I do agree, the bickering about politics is a little silly when you consider just how terrible the actual "journalism" part is. I think there's a general feeling that all journalism has faltered a little bit in the face of the Internet and a 24 hour news cycle, but I'm not even sure video game journalism was ever good. I'm not sure it was ever really 'journalism'.

I'll admit I do miss the older generation of video game 'journalism' nonetheless. Had its problems, but the thing is, it did feel like people were sharing their genuine and honest opinions as a capital-G "Gamer" more often. It became mostly known for the stereotypical attitudes that people have since come to dislike, which you can see manifested sometimes e.g. in old Penny Arcade comics. The only irony is that it feels like somehow, people's more progressive attitudes manage to have even less nuance than the older "unrefined" opinions that have since been walked back on by many. You can see this especially in the bizarro way that people have become regressive about sexuality in video games-I'm not really sure how a bunch of people were convinced to go all the way from 90's style "toxic masculinity" to a totally puritanical anti-sexuality stance in such a short period, but I'll be damned, they really managed to do it.

What happened in this time period, though, is interesting. There's really no such concept as a "capital-G Gamer" in a society where pretty much any kind of person plays video games to at least some degree. There's still a spectrum of different kinds and different levels of dedication, but the lines are firmly blurred. Gaming is just another thing that people do, on computers, phones, whatever, wherever.

To me, the modern era though, won't actually be colored by how gaming went mainstream, or by any event involving gaming at all. It'll be about how everyone became phony and full of shit with pandering to trends and moral grandstanding. I'd be willing to place a wager on that one. Unfortunately, that isn't specific to gaming, gaming journalism, or any kind of journalism.

Player reviews for games aren't much better, unfortunately. So many games get review bombed for political reasons. It's the Amazon equivalent of "this book sucks because my package was late" but orders of magnitude more frequent. It's nearly impossible to find high quality game reviews.

Worse even that gamergate was about Kotaku who also got blacklisted by Bethesda for their reporting.

I think reviews in general suffer a lot from the commodification that's happened as the gatekeepers have conglomerated. I never trust reviews from publications that have a whole team of reviewers anymore, you have to find individual, usually independent, reviewers who have their own fanbases to have any trust. Best video game reviewer is dunkey, best music reviewer is anthony fantano, I haven't found anyone I love for movies or film, but I'm always looking.

> the average review score on any large site is not 5/10

Because this score is in relation to the whole market, not just the reviewed games. Journalists only review the promising games, which means usually from established studios, or from unknown developers when they received some positive feedback from the community. But as it's their job, they still see the whole market, they know how low the bottom, and how high the ceiling is.

Food for thought: maybe because people try to make better than mediocre games, the average review score is higher than 5/10.

This is very 2008 understanding of the industry.

Sure, insider access to studios and pre-release games is important to media, but that’s… also the same for movies and books and TV and music publications? And the argument about the scoring is so old and trite. There are so many games coming out nowadays that the bad ones just don’t get the time of the day. Does median score on Pitchfork hover around 5?

But even apart from that, written reviews aren’t the big traffic drivers they used to be. Bits of gameplay narrated by staff, guides, walkthroughs etc, and other commentary are only increasing in how much they matter traffic-wise.

The truth is that for the most part (with notable exceptions) people on both sides of the divide are adults, and nobody is going to blacklist a website because they didn’t like a negative review.

Publishers also generally do not get to influence review scores, the firing of Jeff Gerstmann from GameSpot and subsequent exodus of editorial staff is still An Event that everyone remembers and knows about.

Oh wow, I didn't know about Yatzhee. I really need my Zero Punctuation dose, and turns out he doesn't own it

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-escapist-staff-resign-foll...

> More broadly, I'm not sure general "journalism" really has a bright future outside of the big names that can field huge advertising budgets.

To be fair, it doesn't have a bright history outside of that, either.

Thanks! There is RSS too: https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/feed

I would love it if some of the other old-timers could make it back. I assume the people I really liked, Steven, Jason, Kirk, Maddy and of course Fahey, since he no longer is with us, are very unlikely to come back. I also miss their Japan pop-culture reporting from Richard Eisenbeis and Bashcraft. The latter was a big part of what made me visit kotaku instead of Destructoid or Polygon.

Holy shit, I had missed that entirely.

Thanks for that heads up, I’m subscribed to their discord community (sigh, why is it discord), and excited to hear what comes next from the leaving employees.

First I hear of it. Seemed like an inevitability.

It makes more sense when you consider that many of the journalists who have gone into newsletters are there because they felt that the need to appeal to "average readers" and build a broad customer pool (edit: often at the insistence of their evil bosses) was restricting their genius and that they'd have a better time narrow-casting to a smaller (but more consistently monetizable) fanbase.

That price point seems about right to me. I just signed up to The Economist Podcasts+ for a similar price because I listen to virtually every piece of content they produce. Sure it's just one publication but it's an excellent one in my opinion. If these folks think they can bring a similar level of value, go for it. I personally wouldn't pay a single solitary cent for people to write about video games but that's just my personal preference.

