Freelance Video Game Journalists Are Propping Up The Industry, And Many Are Being Paid Dogshit In Return
Freelance Video Game Journalists Are Propping Up The Industry, And Many Are Being Paid Dogshit In Return
Paying $250 for 10,000 words is not helping anyone
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I briefly wrote articles for an oldschool PC hardware outlet (HardOCP if anyone remembers)... And I'm surprised any such sites are still alive. Mine shut down, and not because they wanted to.
Why?
Who reads written text over their favorite YouTube personality, or the SEO garbage that pops up first on their search, or first party articles/recs on steam, and so on? No one, except me apparently, as their journalistic integrity aside, I'm way too impatient for youtube videos, and am apparently the only person on the planet that believes influencers as far as I can throw them.
And that was before Discord, Tiktok, and ChatGPT really started eating everything. And before a whole generation barely knew what a website is.
They cited Eurogamer as an offender here, and thats an outstanding/upstanding site. I'm surprised they can even afford to pay that much as a business.
And I'm not sure what anyone is supposed to do about it.
This article was written by Luke Plunkett, who used to work at Kotaku. Some of his past articles include real whiz-bangers like: "Oh No, There Are Women In Battlefield", and "There Is No Saving Cyberpunk 2077." That pretty much tells you everything you need to know.
Sensationalist e-begging for clicks with ragebait articles. Nothing new from a former Kotaku employee.
And our site was like the opposite. Uh... let's just say many Lemmy users wouldn't like its editor, but he did not hold back gut punches, and refused to watch his site turn into a clickbait farm.
Hey man, I was a Hardforum user for as long as I can Remember and Kyle was a straight shooter. Even when he jumped to Intel, nobody gave a second thought about his honesty! The problem is that for every Kyle, we have 10 Ryan Shrouts. He was (unlike kyle) one of these writers that was consistently on a high horse talking down to the peasants. Kyle had a short fuse but you always knew where he was coming from. I don't think lemmy users would dislike Kyle at all.
Off topic: Kyle was one of the few CPU testers besides Ian of Anandtech (much later) that recognized the Utility of running benches at 720p to remove GPU bottlenecks. HardOCP is missed to this day.
Off topic: Kyle was one of the few CPU testers besides Ian of Anandtech (much later) that recognized the Utility of running benches at 720p to remove GPU bottlenecks. HardOCP is missed to this day.
This sounds so logical today it's mind boggling that others didn't come to this conclusion.
the only person on the planet that believes influencers as far as I can throw them.
This phrase doesn't work though. Unless you're some body builder type, and can throw them really really far.
But even that doesn't make sense either. Because if you said
"I only trust this guy 18 feet....."
the other person would say
".............18 feet? What? What does THAT mean????"
And you would say "What??? You think you can throw a man 19 feet??? Ok. Go grab him. Go. Go grab that man, and throw him 19 feet. Show me."
At about this time I think they would just call the cops, assuming you have mental problems, and violent tendancies.
Which to be fair.....yeah. You're over here talking about how far you can pick another man up against their will, and how far you can throw them.
Although, how have we never made that an olympic event? You get a bunch of fat guys in a bar, and some body builder muscleheads, and see who wins. If the fat guy can escape, his time to escape is measured. Fastest fat guy gets the medal. Or, if he gets thrown, farthest throw distance wins the medal.
I'd watch that.
That read exactly as a footnote on a Terry Pratchett book, if you have never read Discworld you should, it has the same sense of humor that you do. For example another popular saying being bastardized:
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a night. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
So you'd say that the answer to "how far can you throw them" and therefore also to "how much do you trust them" would be.... "not at all?"
Maybe they’re tiny and can’t throw them and thus can’t believe them.
Who reads written text over their favorite YouTube personality, or the SEO garbage that pops up first on their search, or first party articles/recs on steam, and so on?
Few layers to that.
SEO still heavily favors sites like IGN and Eurogamer. Most people aren't looking at the by-line to see who actually wrote the article.
The other much more insidious aspect? A lot of the legacy influencer outlets ARE still using contractors.
Remap (formerly Waypoint) is awesome and are generally well regarded for having great rates for both written and on-air content. They are also a very "lean" org consiting of three people but pay Janet Garcia to show up for a podcast every week and even a stream or two a month. Janet is ALSO a "cohort" on MinnMax where it is less clear who are contractors and who are core staff.
