The end of gaming journ*lism

When I was a wee lad, I had a dream that I would one day be a famous writer. Reality set those dreams upon the jagged rocks of life, destroying them completely. Though my novels will not be read by anyone, I figured I could transition into journ*lism. More specifically, gaming journ*lism. I slaved away for years, at first writing for free before eventually making it onto a paid site. I learned a lot there and eventually moved onto other gaming sites where I gained more experience. Today, I have written for plenty of big sites with bylines in most of the popular sites.

I am sad to say my time in the industry has come to an end. I now realize that it is a path that cannot be taken without severe exploitation. Hence I have decided to transition into academia. However, I would like to share a bit about a company I used to work for, GAMURS, and how it is collapsing from the inside-out. What is going on here isn't different from the other gaming site companies such as G/O Media, Static Media, and Valnet. They've all gone down the path of being content mills with little regard for quality or caring about their staff.

The Fall of The Escapist

The Escapist is a popular gaming site that hosted Zero Punctuation, an animated review series that drew in the bulk of the site's traffic. It was hit with layoffs that reached the Editor-in-Chief Nick Calandra who claims he was let go because he failed to meet goals set in place by GAMURS. Upon Nick's termination, 17 staff members left including Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw of Zero Punctuation. The Escapist still exists today, but it is a shell of its former self. Writers such as Brad Lang have left, and it doesn't produce nearly the amount of content it used to. I predict it will be shut down soon.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-escapist-staff-resign-following-termination-of-editor-in-chief-nick-calandra

The Fall of Gaming Journ*lism

So why are these changes happening? AI! GAMURS, like other sites, is pushing for more AI content which is cheaper to create. In 2023, it posted an ad for an AI Editor shortly after mass layoffs, leading to an outcry within GAMURS.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230613212914/https://gamurs.breezy.hr/p/3a291acf07ac-ai-editor

This hasn't been enough to stop the wave, and more layoffs have taken place since. The latest wave took place in July and it triggered several articles being written about it as disgruntled ex-journ*lists spoke to news sites. GAMURS is now focused on beating the Google search algorithm which demands high output. This fell on the writers who could no longer take their time crafting articles and instead had to push themselves to meet ridiculous quotas asking for 3-5 articles daily. Mind you, writers do more than just write. They research, do image editing, and sometimes have to respond to editor requests. Nobody can produce at that level and still be effective. And that there is the reason gaming journ*lism is so shit right now and every site just pumps out guides that take less than an hour to write.

The stringent quotas also make it impossible to spend time with a game before reviewing it, leading to lackluster reviews that fail to go in-depth with any game. If you feel like video game reviews have declined in quality over the years, blame Google. Writers don't have time to play games from start to finish AND write for 8 hours a day. Furthermore, not all days are rife with gaming news. Consequently, writers are forced to shit out """news""" pieces and opinion pieces that's nothing but words for the sake of it with enough SEO tags sprinkled in to please the Google algorithm.

"From what I hear of other sites on the network it was similar", they said. "Our staff writers had to do 85 articles a month, so just over four every work day, and they had traffic goals too, so they were basically encouraged to write about stuff they knew would do well and ignore important stuff like updating older guides, which wouldn't count toward their overall goals."

Another former writer said their quota was "four articles a day". This was "expected across the network for full-time employees, as far I was aware. I know there are bigger quotas at other networks and sites, but I do not care. A quota system never works. It is mandatory crunch that creates a sink or swim environment. Journ*lists should not have to work in such an environment."

"Prior to our acquisition, there was a balance between guides, news stories, and feature pieces", they added. "Under the Gamurs banner, I would say that 95% of articles that went out were guides of this nature. Time and time again, I would see pitches for fun opinion pieces get shot down by the SEO team, with the explanation that 'we won't rank well for that'".

https://aftermath.site/the-gamurs-group-games-journ*lism-escapist-dot-esports

The terminations are brutal and swift, and they come without warning. This happened, for example, with Destructoid's Chris Moyse who has kicked off the site without a day's notice. For those unfamiliar, Destructoid is a popular gaming site that gave rise to a few big names in the industry including Ashly Burch and her Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin'? webseries. Chris was a prominent writer specializing in fighting games and had a Watchya Playin weekly thread that was very popular.

https://www.destructoid.com/whatcha-been-playing-this-week-destructoid-249/

https://x.com/ChrisxMoyse/status/1673367012037345280

It's Joever now. You can't find full-time jobs in gaming journ*lism anymore. It's over for the consumer as well. Everything they consume is going to be written by AI designed to appease search algorithms and maximize SEO. It's a pity, but that's the way it goes.