I think the logic is that getting anyone to get out their credit card and pay anything at all for content is a tough barrier, and the difficulty of crossing it doesn’t scale linearly with the asking price. That and micropayments remain an unsolved problem.

Aftermath uses a similar model found at 404 Media and Defector.

They say "worker-owned." I'm not sure about a new journalistic outlet, but in the context of lesbian bars and communist coffee shops, this means the business will last about a year.

Is this a good or bad thing? I don’t really know much about kotaku.

But I do know game journalists don’t exactly produce the greatest content, everything from “the game is too hard 1/10” to IGNs obvious paid for scores to “this game has a male character, therefore it must be sexist”.

The Autopian's been doing pretty well with it, too.

I think there's two things interacting here that make this more tractable than first impressions - first is that the cost of running one of these sites as a sustainable business is a hell of a lot lower than whatever crazy shit the PE & hedge funders were pushing for. I also think people's willingness to pay for quality content is higher than has been assumed, and I think part of that is a lot of us have seen what the cost of free content is over the last couple years.

I think you're right that these sites will never be more than niche by subscriber count, but I think there's more appetite now than before and I think it's entirely possible to make a sustainable business here.

I'm also generally in favor of a world where writers and creators get paid a decent wage to write and create things I find valuable or interesting, so I'm biased here.

I can't afford to subscribe to every site starting up. None of them have day/week pass options or the ability to pay to read one story out of their archives, so it's $7/month or nothing. My budget for this isn't going to grow just because subscription sites proliferate.

I know we love decentralization here but I'd love if all these co-op sites shared an umbrella subscription, MaxFun style, where you could direct most of your subscription fee to the sites, or even the individual writers, that you want to support. Shared infrastructure, focused support.

Kotaku is the worst example of journalistic integrity in the last 10 years?

Kotaku is one of the only game outlets that actually got blacklisted by publishers for negative coverage. What's the integrity violation you're so upset about? I hope it's not a completely made up one like gamergate

I agree. Made by the people from Kotaku is not exactly a phrase that would make me want to visit a site.

That was my first thought, I am sure that there were some incentives from Gawker that contributed to it but Kotaku quickly became one of the gaming sites that I strongly avoided around 2017 when it seemed like they would get a crusade against any game that had some problems and just run it into the ground. (Mass Effect Andromeda was the straw for me)

I wrote a comment above around that topic, looks like my question was answered…

> The level of vitriol for Kotaku specifically made no damn sense, given how diverse the writing staff was.

I think you got the cause and effect backwards here, unfortunately.

Individually packaged units of coffee grounds in a micro-chipped plastic container for the pot to recognize it as an officially licensed “pod” is our daily life. I think real coffee has become absurd. lol

As another coffee nerd I'm happy to realize I wasn't the only one who did a double-take when they first noticed the in-game espresso machines.

My only complaint about the article is that the 'perculator' is clearly a Braun KF20. haha

I'd rather watch some gameplay footage with no commentary. I don't find that a person reviewing a video game contributes anything meaningful to the decision of whether or not I want a game or not unless I know them personally and we have similar taste.

I have a suspicion that the only way such content has any value today in a world with quick and easy access to online video is that they are given copies prior to the release of the game. They get clicks because of peoples impatience to learn more despite being able to see effectively infinite amount of content as soon as a game is officially released.

But the problem here is that game reviewers livelihood is entirely dependent on getting early access and if they don't speak highly of the game then their livelihood can be cut off. They are basically all bribed into giving positive feedback. I think it is actually worse than nothing at all. It is actively harmful to finding out what a game is actually like.

I guess my point is that we should just wait until a game is released. There are infinite copies and there exists more games than anyone could ever play. Reading some heavily biased opinions about a video game a week before it comes out is not meaningful.

I don't think that is very accurate, in my experience the most popular reviews are Personality Driven and it is largely done in the youtube space, the next most popular writen sites are also more neutral when it comes to their reviews (Gamespot, IGN, Gameinformer, Eurogamer). Honestly people just want two things, to hear their favorite content creator talk about the game or have someone say how great it is. But in my opinion the best way to sort out all the noise is to just find a content creator you share tastes with since IGN et al have such a massive cast of reviewers constantly shifting around so it doesn't make sense to rely on that.

You could also use a review aggregator if you just want to see what the overall consensus is: https://opencritic.com/

My other advice which has worked very well as a PC Gamer is to look up Steam reviews, there are a LOT of underappreciated games that were poorly received by critics but players actually enjoyed. It is also review bomb resistant since you actually need to buy the game,will allow you to filter out by time periods, and notify you if there have been a noticeable change in review patterns.

I guess modern gaming journalists are journalists first, gamers second. It used to be the other way around.

