What shitty state of games journalism?

I'll do my best to answer this from my perspective. A lot of the people who cover gaming news started out as bloggers before getting picked up by websites to write articles for them. The overwhelming majority have no credentials, they are like you and me simply people who love video games. But they've chosen to work for clickbait sites, in a system that is dependent upon specific sources of ad revenue that drive content quality down so fast that articles are based on nothing but speculation, speaking drivel.

There's so much more. Jeff Gerstmann gave Kane & Lynch a 6 back in 2007 and got fired by Gamespot because they ran ads for it on their site.

Driv3r gets solid reviews despite being half finished garbage sparking questions as to their legitimacy.

A Eurogamer Writer lost his job for pointing out how much video game journalism fails in 2012. Here is the piece he wrote about it.

Kotaku had to reform its opinion on journalists supporting individuals through Patreon to which some people pointed out that this only stops the writers financially supporting indies - they still financially support the AAA industry simply because of the structure of the system.

The problem is the situation that leads to these sort of things happening in the first place, it always comes back to where the money comes from - if you pan a game, you risk that won't get pre-release copies for review from that company anymore. They might remove their ads from your site. The journalists are dependent on the publishers in a very unique way.

Superbunnyhop had a reasonable video about journalism ethics around the time this gamergate stuff was peaking (among other shitty things happening in the gaming community) and I really liked his approach.

The editorial writing on these websites has been in a constant decline whereas people are getting far more interested by Lets Plays, Youtubers, Twitch and have found other ways of getting their video game news. This leads to the clickbaity editorial sites to put up articles that they know will cause a ruckus and in the past they've always relied heavily on the fact that they can call gamers and games misogynistic and it will drive traffic to the sites.

There's so much more. In the contract for review-copies of Shadow of Morder, Warner Bros required the reviewers to 'be generally favorable, persuade gamers to purchase the game, have calls to action, may not show bugs or glitches', and just a ridiculous number of commands. If you didn't comply to this stuff, you just didn't get a review copy of the game.

Almost 100% of what you see before a game is released is carefully controlled and marketed PR, actual reviews are embargoed until release and people are pushed towards pre-release with bullshit incentives. Now I know that this complaint is largely on the corporate side of things, but you can see the effect this stuff has on the editorials. Any editorial you see before the release of a game you can expect to involve largely PR-driven content so they just turn into sites that push games, or tear them down all the while no one actually knows what to talk about.

Then we have the fact that a group of editors from these websites decided that the correct response to outrage in the community over the 'cliquish' and 'suspect nature' in which they operate was to declare the death of the gamer identity. All at the same time these places decided to have a culture war with their consumer base. Remember how Kotaku reformed its opinion? Polygon didn't - in their eyes it was okay to monetarily support and editorially support individuals.

The sad state of things is that although most gamers recognize the irrelevance of these editorial pieces and clickbait sites, that's just not the case for the broader internet community or the broader community in general. When the general media picked up what was happening they were fine fitting it within the narrative of misogynistic gamers, and it gives people who like games and games themselves a bad reputation. I can honestly say I believe some of these sites no longer care about the communities that they were founded to be a part of.

As a gamer not fond of GG with friends that are also gamers not fond of GG, we at least don't say "you guys are all mysogynists" because we're gamers too and aren't mysogynistic.

And you'd think that as gamers themselves, these journalists would know not to paint the entire culture with that brush. I'm not fond of some aspects of GG either, but I really think there's a strong point to be made that there are pervasive problems rooted deeply in the way game journalism works. I think it's great that for the most part gamers have moved away from supporting the websites that elevate themselves slightly above us and talk down at us. I think its great that there will always be actual gamers producing actual content and generating actual discussion elsewhere and that these people can be somewhat trusted not because they're shoving an opinion down your throat but because they're just sharing an enjoyment of games.

Lastly, I've been a fan of Extra Creditz for years. This describes what I see happening all the time, everywhere. I believe it adequately sums up the problems faced by gamers particularly as we grow older and the medium grows with us. The problem is that the journalistic side, at least the clickbaity places GG is concerned with, doesn't really seem to care about growing the medium, and is much more concerned with stigmatizing their own community and I think people are sick of that.