the issues involved with this shift highlighting the ways that independent gaming influencers cannot function as a substitute for a robust games press.
The Changing Face of Games Media
The literature is clear—gaming media is facing a challenging period. Games journalism is continually relegated to the sidelines of the journalistic field while the pool of job opportunities continues to shrink with no sign of stopping. Discussion of the precarious state of the field was something which creators also expressed anxiety over—in the coding of the eleven interviews, discussion of poor pay and work conditions occurred twenty-three separate times—thirteen of which also explicitly discussed the lack of long term workers in the games industry. During his interview, Patrick Klepek of Remap Radio expanded on his thoughts regarding games media, describing the current situation as “bleak. It's extremely hard to make the math work to pay people reasonable wages without fully exploiting them and to some extent that's part of a broader trend away from writing.” In a similar fashion, Former Senior Editor at Giant Bomb and Nextlander co-founder Alex Navarro highlighted that his time at Giant Bomb and GameSpot was plagued by overwork, noting that it “definitely had its share of unpaid labour” and describing E3 and Game of the Year debates as “a death march.” Speaking to his age relative to many others in the industry, Navarro highlighted the precarity as driving others away: “The number of elder statesmen videogame journalists that make it past a certain age is just not that high because there isn’t a lot of money or reward in this work unless you have a built-in audience and are able to keep it.”
The co-hosts of Abnormal Mapping, Jackson Tyler and Em Marko discussed their experience seeing numerous friends attempting to break into the industry “burnout and struggle for decades and never get a full salaried position”—while Bob Mackey of Retronauts noted: I was just frustrated overall with the job market… It was just very hard to find a job that would provide benefits, health insurance, things like that. When I started at 1UP, it was very frustrating because I was a contractor. And means you're basically like a second class employee… and unfortunately a lot of businesses operate with contractors who are given the incentive that one day, maybe you'll graduate into being a salaried employee. And that was very frustrating as I was getting into my 30 s to keep experiencing that and really that's why I got out, because it was not stable to begin with.
Mackey concluded this thought by musing that “it seems that that model can't work anymore.” Similarly, Isla Hinck of Easy Allies noted: There is a kind of pervading sense that something is coming, like doom is hanging in the air and everyone assumes that this [the current model] won’t last or that it's already gone… the whole industry we started working in doesn’t exist anymore in the way that it used to and none of us are exactly sure what we are doing or what it's shaping into.
Many creators we spoke to were quick to lay criticism at managers and investors when discussing the field's unstable nature. Fourteen separate instances of respondents negatively discussing ownership and management were coded across the eleven interviews, contrasting with only four positive references. Speaking about these issues Ben Hanson—former Game Informer employee and MinnMax founder rhetorically pondered that “there's so many gaming sites that I’ll go to and it's just a miserable experience with the amount of ads and pop-ups. How much of that is people being greedy at the top?” Similarly, Hinck noted that while managing the Easy Allies business was challenging at times, it was “super rewarding” compared to the “dubiously legal” contracts that she endured when working for the corporately owned GameTrailers. Klepek, meanwhile, said that he “struggle[d] to say too many good or optimistic things about the corporate games media as a corporate institute,” specifically calling out the closure of Launcher. It is clear then, that for these creators the issues are the result of decisions made by corporate heads and management.