And, to clarify, I don't have a (significant) problem with that. It is how you get a broader range of voices out there. But it is still similar to having most of your writing team be contractors (... also, Remap contracts out a decent number of articles).'
But then you look at other outlets. Gamespot spent years HEAVILY dependent on "reaction" content. If you ever watched Jonathan Ferguson talk about guns in video games, that was Dave Jewitt's work. And... they fired Dave two-ish weeks ago. Haven't heard if Jonathan plans to still do reaction content for them but you can bet they can find other contractors (like the douche bag who rants about armor).
And... on the other side of the Fandom family you have Giant Bomb. Who have outright fired two core staff members (Voidburger and Jason Oestreicher) as well as a regular collaborator from Fandom proper (Bayley) all so they could repurpose that funding for contractors. And... at this point there are good arguments that Mike Miniotti is in more content than most of the core staff.
So the influencer based outlets are rapidly doing the same. Some of it is just the necessity of working in a dying industry where funding is mostly dependent on whether fans "vibe" with you. But it is only a matter of time until we have the same content farms. Hell, I want to say that is exactly what Fandom DID until they bought cnet gaming.
Damn I actually like the firearms series, and the "douchebag" who rants about armor. I really like when they have Dave Rawlings (the sword guy) and the armor guy together and they're just needing out over their passions.
Yeah, Rawlings is awesome. I forget if Matt Easton ever did anything for GS or if he only does Insider (and scholagladiatoria) or what.
For me it is mostly that everyone else has fun and does the "Okay, this wouldn't work but it is really cool. It might be inspired by XYZ". Whereas the armor guy just gets incredibly smug and complains that the armor on that Ork isn't historically accurate.
And yeah. Had a bad feeling when they skipped the week after the Fandom layouts were announced. And last week (the ArmA 3 DLC one) has a note from Dave saying that is the final episode because he was fired.
For what its worth, Jonathan and the rest of the Royal Armouries do weekly-ish shows. Less video game oriented but the same gun nerd logic and the discussion of historical context.
Are you sure about Giant Bomb? AFAIK Jess, Jason, and Bailey were all laid off by Fandom. The GB crew even spoke about being caught off-guard both times, and how bad they thought those layoff decisions were.
and Fandom owns and is Giant Bomb.
So yes. Giant Bomb laid off two staff and replaced them with contractors.
The various editors at the blog sites generally don't want to do mass layoffs either. But the end result is the same. People lose their jobs so someone can get paid much less and have no benefits do that job instead.
From the reader's experience, sites like IGN became completely unusable without ad blockers; I still remember the X-Men (2? Origins: Wolverine?) ad where Wolverine slashed through the page in a flash animation that prevented you from clicking on the thing you wanted to read underneath it. Then the information that you wanted could have been communicated in a headline, and it just becomes frustrating. That said, I'll still reviews if they didn't annoy me too much on my way there. I'll still read Schreier when it isn't paywalled. I read NY Times articles like the one they just did on Alexey Pajitnov. Rebekah Valentine and Jordan Middler do great work. In a lot of other cases, opinionated essays on video games benefit greatly from supporting footage in video format, and even without ad blockers, the YouTube experience is far less annoying on average.
The entirety of the internet is unusable without ad blockers.
the YouTube experience is far less annoying on average.
Are you sure about that?
I opened YT links without premium on a new browsers and holy moly! I got 1-3 minute unskippable ads every time.
I immediately clicked them off, of course.
You can tune out and do something passive while the ad plays, and eventually the information you wanted will appear, as opposed to trying desperately to find your article as you scroll and having pop ups and other things interrupt you as you read. Perhaps this is all just a matter of perspective though.
as opposed to trying desperately to find your article as you scroll and having pop ups and other things interrupt you as you read
Joke's on the websites, as I run Cromite, so no pop ups or anything.
...But also, most of the written web is trash now.
:(
only casually read stuff on hardocp around the sandy/ivy bridge generation. but yes a good chunk of it died to video coverage of the content. its why for example Gamers Nexus has the reverse approach where the video content is their main priority (and audience) and they maintain their own website because thats what they wanted to do.
GN is indeed a rare outlier. They're like an oldschool tech site that rose at the exact right time to grow up on YouTube.