I miss the sh*t out of printed specialist journalism. Growing up, we had a couple of printed magazines. You could tell they were incredibly well written, with great reviews, walkthroughs, interviews with people in the local industry, as well as surprisingly in-depth exposes about things like for example, how CG animations are made etc.

Unfortunately, thanks to a leaky water pipe, I can only cherish the memory of said collection.

Their business model was exchanging product (the magazine) for money. Based on that business model, they could pay their employees, a couple of passionate and talented people a living wage. something that I'm not sure modern internet-based outfits accomplish.

> ideological reviews are what is mainstream. It's not about how the game is, it's how inclusive they are to minorities

This seems like a pretty heavy exaggeration to me. I just spotchecked several reviews on IGN, PCGamer, and GamesRadar (top 3 sites I get when googling "games reviews"), and found nothing of the sort. I'm sure if you go digging you could find that content somewhere on the site, but to claim it's the crux of their review model is just false.

For example, the new MW3 is a game where there's lots you could comment on in terms of the ideology of their portrayals of the war on terror and "ends justify the means"... but not one of the mainstream reviews I can see spends time on it, other than to mention the villain's vague motives. Or on the flip side, take Fae Farm, a game that explicitly advertises itself as inclusive - only one paragraph of GamesRadar's the nine page review is on the topic of inclusivity, and it doesn't go any ideologically deeper than "there's a lot of customization here, including androgynous options and things like dreadlocks and turbans". The entire rest of the review is about gameplay and graphics.

Yeah, agreed.

The first name in that list is a guy who gave great reviews of a game by a developer who was sleeping with him.

Of course, due to one (or both? I forget which) of them being married, of course that fact had to be a secret.

In any other publication, the author's sexual liasons with the subject of the piece is considered a clear conflict of interest. Not so in gaming, it appeared.

Where’s the whining? I didn’t find it. Please substantiate your claims.

Turns out lots of people play video games!

op's is a valid criticism in a post gonzo journalism world. hunter thompson, an otherwise conventionally trained professional, embeds himself in the world of his subjects, and produces a masterpiece of investigative journalism. it's also sexy, and generations of journalists imitate him after. but the division remained up until quite recently, where you have the chicago manual of syle, and then you have (late 90s) vice magazine. tongue-in-cheek faux investigative article works when you're a professional humorist and that's your beat, or when you're a professional game reporter, and you want to produce some levity. in the second case the deficiencies are excused, because what otherwise carries your writing and by extension your reputation, are your serious pieces. in the post gonzo journalism world most writers act as if they have that reputation to cary them, but what they consistently produce are low effort tongue-in-cheek, insider jokes articles. there's simply not enough good will to humor them.

You really think that these people who have worked for multiple gaming sites and are now starting their own gaming site really don't play games? It seems like there would be an easier way to make a living than writing about something you don't care about.

Personally I only read reviews of running shoes from lazy obese people, paraplegics, and amputees.

What do you think people reading wartime coverage want to read about?

My recollection was that Kotaku had an entire subsection of the site dedicated to posting pictures of attractive women doing cosplay. I don't remember much political activism -- do you have an example?

I very much enjoyed RPS in the days of the original four writers, and also when Quinns was contributing, though I haven't kept up so much in the last eight years or so.

Eurogamer seems to cover the games news and reviews in the way I like best right now, and Digital Foundary's writing and videos that lean on the more technical side of games are just excellent. (I believe DF also have an arrangement to do some content for RPS, so it's probably being shared around as it should.)

RPS is a shell of its former self. The amazing writers from the early days all left years ago and it's mostly just an SEO spam site now.

That site has been dead to me ever since the gamersgate fiasco.

Leading up to that fiasco people were already frustrated with game media for being in bed with game publishers. And no, I don't care if they have a right to sleep together, I care that the journalistic integrity was so missing they couldn't be bothered to have someone else write the piece or be open about it. And then the entire war on gamers as misogynists for wanting game journalists to have some integrity.

I've never even opened their website since.

I get the sentiment of people who are only interested in game reviews and recommendations. But as a gamer myself, if that’s all a site offers then I’m not paying $7 per month for it. I wouldn’t be willing to pay anything for that content to be honest. I can get a better sense of the quality of a game from aggregated steam reviews. I’m not the target audience for this site, but I do recognize that they can’t just write dry game reviews if they want to make a living.

hello, man from the other side of the divide! i grew up in a socialist country, so i find socialist activism frightful and dangerous, so yes, i think that they are activists for something bad, in general, though not necessarily specifically. (not having grown up in america, i don't share the same divide lines as you people do)

i'm not personally willing to engage in political subjects in my escapist media, and i generally don't. this is the part where you said "you're perfectly entitled", that's good that we agree on this. the rest of my op comment is my personal analysis of the nature of this new publication, which i thought was factual, because it's a collection of facts that i extracted out of this announcement, which i then used to make my decision about the publication. i've preemptively filed it in into a "do not click" category in my brain.