On one of those expansive Saturday mornings only found in childhood, my father led 10-year-old me into a newsagent in Twickenham and invited me to pick out a magazine. I narrowed it to two options. In one hand I held one of those publications that gives you a different bit of a model aircraft carrier each month as a cover mount (the first issue is heavily discounted; you pay to finish the damned thing). In the other: the video game magazine Mean Machines.
I had a Game Boy at the time, that grey Soviet block featuring maroon buttons and a calculator’s LCD screen. So, once I’d waveringly opted for Mean Machines, I was introduced to a bright and alluring multi-format world of Super Nintendos and Sega Mega Drives. It felt as though I had joined a club of older boys. The writers had vibrant personalities and arcane in-jokes, and beneath their reviews, a little cartoonish portrait –a more Beano-like version of the New Yorker’s stately caricatures. Most of all I loved their verdicts on the graphics, the sounds, the “lastability” of games that, frankly, I had no prospect of ever playing. Their words were enough to conjure these little worlds in my mind, and their judgments on them felt reassuringly final, definitive.
A few years later, I picked up a copy of Edge magazine. Leafing through its thick pages I felt the same sense of looking through dark glass into a private member’s club. This venue –and every publication is a venue with its own dress code and decor, its favoured clientele and font-choice aesthetic –felt more like the Garrick than a youth club: deep-chaired, wood-panelled, its resident critics ruthless and assured, unafraid to skewer whatever video game everyone else was busily fawning over. Edge’s writers became my tutors; they helped me develop a sense of taste, to recognise brilliance, and to mourn the distance between intention and attainment. When I was old and brave enough, I began to contribute to Edge, and earned the chance to write about video games for a living or, as my bank manager might put it, a nibble of a living.
Twenty-odd years later, Edge is still around. It is thinner, its paper stock a little cheaper, but the venue still tinkles with the sound of glass and chatter where many of its rivals, both physical and online, now stand ransacked and empty. The past two years have been brutal. In 2022, Edge’s publisher Future Publishing laid off editorial staff despite a 48% growth in revenue. Later that week the Tencent-owned Fanbyte – an outlet well-known for nurturing young talent – made its core editorial team redundant (one team member was on assignment in Tokyo when the email arrived). In January 2023 the Washington Post closed Launcher, its video game vertical that was, by all accounts, both popular and profitable. Two months later, executives at Vice media closed the company’s video game outlet, Waypoint. One of the writers posted the announcement on the site’s own forum with, as he put it, a mixture of “fury and sadness”. The few outlets for writing about video games, both playful and serious, have narrowed to a slither.
Those that remain are imperilled. Late last year, Reedpop, the culture-focused arm of events company Reed Exhibitions, which runs New York Comic Con, announced it was putting its suite of video game publications that include Eurogamer and Rock, Paper, Shotgun, up for sale. The outlets are profitable, apparently, and with what felt like a flash of telly-salesperson’s gleaming dentures, Reedpop described the sale as a “once in a lifetime opportunity”. Still, no buyer has been found – or, at least, revealed.
These redundancies and fire sales are symptomatic of broader trends across print and online journalism, of course, where companies appear more interested in providing short-term dividends to shareholders than building stable and viable publications for the long-term. “The entire journalism industry is now totally dependent on a series of ever-shifting algorithms rewritten weekly behind closed doors by a handful of giant tech companies that do not have anyone’s best interest at heart,” wrote former GameSpot editor Mike Rougeau, in a Twitter thread that appeared like a blast of pent-up steam: “My entire job for years has been a game of whack-a-mole.”
According to the New Statesmen the announcement from Conde Nast that the music website Pitchfork, best-known for its thoughtful long-form album reviews, will be folded into GQ represents a “body blow to music journalism” and signals “the end of an era in music criticism”. Book critics have long understood that theirs is a troubled and precarious niche.
Even when some of these sites were ostensibly healthy, the work was arduous and unrewarding. Last week, the American writer Gita Jackson reminisced about her time working for the popular video game publication Kotaku. The work of the blogger is to be “constantly producing and constantly consuming”, she wrote, of having to author posts during the day, before spending her evenings playing new games to “meet the demands of the Content Machine, which is always hungry and always needs to be fed”. The work was “unbelievably stressful” Jackson wrote. “I cried at my desk about once a week.”
Jackson is one of the co-founders of Aftermath, a “worker-owned, reader-supported news site covering video games” created by former staffers from Vice, Launcher and the Verge. It’s one of several outlets formed by survivors of the wreckage of the last few years’ assault on writing about video games – attempts to create coverage of video games and the people who make and play them in a sustainable way. Others have struck out on their own. Nathan Brown, a former Edge editor, runs his own substantive and successful newsletter, Hit Points. These outlets provide welcome insight from experienced and insightful veterans. But they are, in the main, life-rafts for their founders, not set up to nurture young writers who long to build a career somewhere in the scorched wasteland.
