Gaming Journalism Is Lame
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- Опубликовано: 28 сен 2024
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Video Game news can be cool! Or boring! Or lame! Usually it’s pretty lame though! Today I’m gonna speedrun through some of my issues with the gaming news industry, and how gaming journalism isn’t quite as “gaming journalism” as it might seem.
From Xbox to PlayStation, EA to….PlayStation, there’s so many big businesses that seem to have their hands in all the cookie jars.
But not this one.
Not mine.
Unless they wanted to, I mean I’m not against the idea.
Phil Spencer probably still loves me.
I’ll also make fun of Disney a bit, because I feel like it.
Go to ground.news/husk to see all sides of every story. Subscribe through the link to try out their pro plan for less than $1/month or get 30% off their unlimited vantage plan before Nov 10, 2023.
NGL the way ground news is sponsoring so many RUclipsrs is making me mad suspicious. Raid Shadow Legends or Lootcrate type thing. Makes me real suspicious of how they're able to give away this much cash.
I just took a look at that and I found a very high bias, I search for local news and I only found 2 kind of notes: the ones about crimes comited by drug cartels and the ones written by canadian or US persons for topics that only concern to canadians or US persons. Pretty much it's an anglocentric view.
@@sirllamaiii9708 This is exactly my thought. An upstanding, unbiased news site with integrity would NOT be going this hard sponsoring RUclipsrs, ESPECIALLY gaming ones.
I use Ground News everyday and it's helped me avoid bias in what I read quite a bit.
@@ThwipThwipBoom you sound like a robot to be honest
I remember when sports journalism was the laughing stock for journalists
Thanks gaming "journalism"
Only upped by sports analyst
@@Sandman2007hehehehe
I mean, it still kinda is _one of_ the laughing stocks of journalism. All gaming journalists did was give sports journalists company at the bottom of the barrel.
"Real" jornalism speak about boring "facts" (that could be false) following a political agenda and no one won anything with that. Sports journalists speak about World Cup champions, Champions League champions, F1 champions, Super Bowl winners. The day politicians win anything other than jail by being corrupt, or ilegal corruption money, anything that requires real skill, only then the boring journalism will compare to the glorious sport journalism.
What do you mean was
I've always been surprised that gaming journalism is even an industry.
Me too until I realized the sheer amount of people out there who want to be told what to think, whether or not they realize it.
@@GabAssbreaker "no need for any game or music critic"... perhaps no need for them purely from a consumer convenience standpoint, but the value that critics offer goes beyond just "telling people if something is good or bad".
It has it's place, but the incentive structures around it are f*cked, and also it's subject to the same problems as traditional journalism. These two combine to turn most of the industry, especially the more mainstream stuff into turbocancer. Despite that, there are folks doing actual journalism out there instead of polishing AAA knobs. Besides the relatively healthy ecosystem for game reviewing on here and other social media, there's also folks like People Make Games, for example, that actually do proper investigative journo stuff. You just gotta dig for it, same as with regular journalism.
Gaming journalism has its flaws, but game dev is incredibly interesting, and without the journalism we wouldn’t know about why mass layoffs happen, or why a certain game music composer quit, or where he came from. How the programmers are feeling, why they are quitting en-masse, or why game designers are all wishing they work at a certain company. Reviews are only one of the cogs in what I think is a valuable machine
It's just a branch of standard journalism, meaning it was suspectable to the same money insensitives and sensationalism.
Reviews are insentivised to go full speed to maximize attention, as well as being positive to get early release copies to many games.
Opinion pieces that are only meant to grab eyes and attention.
Reducing the coverage of important topics, such as labor issues in game companies, as to not push people away from them.
You know... I'm starting to think that having everything revolve around profit is a bit... not swell.
The cost of living is rising everywhere but wages/salaries are not rising.
So guess what? This is only going to get worse and worse as time goes on as companies and individuals do everything they can no matter how scummy to be able to pay their rent and afford food so they don't starve to death.
Capitalism at it's best...
The next Lenin will be a gamer
I mean, I imagine it’s pretty sweet if you’re the one getting all the profits while remaining blissfully ignorant about the specifics of how that profit is generated
@@ThwipThwipBoomindividuals can't do anything... but a mobilized class can!
