To think i wanted to become one as a dumb teenager, fucking hell.
So did I. And I still do. Not the click bait shit stirrers like Jason and his two dozen buddies. But something like the old days. Covering games, giving honest reviews, talking to devs, a regular podcast rounding up the news and talking shit. If that's too old fashioned and not viable, something more like YouTubers or the glory days of Giant Bomb.
This is going to seem a bit off topic, but is related. Recently I tried to get back into miniatures wargaming. And it's not going well. Part of that is the Games Workshop I grew up with doesn't exist. Where excited hobbyists play games in the shop and you make new friends and slowly grow your collection of toy soldiers. Now it's just a shop. They don't play games because the logic is if you're not spending money, you're wasting their time, get lost. The nearest "friendly local game store" is the next town over, and even they seem to have stopped playing games for the same reason.
While the logic is sound on it's face, in the long run it damages their sales because if there's nowhere to play, then there's no reason to buy this stuff. I won't be surprised if we see "friendly local game stores" start dying off in the future and nerd stuff become less popular. I hope this doesn't happen, but I won't be surprised if it does. They'll blame the inability to compete with online discounters, or claim that changing tastes and new generations just aren't into traditional games. But if you have a product that relies on meeting other people to enjoy, and you cut off the means of doing that in the name of short term profit, things are going to decline.
Games journalism is much the same. The magazine system worked. TV shows were few in number and often cringe, but the ones that worked were great. Then online happened and things worked well there too. The business model changed to ad supported, and then to crowd funded, but it worked for a long time. It was the erosion of reputation through payola. politics, and clickbait that killed games journalism. I think the old business models could still work. I hear magazines are a dead format but my supermarket and newsagents have loads from sports to gardening to model trains. But somehow gaming is unique?
Now, granted, there's a big issue with making a new gaming website or magazine in current year. AAA slop isn't worth covering. Events like E3 are either dead or overly corporate dross. The age of party e3 are long over.
The coping and seething is off the charts.
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I think an indie game Dev complaining started this?
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I ain't reading/archiving the FAQ
Complaining about SEO has been a thing since the year 2000. Source: Me, training to work in IT at the time. Everybody promised that doing this or that would trick google (and at the time, Yahoo) into putting you to the top of search results. I was always suspicious of such claims, and even if they worked the system would be changed to patch the exploit.
I think an indie game Dev complaining started this?
That's game journo Luke Plunkett. Didn't he get a job at Aftermath? The spite/revenge website after a bunch of journos got shitcanned?