Opportunity is equal to demand, naysayers might counter. Yet, there is still a widespread appetite for proficient writing about video games. As with all media, readers want writers to help them understand the works of fiction they spend their time with, to have critics contextualise video games in the broader tides of culture, and to help them develop a sense of taste and criteria. It is the supporting infrastructure that has collapsed, subject to the Succession-like whims of moneyed owners who, in some cases, have no background in journalism. Soon, it seems, all that will be left are crowd-funded, design-led magazines like A Profound Waste of Time and Lock-On – publications that meet a demand to which the newsstand is no longer fit to cater.
In the past, video game critics and journalists would, when their typically brief careers were over, move into writing for video games, rather than about them. Their efforts would become part of a collaborative enterprise, no longer with an accompanying byline but at least with decent remuneration and job security. That too, however, has become an uncertain pathway to stability. The video game industry has, in 2024, seen almost 6,000 redundancies, including hundreds of editorial roles.
There will always be people who want to read about games, ideally in publications that, like a members’ club, attract like-minded writers and readers. Where, however, those writers will come from, is increasingly unclear – a minor tragedy, in the raging fires of the contemporary world, but a tragedy, nonetheless.
What to play
We’ve been looking for a new multiplayer blast-’em-up since overdosing on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 during the festive break. Enter Hunt: Showdown, a dark, swampy tactical shooter set in the Louisiana bayou, where you play as a bounty hunter stalking monsters while avoiding other players.
The southern gothic setting is beautifully realised and the tense, demanding gameplay requires patience, planning and concentration. Play as a team and you experience gruelling emergent narratives as you work together to take on intimidating boss lairs. The Hunt exists in a crowded market of similar tactical online shooters, including Escape From Tarkov and Hell Let Loose, but it’s certainly holding its own so far.
Available on: PC, PlayStation, Xbox
Estimated playtime: 30+ hours
What to read
David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros Discovery has been talking about his determination to expand the company’s influence in the video game industry. This piece in Variety lays it all out via a grimly compelling smorgasbord of business speak and pretty graphs.
Sony is looking to boost its presence in Africa starting with an investment into Carry1st, a video game studio based in Cape Town, South Africa. Speaking to CNBC, the studio’s CEO Cordel Robbin-Coker said: “As large companies like Sony that have really strong footholds in tier-one and tier-two markets start thinking about where the next billion customers and gamers are going to come from, our pitch is that Africa is a prime market for that.”
The fan-made parody racing game Bloodborne Kart is having to change its name. Sony has been in touch with the makers to request that all mention of FromSoftware’s acclaimed role-playing adventure be removed from the project. This is a common problem with unofficial remakes, updates and spin-offs – ambitious projects involving games such as Resident Evil, Streets of Rage and Team Fortress 2 have all fallen to that most devastating end-of-level boss: legal intervention.
What to click
The joy of CeX: how to spend £10 in the secondhand gaming mega store
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth review – happy yakuza holiday
‘At this point it’s not just a game’: the making of Ukrainian RPG Stalker 2 – during wartime
Question Block
“There have been a lot of classic video game remasters and reimaginings recently, so which three vintage games would you like to see glossily updated for modern players and why?”
I appreciate some remasters of more recent games, such as Bluepoint’s magnificent work on Shadow of the Colossus, and Demons’ Souls. But in most cases, not enough time has passed to make many of these updates meaningful; often the remaster simply feels like the original in our minds’ eye, anyway. The more interesting opportunity is to resurrect some of the first generation of polygonal games. I always loved Sonic Team’s Burning Rangers, in which you play as a team of heroic firefighters rescuing people from flaming buildings. As it was released for the Sega Saturn, a system that sold poorly in the west, regretfully few people played the game. A remaster would enable it to find a significant new audience, and its magnificent premise might inspire a new generation of designers to explore this interesting creative ground.
Another legendary Saturn release is Panzer Dragoon Saga, widely regarded as one of the finest Japanese RPGs yet made. It is a fully 3D project with dynamic aerial combat. The game is notoriously difficult to emulate and, therefore, secondhand copies are expensive on the collector’s market. A remaster would make this wonderful and enduring piece accessible to all. Lastly, the PlayStation arcade driving game Ridge Racer Type IV has one of the most brilliant and striking aesthetics of any video game. Its sunset-bloomed colour schemes, acid jazz and drum‘n’bass soundtrack, and joyous menu design make it an enduring classic. As Fez creator Phil Fish put it on My Perfect Console, the game is an “impeccable video game vibe”. A remaster would surely become a bestseller and introduce a design classic to a new generation.
If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.