Interviewing management to further understand their perspective on these issues was beyond the scope of this research, but we can clearly see how the managerial class of many gaming websites have shifted focus towards avenues of work which they believe will be profitable. Three emerging forms of content have been noted to be part of this trend: content focused on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), guides-based content (i.e., written or video guides about how to play particular games), and AI-written content. These three forms of content are not mutually exclusive, nor are they solely utilized in games journalism. Nevertheless, they all represent aspects of the focus on revenue that management has which is responsible for these tensions and the current moment that games journalism finds itself in; Klepek for example claimed in our interview that “between the introduction of AI writing and the obsession with SEO, and the proliferation of guide writing in connection with SEO it's just bleak.” Similarly, Lucy James—co-creator of the Friends Per Second Podcast and Senior Video Editor at GameSpot and Giant Bomb—noted that “traditional media in general is also struggling right now, Conde Nast has 5% [of staff] going. I don’t think it's something that is specifically games media… nothing is safe anymore and I think it's just a wider impact of the tech industry boom. There's always going to be the shrink.” Indeed, during the revision of this article, Kotaku Australia was shut down as part of a series of broader layoffs at the publisher Pedestrian group. 4
These quotes from Klepek and James highlight the nuances of the issue; while creators like Hanson and Hinck pointed out the issues of greed or dubious business practices as problems with management, the reality is that these practices and pivots in content forms speak to an underlying precarity in the business model of many gaming sites, which are reliant on advertising, affiliate links, and support from SEO clickthroughs as a large part of their revenue. While the use of these tools may be controversial, it aligns with the capitalist financial imperatives mentioned above. As noted by Sato and Vincent (2023), AI and SEO content is lucrative for the business, though this often comes at the expense of workers and quality writing
While creators ponder how much of this pivot is a result of corporate greed chasing infinite growth, management's perspective seems to be that this is the only way to create a sustainable business due to the precarity inherent in relying on the SEO algorithms which a platform can change at any time. In a tweet posted soon after the announcement of Waypoint's closure, the Editor-in-Chief of VG247 and former managing editor for USGamer Tom Orry (2023) highlighted this shift in profitability, noting that the traffic needed to sustain a “solid business” in games media has grown in the past decade—which may explain the increased focus from management on pivoting towards the types of content that they view as profitable. Unfortunately, these pivots carry no guarantee of success, and can only further exacerbate the precarity in the field. These current tensions in the games media industry highlight the instability inherent in building a business around these SEO practices. Indeed, the example of Kotaku's management recently attempting to pivot to guides resulted in the loss of an Editor-in-Chief who claimed that the decision directly contradicted “months of traffic data,”—a perspective borne out in their recent 64% decrease in traffic brought about as a result of recent changes to Google's algorithm (Plunkett, 2024). This only serves to highlight the issues faced by games media; even attempting to follow the trends which have been previously successful carries no guarantees of continued success.
Finally, these issues are further intensified by the nature of corporate ownership, where many of these sites are owned and operated by venture capital firms who treat them as assets to be bought and sold. It was the change in Giant Bomb's ownership—according to Navarro—that led to the Nextlander team leaving the company: “The reason we ended up leaving was because we got bought by a company called Red Ventures. And in the ensuing time following the sale we all came to the separate conclusion that maybe our time at Giant Bomb was done.” Even beyond prompting some creators to leave however, it is the dominance of venture capital management in the field that has led to numerous sites and outlets shuttering: the original owner of Retronauts—1UP.com—was shuttered after an acquisition by Ziff Davis, Waypoint was closed mere weeks before the announcement that parent company Vice Media—unable to find a buyer—had declared bankruptcy, and Giant Bomb—while still functioning—has had both the aforementioned departures from the Nextlander founders alongside layoffs as the result of changes in corporate ownership. Further to this point, while revising this article, IGN owner Ziff Davis acquired The Gamer Network—including the sites Eurogamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, and GamesIndustry.biz—immediately firing numerous staff in the wake of the acquisition (Grayson, 2024).
It therefore seems that the games journalism side of gaming media is in significant peril. More and more, websites are downsizing, with management pushing to shift their focus from this more traditional journalism or reporting that they had previously prioritized and instead focusing on creating SEO and advertiser friendly content where clicks are more important than quality. While some may claim that this pivot is necessary to make the field financially viable, it has done little to stem the increasing tide of layoffs and departures from these sites, issues which can be further exacerbated by the frequent trading of hands that some of these sites undergo. As a result, many in games media have become increasingly disillusioned with the state of the field leading some to argue that “the dream job in games journalism just doesn’t exist anymore” (Liao, 2023b).
Of course, this raises the question: if the dream job doesn’t exist, where are all the laid off workers landing?
The Independent Exodus
What we find is that the people involved in this exodus from games journalism have predominantly turned to two main areas of work: either they have shifted to become involved in the game production side of the industry more explicitly, or they have shifted to become independent “content creators” and influencers who focus on games and gaming related content. Many chose the first option; former Waypoint Editor-In-Chief Austin Walker pivoted to game development at new studio Possibility Space 5 while former host of Idle Thumbs Chris Remo claimed that the podcast ended because “our lives got increasingly busy for a number of reasons,” one of which was the team's game studio being purchased by Valve. This shift towards working within game development was something which Klepek noted multiple times after the announcement of Waypoint's closure—no journalism offers were available to him, and he was instead offered help finding a place in the development side of the industry from another former journalist (Klepek, 2024). Put simply, jobs are being lost and no new positions are being created to replace them, leading many to pivot into adjacent fields for work instead. As Hinck put it in our interview “you can’t work for somebody that doesn’t exist.”