I loved how EGM would, before their review section, give a little history on each reviewer that issue and then had three of them review each title for the month. That way, when the two guys who love 3D platformers says Tonic Trouble is amazing and the one guy who hates them says it sucks, it made sense why. It also instilled in me at a young age to actually know who's opinion I am reading, and "IGN GIVING IT A 10/10" means nothing.
Electronic Gaming Monthly even had a drawing about the incestrial relationship with a lot of review publications and product publishers. "SITE SAYS GAME IS 10/10" slapped on the boxart. "GAME OUT NOW" ads slapped all over the website.
Thats a good way to do it indeed!
but would people still talk about this game after month pass? Wouldn't targeted audience of those reviews already decided if they will buy or not buy said game because what people on twitter/reddit and/or youtubers who played those games said?
It's baffling how some people deny that "access journalism" is an oxymoron, and the influence companies have.
@@VikingTeddy History is an interesting subject. How do you know what you're being taught is accurate/inaccurate? You read someone else with contradictory info based on X. But X could also be info that's lacking it's own proper context or was a lie/propaganda that got accepted as fact over time. Basically, you can't got far past your own time period (say your up to your grandparents) and really "know" what's right or not. Essentially, it's a game of broken telephone and at some point you're accepting someone's statements based on faith.
The incentive structure is pretty simple and well laid out here:
1. Reviewers need to get their articles out as fast as possible. This usually means getting access to the product before the general public.
2. If a reviewer gets the access they need and churn out a negative review, the publisher/studio won't give them access in the future, hurting their ability to earn revenue.
3. Therefore, it is always in the best interest of the reviewer to give positive reviews.
In other words, you write positive reviews, you make money. You write negative reviews, you lose money. That's the system. You can disregard advertising dollars spent on banner and video ads, exclusive content, etc. With this alone, the "review" industry is nothing more than an extension of every studio/publisher's marketing arm.
There’s quite literally a very easy solution to this. All gaming companies must mandatorily provide a review copy of their games to established journalists (freelance or corporate), regardless of their opinion. Make a list of reviewers, and if somebody from that list deliberately does not receive said review copy, then he/she/they may publicly denounce their exclusion and/or call upon union reps in general to demand answers/provide consequences to the parties involved.
TLDR gamers need to rise up (and unionise)
@@galvendorondolol why would a studio do that remember they make games to make money they dont care about the art or quality
You described what is sometimes referred to as “access journalism”. I first observed it in my conscience life before the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.
Too many journalists pushed out-near verbatim-White House talking points. Normally there would have been better questions asked at press conferences, more OpEds from both parties questioning the general wisdom of such an undertaking, and public outcry to “send someone else’s kid-not mine.”
Not that time. Even the “left wing media” (who hated the Bush administration) were too chickenshit to come out and say “this is an objectively bad idea written on flimsy pretense that is unlikely to pan out in our favor.”
Is gaming “journalism” to be held to the same standard of importance? No. That would be insane.
Video game publications have *always* been nothing but ads for games. Trust me, dude. I remember reading Nintendo Power magazines in the late 1980s.
“Yar! Thar be nothing but bullshit here, matey!”
@@thewildcardperson boy let me tell you about these beautiful things called unions
I love how it implies that only good reviews get press even though it's a known fact that shit talking a game is always more popular than giving it praise
I love how Husky the Snowman was made to prove a point in the marvel video and now he's officially become a recurring mascot of the channel
All hail husky, may he never melt!
Still better than today's CGI lol. Has more character and heart.
Husky for Smash!
I like how much use he’s getting out of his silly little snowman he modeled
I think that's what most people forget about the news industry in general, not just games and movies: They are in advertising business, and journalism is just a side product.
Byproduct, not side product.
"The Industry"... exactly. I don't know when it happened, but the same people that made Saturday morning cartoons are now Kotaku and MSNBC, FOX and Gamestop. There is still actual good journalism out there, but I'm too busy watching X-Men cartoons in my jammies
I think a large part of the problem, which is also present in regular journalism, is that the current generation of journalists mostly come from homogeneous backgrounds. They all went to the same schools, came from the same demographics, and if they transitioned from another industry prior to doing journo stuff they often come from the same places there too. This basically results in people whose job is dependent on being in-touch with the subject matter just being more in touch with each other than with the field they're reporting on more often than not instead.
