gamers rose up
you the gammer can do a better job & make money than jurno hacks.
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The one thing in here I'd agree with Jason on is that IGN or Kotaku or whatever reporting more on indie games or the like won't save them. They could even completely drop the woke shit and actually report honestly about games and gamer interests, and it wouldn't save them. The problem isn't a readership in decline, decline is in the rear view mirror. Shits barren, its gone, when a new game comes out I don't even think of checking IGN or any of the others. I check a few youtube critics and content creators, and I check the steam reviews. By the time I'm checking for IGN's score, its so I can laugh at them based on the proximity of the new games score to Concords perfect 7.
Independent critics and youtubers have access to prerelease copies. They have access to early press events. They have access to insiders and whistleblowers, both real and fake ones. And there's a thousand of them, I can always find one that both aligns with my interests and preferences in the industry, and who played the game in question. Hell, I can find six, and get a composite opinion that avoids the risks of niche ignorance. I can get all the things corpo media used to offer, without having to engage with corporate media now.
And I get that all for free, without being bombarded by advertisements, harassed to pay for a subscription, or getting bait and switch with a salty tirade on modern american politics rather than a review. If I
want that salty tirade, I can go find youtubers who'll do that far better. If I really like someone, you can spend twenty bucks on merch or a patreon, and have easily paid them more than an entire lifetime of advertising revenue from your views would have. IGN can't compete with those economics. Even Jason here would make a killing if he took his actual investigative journalism work indie.
Commercially Driven Gaming Journalism isn't dying, its already dead, as irrelevant as the Farrier. Sure, there's always going to be a few jobs around from the business side (Jason over at Bloomberg, that one guy at Forbes who plays too much Destiny) to inform the investor side of the gaming space about general sentiment if nothing else, but it can't support the cost of an actual corporate overhead and structure. There's now too many good creators, with too low of a bar of entry, to really support anything corporate coming in - A good, average creator can manage a lower middle class income in places that aren't stupid expensive, but that's about it. You can't cover the salaries of middle management, HR, the Finance and Legal department off of 8-12 games journo's who barely cover their own salaries. And you can't scale it to hundreds of journos, there's just not that much gaming news going on at once.
