So everybody on the internet, since that Bethesda review copies thing, has put up their own hot takes on what the future of gaming journalism is.
And let it never be said I’m not a loudmouth with opinions, so here’s mine.
Traditional games journalism sites are done. Finished. They might die out slowly, but they’re done. IGN will probably survive due to sheer size and being ‘THE SITE’, but the others? The others are fucked.
Kotaku is done. Destructoid is done. Polygon is done (except for a couple people, which I’ll get to in a second.)
Reviews, in general, are probably done. They’ll be replaced with video content like early streams/preview vids, if a game is fucked it’ll probably get out through the grapevine of twitter or facebook or other sites everybody uses.
The only sites that are going to survive are sites with relatively few employees that double as personality sites. Sites like Giantbomb and what Vice just launched, Waypoint.
Cause most of these sites? Have too many employees. They’ve had too many for years. Youtube and Twitch came, grew, ate huge chunks of their audience, and they kept the same amount of employees. Adblock came, grew, and ate half their advertising revenue, and they kept the same amount of employees.
It’s why Kotaku can’t pay their contributors a respectable salary and have recently begun replacing their entire staff with previously freelance randos they can abuse and underpay. Cause they have too many people. The idea of a gaming site that puts out a constant stream of content 24/7 is not only outdated, it’s not what people what or need. Information disseminates different on the internet now.
I get a lot of asks that ask ‘where do I go for news?’ and the answer is: I don’t know. Cause I don’t go to any sites specifically for news. I have friends. I have twitter. I have youtube. I have all these other ways of getting info, and if I see people on twitter discussing something I don’t know about, I google it and click the first article from a site I don’t dislike. Most people I know do the same. The idea of someone checking a site for gaming news every day (or, in the desires of Kotaku, multiple times) is no longer realistic.
So they’ll die.
Waypoint and Giantbomb will survive because they produce what people want - video and audio content with funny personalities. (Use quotation marks for Waypoint if you want, there.) Polygon has some funny people but I think the site will die rather than convert into a personality site, because they’d have to fire too many people to make the conversion. God knows they can’t put repellant crazies like Kuchera and Gies on mic (Gies is probably too busy doing coke for that, anyway.)
Youtube got so big cause demand for video/audio went up and demand for writing went down, especially when you can find people just as informed and intelligent (which isn’t a high bar these days, admittedly) on Tumblr and Twitter, and put them on your feed, if you want. There isn’t a place for these sites anymore. Their currently shrinking audience are one-off visitors, or people who visit the site out of habit.