However, this is only one of two pivots that these creators are making, and it is this second one we now focus on in this section: a pivot away from the existing institutions and instead towards independent content creation. Retronauts was a show that was initially created as part of the gaming media website 1UP. After the site was bought and subsequently shuttered by new corporate owners, the creators—after a period of bouncing between alternative websites as freelance journalists—decided to continue the show independently. Speaking about this decision, Mackey highlighted the benefits of independence as being preferable to further corporate management and its accompanying limitations:
“I had been approached by Joystiq and they wanted me to do Retronauts for them. But I couldn't use the name Retronauts and I would have to involve someone from their staff every time and the money wasn't very good either… So I thought like “No, if I want to do Retronauts again, I want to do it the right way.” I got in touch with [former hosts] Jeremy and Ray Barnholtz and we decided to do a Kickstarter.”
Mackey also noted later that they “didn’t really trust another website to keep it running indefinitely”; an instinct that has since been proven correct with Joystiq's eventual closure. For many like Mackey, the instability in the industry is an unsustainable burden. Speaking in a similar fashion, Hanson noted that starting an independent outlet like MinnMax “wasn’t the brave move. It was the safer move at the time at Game Informer. After those layoffs [of his colleagues] it would have been scarier to stay there with GameStop swinging an axe over my head than to just go out and do my own thing,” Other creators expressed this sentiment, with Klepek noting that “It's just who are you serving, and at the end of the day I’d rather serve the audience,” while Navarro claimed that “I am always going to be of the opinion that independence is better than the current corporate media structure that we have,” as it allows creators to “make the kind of stuff you want in a relatively uncompromised fashion.” All of this was summed up simply by Mackey, who stated “It feels like the talented people who created that [gaming media] content are much more happier, make a lot more money, and find a better audience once they’re independent…”—an assertation supported by the twenty-five separate positive responses to independence mentioned over our eleven interviews.
Interestingly, when speaking with us about this change Tyler and Marko emphasized differences between podcasters who create shows as a hobby, those who work for larger businesses, and independent creators “hustling” to make a living. Throughout our interviews, it was shown that many who may be labelled as hustlers are creators who decided to become independent because of the previously mentioned precarity in the games journalism space. This increase in gaming journalist “hustlers” recalls Keogh's discussion of the emergence of Silvio Larusso's entreprecariat in the Australian game development field, whose path to success is far from assured (Keogh, 2023). During our interviews we dealt with a variety of creators who would fall into this hustler—or entreprecariat—category, and while some (like the Nextlander team, Retronauts, or MinnMax) managed to achieve success, others (including creators without experience in the games press not directly quoted in this article) had failed to make podcasting a full-time career. In this way, the “hustlers” or entreprecariats that we spoke to reflect the different avenues out of the traditional games media industry mentioned earlier: some may successfully branch out to become independent creators, while others are driven out of the industry by its unstable and precarious nature.
It is important to note however, that these different categories of creators are not necessarily separated in the eyes of the audience. Indeed, many creators acknowledged that their independent work involved multiple mediums and formats. Navarro noted that “even though the twitch streams aren’t necessarily a thing that are tied into our Patreon we see it as ‘we’re doing these things over on this platform to add to the general suite of things we provide to our audience.’” For Navarro, the audience for the podcast was the same as the stream, an idea reinforced by other creators. Hinck and Hanson's networks both used Twitch to broadcast live versions of some of their shows, while Remap consistently includes mentions of upcoming streams on their podcast and in their “This Week At Remap” emails. Remap also highlights that it is not just these two mediums that are viewed as having overlap. Speaking to us about the future of the network, Klepek noted people are “primarily paying for podcasts, [but] we do streams, we have ambitions of having a writing component…” - ambitions that were later realized, and which Klepek hinted in our interview he believed audiences would find “exciting.” Responses from the audiences of podcasts surveyed support this idea, indicating that almost fifty-six percent of listeners did not consider gaming podcasts their only primary source of gaming related content. This competition is yet another factor in the changing state of games journalism as audiences are increasingly flocking to individual personalities or independent teams rather than specific sites.
This change was noted by former USGamer Editor-In-Chief Kat Bailey 6 (2020) as a reason for the site's demise who claimed that “the media for better or worse ceased to be the gatekeepers, with publishers hiring their own social media team, and influencers gaining vast audiences of their own.” In this way, we can see these sites are forced to compete with individuals for attention in the eyes of audiences—and for access to the developers and publishers which are their sources. Bailey argues that audiences and publishers alike do not distinguish between access gaming journalists, investigative gaming journalists, independent influencers, and entertainment focused hobbyists. Similarly, they do not discriminate between content formats as highlighted by the survey responses mentioned above and in our discussion with creators. As Navarro's prior comments and the utilization of multiple formats by most creators indicate, the different platforms work together to “add to the general suite of things [creators] provide to [their] audience.” This has led to a tension in the field, where the undifferentiated attention of audiences means that gaming journalists, influencers and independent entreprecariats are competing for attention from publishers instead of having a field where journalists receive exclusive access. All this has led to a blurring of the lines between gaming journalists, individual influencers, and dedicated fans—a blurring which can be seen by considering the “E3” event as a useful case study of these relationships with games media.