Back in the day journalism was more informal (less dependence on accrediting, and degrees to get the job) and folks often came from the areas/fields they reported on. Eg. prior military often became war correspondents, folks with labor union connections reported on labor adjacent stuff, local activists got on the local paper to report on local issues they worked on, etc.
The problem is too many people from homogeneous backgrounds.
In the case of Hunter S. Thompson weird druggie schizos wrote about politics
That not really the big issue, rather it's simply where their money comes from. And that has always been at least somewhat of an issue, except with news up till around the 50's (where news was very dry and generally not self funded). In the past news was written to at least be interesting and within the worldview of their subscriber base. Modern news is meant to generate clicks so more eyeballs see ads. It's a system that's build to appease the payer, and the actual payer has become less and less the consumer.
@@relo999 And modern news expanded to be entire, 24 hour networks. Not enough news (at least that would interest their chosen audience) happens to fill that time so there's lot of people on standby, expert opinion and eyewitness accounts to try and plug the gap.
I like the general premise of this comment, but if there's anything we've learned, it's that activism and journalism do not mix. Activists are the absolute worst at reporting information.
Aside from the last part this can basically apply to all forms of journalism
Chomsky and Herman have entered the chat
no dont be a conspiracy theorizt . this only applies to gaming journaliam. most journalisms is accurate unless it is pushing a narrative like right wing and often centrist journalists
I was thinking the same thing. However, I think a pretty stark difference is gaming/movies don't really have a way to clearly define market segments like The News does. I think the video is wrong that the market segment of gaming consumption is as tiny as he made it out to be. There's definitely an absolutely massive market out there, it's just that gamers don't really care enough about "those people" (the people who don't like the same games as they do) to wall themselves off and thus make themselves a targetable segment.
This is probably for two reasons: First, the games themselves are targeting an audience so targeting a target means you're already talking to a very small (unprofitably low) crowd and the second is that people have no choice but to interact with society yet people don't have to play a game. Not interacting with society isn't just unnatural, it could be deadly. On the other hand, the opportunity cost of not playing a game is practically zero. Because the stakes are so low, there's absolutely no sense of urgency to form a tribe. Without forming a tribe, there's no sense of identity. Without forming a sense of identity, there is no brand to represent that identity.
Like the video said, the closest we have are the various console wars, but that's basically a whole coke vs. pepsi thing. People do take a side, but they do so knowing that it's inconsequential.
@@PoopDog7771-ei8kv🫃🏿🫃🏿🫃🏿
I think the last part applies to. Think about it
I miss the days when we would get demo discs with our gaming magazines. Growing up throughout the 90's & into the Y2k early 2000's was such a unique experience. I'm glad i got to grow up thru that era because nowadays it is so different & i never thought we were going to lose so many aspects that we used to have.. i just assumed things would evolve, improve but weirdly enough things have actively changed for the worse... So ya i miss the days of demo discs with our gaming magazines and so many other things from that era.
Free/shareware Era was balling
I'm still waiting for coconut monkeys coconut island 2 😢
Sega rally championship. Timecop
Yup I also remember getting the GameStop magazines used to collect them
Rose tinted glasses. Newer generations already not missing it. They'll be nostalgic about current social media.
Ahh man, I miss magazines. Fr tho, they maybe only came out once a month but as a kid you bet your behind I'd be pouring over every screen shot, reading every word, pawing at every page in bed at night, or the back of my parents car or with friends during school lunch breaks. I swear the quality of journalism and reviews was so much higher because it cost so much more to produce and distribute and reputation actually mattered, accountability mattered and journalists were hired on the basis of their skills as writers and storytellers, not how many clickbait rageclicks they could generate on TXXTer or FaceMuck.
On my Home Screen, this video appeared directly below an IGN post showing screen caps of random people on Twitter reacting in utter awe of the new episode of Loki... because "journalism"
I have never gotten over that gaming and tech press conferences look and sound like political rallies.
i feel like there’s a reason for it but i’m not sure
Ah, c'mon. Nuremberg didn't have pie charts.
