'There Are So Few Of Us Left': Even Full-Time Games Journalists At Big Websites Are Feeling It In 2025
'I give myself 1-3 years before I'm working in PR or Home Depot'
You're viewing a single thread.
The free internet as we’ve known it for the last 20 years is collapsing as the ad market evaporates and corporate media ownership becomes increasingly unhinged in response. As belts tighten and profits dwindle across all media–not just video games–that rising tide could begin claiming more and more sites that even ten years ago would have seemed immortal.
Why is this happening? The post alludes to Google and Meta hogging all the ads somehow, but why would advertising on things resembling traditional media now be worthless? Everyone started using adblockers or is there something else too?
Video game reviewers used to provide a valuable service. Back when all video games were Nintendo expensive, we needed trustworthy reviewers to guide us towards making the correct purchase. Paying the inflation-equivalent of $100+ for a single video game made a single bad purchase really hurt.
Nowadays, people log on Steam and scroll through hundreds of previously purchased (never played) games they picked up for a few dollars each during a Steam holiday sale 3 years ago. They can just click download and start playing anything that tickles their fancy!
Plus I’d also add that many gamers have found games that have enormous replay value (especially multiplayer games like League of Legends or Hearthstone or Fortnite) and they sink thousands upon thousands of hours into that one game.
What room is there for professional game reviewers reviewing new games every week and writing about them? Most gamers seem to have more games than they could ever want, plus single games that could last a lifetime by themselves.
The same could really be said for music reviews. People used to read magazines like Rolling Stone in order to get reviews of the latest songs from the hottest bands. Nowadays people just listen to the music themselves and decide whether or not they like it, no reviewers needed.
Edit: I forgot to mention streamers and lets players. People can watch a lot of these videos by amateur or professional content creators and judge whether or not they like the game based on how it plays. Reading an article, even a very well-written one, pales in comparison to a gameplay video at the job of communicating how a game looks and sounds in motion.
You're also missing a big piece... You can't fucking trust the reviews any more. Steam reviews are great, and game reviewers have been trying to insist "no, this trash game is actually great, don't trust your fellow gamers" for years now
At this point, it's blatantly obvious you can pay for good critic reviews, and there's no walking that back... Especially since there's better, more honest, options
These explanations make sense to me, but they seem to conflict a little with what's being said in the post, where it's implied that game journalism sites get a decent amount of traffic but it isn't worth as much because media business models as a whole are collapsing somehow:
It doesn’t matter how many millions, or even tens of millions of people are reading a website if the means of financially supporting that writing are evaporating.
I think there’s a lot of explanations for the decrease in value of the ads:
I’ve heard YouTube video ads pay a lot less to the creator than they used to. A lot of creators are struggling and feel pressured to release a lot more videos and more consistently. But this can all be measured by view counts where the numbers drop off as engagement disappears.
One of the worst things a YouTube creator can do is completely change the type of videos they make. This often gets people to stop clicking videos and YouTube’s algorithm takes this as a sign to stop recommending that creator, causing their views to drop off a cliff.
I wonder if there’s a similar issue with the ads on game review sites today. I have seen some YouTube video reviews that include a sponsored segment for a game I’d never in a million years consider playing (which has no relevance to the video at hand). Maybe if people are reading reviews the ads aren’t relevant to the games they’re playing so they never bother with them?
It's so crazy to me that ads pay less and subscriptions cost more.
Are these AI bullet points, lmao?
I never use AI. Can’t stand it. Wish it would go away!
I also think it’s completely stupid and overhyped. I took a course in 4th year on building and training neural networks with PyTorch. I know how it all works at an intimate level. It’s not going to lead to a singularity any time soon (as so many people think).
Well, sorry for the accusation. AI usually gives these bullet points when prompted.
A more apt comparison would be with film reviewers. Before the internet, knowing what a movie was about, if you didn't care about spoilers, would require either someone watching and telling you, or reading a piece on a newspaper (or, in some places, watching TV). It's almost the same with "professional" game reviews and how they completely lost space to random dudes on the internet.
Also, watching a video usually feels more like entertainment, whereas reading a review or walkthrough feels more like doing some research.
A lot of content available on the web now is getting scraped by search engines and ai, which provide summaries and results that don’t profit the website that wrote them.