Initially created as a trade show to advertise games to sellers, over the course of its 27-year history the Electronic Entertainment Expo slowly morphed into an event predominantly focused on advertising games to consumers through the journalists and media present before shutting down entirely post-COVID. While the pandemic undoubtedly played an important role in the show's demise, the decline of the show was also caused in part by key publishers who increasingly chose to forgo supporting E3 and instead attempted to court audiences directly via platforms such as Twitch or YouTube. This shift towards directly marketing to fans rather than providing journalists with exclusive access highlights the difficulties these journalists face. While the media still play a role in highlighting publishers’ games, they must compete with both influencers and the producers themselves to grab attention from the fans. Over the past two decades, the producers, distributors, and key stakeholders involved in game production have slowly but surely shifted away from utilizing gaming journalists as their sole method of communication with consumers and audiences—instead choosing to utilize direct marketing or intermediaries such as influencers and streamers. As a result, the games press—an already precarious field—has become even more precarious. Beyond the implications for games media however, this shift is also interesting and important to study for one key reason which we will turn to in the final section of this paper: the gaming press has different goals and standards to gaming influencers.
Issues of Access and Ethics
Despite how interchangeable the gaming industry may treat them, gaming influencers are not a substitute for gaming journalism. As we highlighted earlier, all journalism—including gaming journalism—must find a balance between the competing concepts of access and accountability which are often placed in tension with one another. Reporters in the industry generally find themselves holding to ethical standards and ideals which have long been established as part of journalism. Indeed, in our interview, Klepek noted that a more critical analysis of games and gaming culture was one of the key goals of Waypoint, something that was harder to do under an independent banner: Even if we added a written or produced podcast component to Remap, I don’t know that it would involve pointed claims about a company that could be interpreted as potential defamation from their point of view… [with Waypoint] we wanted to be the tip of the spear, saying things that people aren’t saying – not to be edgy but because we have a specific point of view. We’re OK having politics at the heart of how we think about not just games but broader culture. I would say that as someone who has done a lot of reporting, written stories that have specific allegations towards companies, that's the thing that gives me a lot of pause for the future.
Beyond the threat of defamation; however, the issue is complicated by the nature of the access journalists receive. As previously mentioned, the companies these journalists criticize are often also the source that provides access for many other journalists—sometimes working at the same sites. This means that the highly regarded critical and investigative work reporting on crunch culture, labor movements, harassment and more done by reporters like Jason Schreier (2021, 2023), Rebekah Valentine (2021, 2024a, 2024b), Kat Bailey (2021, 2024), Shannon Liao (2022a, 2022b), and many more, must exist alongside work which is predicated on a continued good relationship with publishers and developers; an uneasy balance which inevitably leads to tension. There are numerous examples which highlight the issue here, including the blacklisting of sites like Kotaku by publishers for reporting about unannounced games or development troubles. Speaking about Kotaku's blacklisting, then Editor-In Chief Stephen Totilo (2015) was extremely critical, claiming that: They have done so in apparent retaliation for the fact that we did our jobs as reporters and as critics. We told the truth about their games, sometimes in ways that disrupted a marketing plan, other times in ways that shone an unflattering light on their products and company practices. Both publishers’ actions demonstrate contempt for us and, by extension, the whole of the gaming press. They would hamper independent reporting in pursuit of a status quo in which video game journalists are little more than malleable, servile arms of a corporate sales apparatus.
These comments are extremely illustrative, highlighting how the imperative to do investigative gaming journalism conflicts with the desire of corporations to limit the press to doing neutered access journalism. There is hence a complicated balance needed to avoid falling into the trap of regurgitating press releases and marketing hype, something that multiple creators I spoke to from the industry highlighted. Talking about Idle Thumbs, Remo noted that the most important thing for the podcast—and website which preceded it—was to maintain “somewhat a degree of irreverence and the desire to avoid the kind of standard industry hype cycle…” Remo's mention of the “hype cycle” here recalls both Klepek's comments regarding Waypoint “saying things that people aren’t saying,” and Totilo's accusations that publishers would prefer the gaming press to be “malleable, servile arms of a corporate sales apparatus.” Publishers are more interested in making their games look good rather than be held accountable by serious journalism. Unfortunately, it is difficult for independent creators to hold publishers to account in the same way without the backing of a larger corporation.