Nice try Husk, I know for a fact that we've never had to live without Funbooks or Tic-Tacs. I love a good work of fantasy imagining what life was like without them tho
I always appreciate a person that can properly use Jonathan Frakes poses to get points across..
Best frame in this video is where you said "best possible setting" for The New Star Wars and its just Lego Yoda on the screen. Absolutely flawless
Man, am I glad that now we have youtubers who review games independently and will never be paid or invited to a press event to promote a product! Right? Right?!
hello mother
Hello father
Hello brother....
Hello grandmother and grandfather
I am at Camp Granada
>Spider-Slop 3 with a Cuban flag in the background, referencing how Insomniac got Cuba and Puerto Rico mixed up
Lmao this guy gets it.
All that you said might be right on the US market but it's not elsewhere. In France we have Canard PC (Duck PC, a joke made from the Canard WC brand of gel for WC) that does in depth articles about the industry, the games, everything related to the media and more (they even have an off-shoot called Canard PC Hardware for, well hardware) and they're completly independant. And guess what, they SURVIVED one of the hardest crysis to hit newspapers in France (Prestalis scandal) and they still operate to this day.
Reprinting press releases doesn't really count as journalism for me
That's most journalism today, sadly. Worked for a couple of PR firms that had press releases in most major publications on a monthly basis
"In the words of Huey Long, 'Every Man a Mega-Man' and 'a DLC in Every Pot'"
I miss the excitement of receiving a brand new gaming magazine each month. Each time it was cram-packed full of news, reviews and info on all upcoming games. I miss level layouts and, of course, demo discs! Oh yeah, and I really, really miss when the industry was creative and driven to push the boundary of what was possible in a game. Nowadays the industry only pushes the boundaries of how broken and incomplete a game can be and see if people will still buy it 😔
No one wants to pay for their journalism anymore, but everyone wants to complain it's gotten crappy... I think one major component of why gaming magazines were better than free gaming journalism websites was that it was a product being sold and that meant it paid a good salary to high quality journalists. They also had to compete with each other so that drove innovation and creativity and better value propositions to consumers. When everything is funded purely off click based advertising then there's obviously *ONLY* the incentive to write what will drive more clicks, not to produce a better quality product than the competition.
@@PostingCringeOnMain Well said! I completely agree with you assessment of the situation 👍
Videogame these days are all bad and only motivated by profit, unlike the past where there were no bad games and nobody cared about money.
@@Paddy656
Facts! Videogame peaked with ET
That's exactly what happened with that Galactic Starcruisers and those influencers that were invited to be there first. You could see how bad it was but they were desperately trying to find anything positive to say.
Professional gaming journalism sucks, because the professional reviews will not end up liking good games. They will like games that are flashy, and easy to get through, because they have to go through so many so quickly.
there's a specific term for the type of journalism you're describing, it's called "yellow-page journalism"
a.k.a: Sensationalist Journalism, Tabloid Jounalism.
Game journalism websites rely on ad revenue from game companies to stay alive - for the most part they basically just **aren't allowed** to give bad scores to games published by their benefactors. Look up the story of Jeff Gerstmann, who was fired for giving a bad review to Kane and Lynch - one of the worst games ever made.
I made this comment at 15 minutes in, so if you go into this in the next 3 minutes, my bad :O
@@ItsNketOr you could delete your comments since they're completely redundant. That would be simpler.
@@notsyzagts7967 While that’s true about most things I say in life, he didn’t bring up Gerstmann’s story or the minimum review rating scandals, so I left them up.
It's crazy to think that only half of earth has never played a video game
Yeah I quit clicking on bait articles back in 2017. I finally realized what I was doing for those websites. Only time i comment on a kotaku, cbr etc is if it’s on my Facebook timeline and I’m usually just trolling while I’m on the shitter!😂
Why do gamers find Gaming Jurnos so lame? *Wind whispers GamerGate*
Someone pointed out. It took like 5 years but Gamergate basically achieved it’s goal, showing people gaming journos sucked.
@@UltimateDarknezz999 That wasn't its goal, lmfao.
Gamergate has had almost zero impact on game journalism, because in practice its only intent was to get cellarian dorks to flip their shit over alt-right conspiracy theories.
