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Extremely unsympathetic comment and you have no idea who you’re talking about. You must not have read Gamesindustry.biz or Brendan Sinclair’s work for that matter. Why would you even write this as a response to serious and professional people getting fired?
Maybe those fall onto the "Outside 2-3 people" he mentioned, I'm sure he was not literal on just 2-3 people being good Journalist. But it is true that in Gaming, most of the "Journalist" are just bloggers/streamers(as of lately) that just happened to be early to the party and gathered a following, again, there are exceptions of really good/professional folks that do an awesome job.
This is kind of true of journalism in general. A lot more hobbyists in gaming but, thinning the field will reduce the level of high-level criticism, investigative journalism and analysis of the industry. Especially since layoffs target more experienced journalists meaning we will have far fewer experts and far more bloggers struggling to put out 5 guides a day.
Are those sites shutting down? I thought it was "just" layoffs as opposed to entire websites closing.
I fully expect all of these websites to either turn into mindless drivel or be shutdown entirely within two years.
Post Christopher Dring's coverage of ABK, I don't take GI seriously anymore. And don't read anybody else there. Hell, even sales reporting from him are relatively often not neutral at all. From the public faces, the only one neutral person is probably Matt Piscatella who provides numbers and his opinion does not slant the numbers themselves.
Quite often it is true. Especially when media is desperately afraid to be blacklisted by the platform holder or when they have friends in some studios.
You may not like Chris for whatever reason but he gives far better detail and information than whatever Mat Piscatella does. Just think about it for a second, the reason we know of the debut sales number closely for a lot of games last year is because Dring gives the best information. We know Zelda /Mario Wonder did around 205k / 60K launch weekend at retail in UK, but we have no idea about the debut retail sales in USA. He also gives far better hardware reports monthly than Mat Piscatella.
I agree with alot of what you are saying but I think your messaging about Mat is possibly unfair because he may simply not be allowed to give more information than he does. I don't think Mat would purposely withhold information if he was allowed to. On the other hand, Chris could possibly just have no restrictions on the information he gives.
There are others but your posts started this derail.
Not only that, layoffs like this will only accelerate the death of actual journalism in the industry. It's shitty all around.
Correct. Epic were literally engaged in what was very obvious vertical integration activity, along with dumping piles of money to distort the market in a way that was never sustainable, and if successful would have been a massive rug-pull performed on both customers and developers, and the depth of "analysis" offered was "More competition equals good so lets portray a bunch of people who previously wrote off the PC games market as a bunch of pirates as saviours. I am very smart"
In most cases the media brand is more important than the individual journalists to publishers, so they can fire veteran staff on higher salaries and replace them with entry-level employees, then award themselves bonuses for reducing costs. By the time the brand has been devalued by these actions they'll have moved on to the next carcass.
gamerant.com
