The Essential Malady

Just over two years ago I wrote a diatribe called ‘The Absolute State of Video Games’ that covered various aspects of the gaming industry. One that I covered towards the end was the increasing irrelevance of gaming media as publishers and developers are now able to deal very directly with their customers through websites like YouTube and Twitter among many others. A number of large gaming websites have gone bust over the last decade and the ones that remain increasingly focus on comics, film, television and popular culture and far less exclusively on video games.

There has also been an increase in political/social activism which I would argue really began around 2012 and became very obvious with #GamerGate a few years later. This was initially thought to be clickbait for their dwindling audiences and while this was somewhat true, it was more than this. Seeing articles like, ‘How I learned to embrace Lesbianism playing Sega Bass Fishing on Dreamcast’ certainly provokes curiosity from potential readers but behind this was a concerted effort to converge the medium as well as the industry. These people were all entryist wreckers whether they were conscious of it or not.

The last time I wrote on this subject, a commenter claimed that this was simply the result of more educated writers taking a more critical eye on the industry. This is an absurd claim as most of these articles are more about the writer than the medium as my thankfully fake but all too plausible example above shows. The topic is less video games but the writer’s own interests grafted awkwardly onto video games. These writers mostly do like video games in much the same way as the average person likes watching television. Their main interests lie elsewhere though and this is simply a vehicle to voice them. And one they will (and do), abandon when the first more lucrative opportunity presents itself. The remaining employees that have a genuine interest in the industry have either acquiesced to the changes to their working environment or are no longer part of it. The genuinely in-depth and thoughtful journalism I’ve read has almost been done by freelance writers and rarely the employed staff.

This transition coincided with these website’s articles becoming little more than facsimiles for publisher press releases. Many articles today (do go look for yourself), are simply embedded tweets, YouTube videos or quotes of press releases with a brief editorial to make it appear as more. Worse still, the writers often hide the information from the headline as a flagrant way to maintain web traffic. This practice is so ubiquitous that I am sure parent companies have insisted on it as a way to prevent the continued loss of readers and advertising.

Why not go straight to the source?

If you’re wondering how any of this can be accurate since many of these websites still exist, well this is largely due to the parent companies just mentioned. They can afford to make losses so as to maintain a presence in the industry. There are only a handful of prominent websites that aren’t owned by a much larger parent media company with several more reliable income streams holding the website up. Nearly every major gaming website would go down within a few years of being cast out on their own and many will anyway.

This brings us finally to E3 2021

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