Nobody batted an eye at COIs in Nintendo Power, or when EGM gave a 9/10 to Aliens: Colonial Marines. No, the straw that broke the camel's back was Zoe Quinn, and journalists not being misogynist enough.
"Why don't we hear anything about gamergate anymore"
"because they achieved their goal, no one trusts games journalists anymore."
It reminds me of "Manufacturing consent" from Noah Chomskey
It's always been weird. The old magazines would be written by people barely into adulthood working for a pittance. Imagine having to stretch a two-page spread out of a busted Breakout clone. The current sites use a rolodex of faceless freelancers. Below that, you've got influencers who are entirely self-employed and rely upon views and watch time. There's honest in there but there is no editor or a second opinion to at least offer the illusion of checks and balances. And then you've got anyone booted from gaming publications/websites. The patreon mob that just can't quit.
It's an industry that can support a few hundred people globally. The rest are just crabs in a bucket. The only thing that's changed is the sheer, terrifying volume of it.
When I read the news I always read multiple websites takes on it because I feel (and know) I am getting incomplete information without it but it is unfortunate people dont do the same
...and, as good as that might be, Ground News won't cover video games. Just politics.
There's an undercurrent that doesn't get mentioned here, which is that what all the gaming journalists started doing was posting on Twitter, because all the game devs were there. They did not know any better than anyone else at the time that Twitter would go for algorithmic engagement and what that actually meant, but once it did, which was in 2012, one year later there was Politics in Video Games and Ethics in Game Journalism.
The period before that was quite hopeful about what all the new voices found online could do for gaming's conversation, which had been in a stagnant good-old-boys mindset roughly since the time that the market consolidated into a few publicly-traded publishers(basically, the mid 90's). But what jumped ahead of the line in this new era were extremists with career ambitions.
And part of that is also that we're talking about a bunch of Millennials who were not getting anything like what they were promised in the post-08 economy, so they didn't want to go along to get along. The grievances were going to come out somehow and gaming was an easy space to do it.
Gaming isn't unique in this, just maybe more visible. In general, industries do harm because they're there to support the goals of nation-state elites, not the things they say they're about. It's not solved within the politics of the state: the access to financing and legal structures to have a big organization with a large reach derives from partnering up with the state, so everyone on the ground ends up being dependent on doing things that advance someone else's power play. And whether it looks left-flavored or right-flavored, someone is pulling a string. Avoid being part of an industry if you can help it 😂
Yours truly: the Anti-Industry-ist.
I can't believe there's so many people trusting game journalists that it's become an industry.
"Not like Scientific American" The exact same thing, though not as extreme (yet), is happening to Scientific American. They're starting to publish a lot of politically fashionable pseudoscientific nonsense.
The 'editorializing' Gaming Journalism is what is dying... It is easy and simple, they are adding things in that don't need to be there and not actually covering the games and news on the game, they're falling in to the 24/7 issue of having to create news in order to keep 'relevant', see CNN/MSNBC/Fox.
Contrariwise sites like GameFAQs are picking back up in popularity, because they're telling you about the games and moving on.
Careful if you care about ethics in journalism you're really just harassing somone
So it’s all just a game of marketing?
NintendoDisney: Always has been
There’s real gaming journalists such as Karl Jobst that broke the news about the game grading scams and other actual news and there’s just Kotaku claiming “X” is ist/phobic.
I've been following him since the whole Dream thing.
Then you had Sophia Narwitz who broke the news about the ESA leaking everyone's data and "gaming journalism" dogpiled them for reporting on it.
But how els will the drama RUclipsrs get their money.
Gaming probably doesn't really need too much journalism behind it. As you said, it used to be a niche thing with magazines catered exclusively to the niche of the already niche hobby. Gamer mags weren't akin to gossip news and tabloids, it was more related to transportation (cars, buses, trains, boats, planes), fashion, design, manga/anime or any other hobby that never caters to everyone, but instead something that a certain type of intellectual elite wants. Train geeks, industrial design geeks, car people, all of them have (or had) a magazine or book or any sort of e-publication centered in the specific type of car company design house, etc. that the reader wants to see. Manga mags used to cover the recent premieres and manga publications with reviews, pictures and other articles for a broad anime audience while at the same time understanding who that audience is.