This highlights one of the ways in which independent content creators and influencers cannot be viewed as a replacement for traditional games journalism. Even if creators are attempting to hold themselves accountable with the same standards they had before going independent, these creators do not have the same resources, access, and protections to do investigative gaming journalism, and as a result they must be more measured and cautious in how they approach some of these issues. Consequently, this limits their ability to hold these companies accountable—if indeed they even want to hold these institutions accountable. The reality is that a portion of the creators working on YouTube or in podcasts position themselves in opposition to the gaming press in much the same way that the Gamergate movement did. Indeed, the continued success of these oppositional voices points towards a deeper rupture between the work of these journalists and the expectations of some audience members; a rupture where in-depth analysis falls beyond the scope of this paper.
Even content creators and influencers who do not fall into this oppositional category are limited to engaging with publishers and developers in ways which mirror access journalists—with their work serving a different purpose and having different standards than the ideals of more critical or investigative journalism. Multiple creators we spoke to, including Hink, Hanson, and James noted some discomfort or objection to their work both independent and at larger organizations being labelled journalism. James further elaborated that she was “giving context to those things… not breaking the news and doing the journalism part myself,” pointing towards a definition of gaming journalism that privileges investigative journalism and highlights how access journalism and influencer work can also function somewhat symbiotically with investigative journalism. James also noted her acceptance of branded content deals stood at odds with the journalistic ethics outlined earlier, implicitly positioning her work in the “access journalism” category and highlighting the tensions between the two fields.
Notably, while creators with previous access journalism experience mentioned they maintain a high level of professional and ethical standards, this does not hold true for all the influencers and creators they find themselves competing against. While the topic was not explicitly addressed in our interview with him, co-host of Game Studies Study Buddies Cameron Kunzelman (2023) argued in a Twitter thread discussing the issue that “content creation and journalism, which are absolutely at odds in terms of obligation and intent in the industry, are flattened into the same thing,” further elaborating that this has in part been caused by the previously discussed precarity in the industry. This sentiment was shared by many others in the industry, who lamented Waypoint's closure as a portend of further shifts towards “influencer based marketing” (Greszes, 2023), “AI spam” (Liao, 2023a), and algorithmic spaces (Nichijou, 2023)—all of which seem to reinforce Klepek's perception of the industry as “bleak” and Hinck's idea that there is a pervading sense of “doom” amongst those involved. Even if access journalism is occasionally servile when compared to investigative journalism, the journalists involved maintain many journalistic standards, something these alternatives are under no obligation to do. This is why the contraction of games journalism is such a significant problem—there is no emerging industry which serves as a suitable substitute.
Conclusion
Games journalism, like many forms of written or print journalism, is in a precarious state. As competition on the internet continues to grow, outlets are being forced to focus on providing SEO content which appeals to the algorithms that drive much of the internet's traffic in order to appeal to advertisers for revenue. This has led to a proliferation of guide content and experiments with AI written work, as well as a decrease in the outlets doing more rigorous investigative and critical work. This shift has been further exasperated by the poor working conditions journalists in the field often contend with, as well as the rise of gaming influencers, podcasters, and other “content creators,” whose positive and personable approach to engaging with media makes them an enticing alternative for game producers and developers to use when marketing their work. These factors have combined to create a shrinking market for games journalists who find themselves either leaving the field entirely or striking out as independent creators and entreprecariats themselves; a move which recalls an “if you can’t beat them, join them” mentality.
Yet this shift is fraught with its own problems, as even those who have a background in games journalism are forced to contend with new restrictions which distinguish their work from the traditional press and limit the possibilities of what they can do. Many of these creators have turned towards podcasts—a medium which epitomizes the more personality-based shift that has occurred but is not a substitute for proper journalism or reporting. This paper then, is not just an analysis of the state of the field, but a call for further investigation into the matter. The idea that these creatives function as entreprecariats is one which bears many similarities with the increasing casualization and resulting precarity ongoing in many industries—including other media institutions and game development itself. Further investigation is therefore needed to situate this shift within the larger context, as well as to analyze the potential future directions of the field. While this paper focuses on tracing the path that has led us to the present moment, the future of the field remains in flux. While the future is at present unknown, it is clear that the scars of this transformation will remain, and it is important that the implications of this shift are fully analysed and understood.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.