Meanwhile, most modern gaming sites (IGN, Kotaku, etc.) try to cater to a lot of kinds of gamers, PC gamers, Play Station gamers, Nintendo Gamers, heck even phone gamers. Needless to say, a lot of these audiences are very different from each other and different regions/markets do not make any favours to the journalists trying to write articles about games and such, since a lot of games aren't distributed equally throughout the world (PS, Steam, PC).
I do believe that this might be the real reason for why modern games journalism is so out of touch as the old school spetialised journalists that wrote only for the niche sector now were put in charge of broader appeal publications, which in turn makes it harder to actually connect to anybody in said niche.
Think of it this way, there are a few cars magazines centered around companies like VW or Nissan, car companies that aren't just huge, but they also have a huge following of owners, fans, and maybe even future buyers. It would be unreasonable to ask those kinds of publications to start creating articles that talk more broadly or even about other car companies without making the old fans and followers feel betrayed or dissatisfied.
Either way, as long as we still have open discussion forums and sites to communicate freely with other gamers in our field, platform, game genre, games and the like, there will not be too much of a need for these sensationalist tabloids passing as gaming sites, as all the information that we can want and get will be available to the community and still be created and maintained by most communities around it.
gaming journalists are the scariest Halloween horror of all.
There's a reason Jason Schreier is doing some truly great investigative journalism into the videogame industry at Bloomberg instead of one of the videogame 'journalism' sites
You mean the guy that withheld information about the sexual harassment going on at Activision Blizzard while shitting on Chris Avollone because he didn't like the guy?
@MarkMann1 Chris avellone was years ago.
Also you can't just make an accusation like that with no proof. It's not hard to see why someone might be cautious when approaching a subject like that
@@MarkMann1 shouldn't you be pissed at the victims for not speaking up rather than some random guy
@@sdfxcvblank5756they did, Jason was protecting Activision. He did the same with the NeoGAF admin.
@@MarkMann1 its one part apathy and one part obligation, and one last part of caution in most states only a victim can bring about charges, secondly lets say he blew the whistle and Activision was able to sweep all the dirt under the rug, they could then sue him for slander and libel... the world is not perfect man
One major advantage to a “public” school system is that it in theory is that it can’t be bought by big business. Yet, there is practically no responsible consumerism taught in schools. From allowing Amazon to slaughter brick and mortar to supporting awful journalism, we have never been taught to shop responsibly. Though we will learn through the consequences of our actions soon enough.
In the 9th year AGG (After GamerGate) I thought this was self-evident but thank you for the explanation, but an upload from you is always a welcome treat.
I think reviews are such a weird thing to count as journalism in the first place. To consider a personal opinion on the quality of a piece of art "news" in any way shape or form is... kind of stupid? This is why I only ever watch youtube videos for reviews, trying to find channels operated by a single person rather than an entire organization like ign. Reviews shouldn't be news, they should be opinionated pieces of discussion. It's just the kind of thing you can't tack any kind of reliability or credibility behind at the risk of making an opinion something grander than it is. Best you can do is find a platformer fan to review a platformer game, and that's what you should do, because anything else feels disingenuous. And it sucks too, because the people who really care about talking about games, the kind of people to make hour long dissections of their favorite games, are the people who are doing the best games coverage on the internet. I don't hate websites like ign and kotaku but I wish their writers were allowed to make something more passionate for this artistic medium rather than simple observation every once in a while, and god forbid the outrageous opinion pieces on things no one really believes.
Where can I find the outro music?
oops I keep forgetting to upload it haha
I'll have it on my Soundcloud by tonight though
on.soundcloud.com/r4a7z
Thank you I really appreciate it@@knowledgehusk
Gaming journalism and video essays both spawned from the same pool, and suffer from the same problem. They aren’t sourced properly, therefore exhibiting no real contextual relevance, and are basically just opinion pieces in a fancy dress
Source: my opinion
I still can’t wait till that new spider slop comes out
Is there a niche for a high quality long form type journalism in gaming? Because I know in sports, sports journalism was pretty much in the same state of shittiniess but The Athletic has managed to pop on to the scene and give actually good content behind a paywall
There's always a niche for good quality journalism if people want to pay for it. The people who complain the most about games journalism, as with a lot of forms of journalism, tend to be the people who would never dream of paying for news. Or people who, God forbid, only ever read things that they found on social media.
Seriously though - have you tried Edge magazine? They lean a bit more towards the technical side of things than some of the other magazines, but their journalism is top quality. It's actually the sister mag to PC Gamer, but a lot more in-depth. Recommend investing in the print version as well if you can, they really know how to make pages beautiful.
"behind a paywall"
If it's not one, it's the other.
A marketer is asked to lie and is rewarded for it. A journalist is asked to tell the truth and is rewarded for lying.
Wanna hear a joke?
Gaming journalism.
hmm, I thought everyone was in it for the demo CD.
An entire video about how shit gaming journalism is and I'm surprised you never mentioned the sheer levels of cronyism and nepotism that drops from every office of the industry. You touched upon the subject but only slightly at the end there. 2014 was 9 years ago but we all learned a lot from that, true colors were shown.
the thumbnail (as of 1/19/2024) looks like something used as an example of surrealism (it does look good but it's really funny)
So, if a bad review can give more clicks but only really happens if they feel like they got a leg up on the studio, no wonder indie games get slammed hard sometimes.
wait so your telling me a number and specific word doesnt mean game good, wow dats crazy
where were you in 2015. we had a whole big thing about this
Does make you wonder who is paying the journalists to smear games that are very popular... like that Monke game.
They get their money from clicks
Yeah. Reviews basically always have been ads. But I’ve never gone to games journalists for reviews. Granted not a lot of games appeal to me these days so I don’t even bother.
Still remember getting Game Informer in the mail every month or whatever, remember learning that StarCraft 2 was in development through the magazine.
Primitive man: the ORIGINAL survival horror players.
Was 'Huey Long' done on purpose? Dude's name was Huey Lewis....and The News
Nothing like the exaggerated swag of a gaming journalist.
I have Heavy Metal Magazines. I used to collage, my whole room was a collage.
Its sortta builds up around your main posters. It would say PANTERA, if I had anything to say about it.
This duramax Ultra Clear tape and some tacks works well. Doesn't take the paint off or leave residue.
I remember, Hit Parader, Revolver, skateboarding, cars. Stuff like that.
micro pictures of weed, when you can see the tricones.
Knowledge husk, are you DJ Gravity Kool-aid?
Same as with cars. Where reviews are mostly enthusiastic presentations. There's informative value in that but info like: same engine as the last one , was known to kinda crap out after 20k miles, might get left out. If you dont do it like that you don't drive it for free.
This is why the completion-ist cries about Nintendo cutting him off from early access
The Blatant Racism of Super Mario
RUclipsrs are lame. You take 15-30 minutes to make some regurgitated, generic statements that would take 1 minute to say if you were to remove the e-begging, the endless overworded preamble, the scatterbrained tangents, the repetitious re-phrasing of statements you do to extend the video length for monetization/algorithm gaming purposes, and the audience fellatio you do for para-social addiction purposes.
Like you were to do something better...
None of these words are in the Bible
It’s almost like everyone and everything is motivated by the Dollar and anything can be bought
And it's almost like everyone wants the USSR to be reanimated.
Is this a problem with just gaming journalism, or journalism in general?
Bro really made 5 minute ad read for a 13 minute video
At this rate, Jimmy from South Park will be proven true, as adverts will be incarnated in tangible people.
I know some game journalists that are pretty good at what they do, but they get most of the revenue through Patreon and RUclips ads, not companies paying for ads at their website. Something funny about them is that they are always shitting on Digimon and SAO games but Bandai keep sending them review copies. They also have mentioned in their podcast that when companies give early review copies the only condition that the companies put for the reviews is to avoid spoilers.
No way. KnowledgeHusk x Whimsu collab
All journalism is propaganda. Sometimes, it is disguised as being unbiased, but it never is. Games journalism is no different. It's sad that we ever thought that games journalism was ever different, especially with so much money involved and thus so much power.
when is the knowledgehusk funkopop coming out
always has been *insert IGN'S godhand vs imagine babiez here* *insert Geoff being fired for not liking kane and lynch*
and if you don't like it they turn gamergate back on and slander you on the news
What you are overlooking is that video games, themselves, are job training for jobs of the future and they may be made obsolete by AI...
Ohh. AI is just a messed over tool.
"Everyone wants to hear when the new GTA 6 is gonna get announced."
Didn't know you were an oracle.
My favourite youtuber told me to
@mauler
I fully agree that wanting to get the scoop is part of the problem. But it isn't the major problem with gaming journalism. Opinions were always the problem. Not just today, where sites are purposefully trying to generate rage with opinions. But even back 25 years ago in the early days of IGN, they would downscore certain games or upscore certain games, just because of the reviewers opinion. Or choose to cover one thing and not cover another. Someone might follow that site for 5, 10 or even 20 years. But eventually, the number of times the "journalist" snubbed their favorite series or had the opposite view of a game that the reader had would accumulate. And once they've reached a certain threshold, the person will leave.
Basically, these sites were going to lose people anyway. They're just speeding up the process with a bunch of extra dumb moves like the format of articles, AI generated headlines, annoying ads, clickbait, rage bait, virtue signaling, insulting the reader, etc. But once they lose too many readers, they will completely change the format of their page and the opinions they spew, call it a "fresh new look", and a bunch of new suckers who agree with those opinions will jump on the site. Rinse and repeat. I remember when GameTrailers.com did this. Literally overnight they went from being a pretty balanced site that covered lots of games no one else would to basically just being a Sony website.
And also, like the video said, reviews are a joke in every way possible. A huge AAA game got a score of 9.0 while a objectively better game in gameplay, visual design and music got a 7.0...because it was a medium budget game without a major marketing push. Wow, how did that happen...
I will miss the Whimsu intro with these...
I feel like evwry review should be a collab between a super fan and newbie/casual. It could provide some interesting dynamics
Surprise Whimsu appearance!
on your discussion of why gaming news outlets make ragebait articles at 11:00
I would agree with you that it's mostly for a survival tactic/doing it because it's what gets clicks, especially comparing the situations when regular news gets shared it's typically not sharing the actual article, and I would add that since it's easier than ever to self-publish, I generally prefer to get that sort of news directly from nintendo directs, or E3 clips I can watch on youtube; why would I view this content second-hand when I can view it first hand? I don't know if all of the people writing for these outlets are actually doing it cynically without actually believing the political opinion pieces they write; i think the incentive to do it is there, but there are enough people who do it on public social media forums like twitter and reddit completely for free that makes me question this. Perhaps the way we talk has been partly influenced by the media writing so many emotionally charged politicised articles, or maybe the successful journalists are among the minority who do actually believe what they write? I always feel that discussing the thought process of large demographics is almost always going to come down to anecdotes though, but I appreciate some of the ways you tried to break down this topic from the perspective of incentives and profit
that cat kinda reminds me of that whimsu guy
Where is the cat's cornrows? Where is the slacker Funko Pop! figurine? Why is there no lego set of whimbot?
R.I.P. Game Informer
Dude Game Journalists just do it for the pay and not play the game.
I still find stupid how that journalist was feeling depressed because of the PS5 and Xbox Series were coming out but in the end he was so sad and depressed about how the world was getting destroyed.
3:07 Girl on the right doing exactly nothing on that phone
On RUclips and social media, it seems there's the opposite bias where the "past of the least resistance" for producing videos are negative reviews on media. In the worst case, "Why gaming isn't fun anymore", "game is buggy/bland" and "media gone woke" reviews. For positive reviews the reviewer need extra effort on research and media knowledge (game design, story, etc.) to defend a positive case.
Tyler, where do you get your ending credits music from? I suspect that you are making it yourself?
11:55 this right here is the problem. People support these bad behaviors by either talking about it and making it this week's relevency or they go out and buy the thing they just complained about. It doesn't matter if they buy it to make fun of it or not because that company just got the profits. It doesn't matter if you go to the article to laugh at it, you just gave them your views. These youtubers even reporting this stuff are part of the problem because they are broadcasting it, thus making it "relevent"...everyone just needs to stop.
10:15 Is your studio in a Zelda dungeon? Their soundscape is leaking
I like the editing style
Elden Ring
Gaming journalist: AAAAAAHHHHH! AAAAAAAAAAAAHHH