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Comment by xyst | Hacker News Reader

Seems like “gaming journalism” has been replaced by independent journalists or random social media “influencers”. Mostly the latter.

Gaming mags like Game Informer used to be the premier source of gaming industry news - exclusive interviews with publishers and studios, and game reviews. The reception of these quality articles largely determined the success of games.

But now? Just buy off a few “influencers” with significant following, have them play through the happy path, review, edit and approve videos for positive vibes.

Formula for success. No need to push out quality anymore. Keep milking the cash cow game series.

Very hard to find a good game these days. Have to sift through at least a dozen of shit games in the marketplace before settling on something half decent.

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All those game mags in the 90's were riddled with ads. Plus I remember renting NES games from Blockbuster and other video game rental stores. 12:1 shit ratio was true then.

Still, I think Game Informer was one of the better magazines, along with Video Games and Computer Entertainment.

But the demise of print-based anything for games was rather obvious once broadband Internet became ubiquitous and online gaming became a real thing. I haven't touched a magazine let alone a video game magazine in over a decade. Doesn't mean they're not cool to have, or don't perform a valuable function, but I'm surprised it lasted this long.

Just to confirm, I have strongly nostalgic memories of gaming magazines from the 90s, and recently decided to bring my 8 year old son to the biggest international magazine shop in my northern European city in hopes of giving him a taste of the joy they brought me. But the selection these days is simply garbage. Only a couple of gaming magazines remain and they were very gimmicky with little journalism or substance.

I was subscribed to a (physical) game magazine until a few months ago though. And I stopped more because I didn’t actually have time to read them.

The reviews there were actually trustworthy, so if they gave the game a decent score I’d know that it’d be an objectively good game (even if that particular game would be a bad match for me)

Decent review score actually meant something back then. Nowadays, a generic game with an empty story and hollow characters can get a 9/10.

There is yet to be an A24 equivalent for gaming. And I’m not sure there ever could be.

> No need to push out quality anymore

At some point in my life I started watching people play games on YouTube far more than I play games myself. There are a handful of channels I follow where the creator (influencer?) plays a wide variety of new games completely uncut. Very often, for a single game there are 100+ 30 minute videos of the entire game.

I find this kind of deep-dive into the game to be invaluable. Good creators/influencers make it abundantly clear when they are taking a sponsorship. It is also usually clear when a sponsored game gets 4 videos (total of 2 hours of content) how the creator feels, even if they don't explicitly criticize the game. Although, the better creators will offer unbiased opinions even on sponsored content.

When I compare this to the vast majority of gaming "journalism" that I grew up with, I am more than happy with the new status quo.

Just out of curiosity about the gaming journalism you are talking about, what gaming era did you grow up in? For instance, for me it was the mid 90s to early 2000s, the days of the demo cds, etc. Somehow the whole watching other people play games movement missed me, not saying that's good or bad, maybe its just an artifact of my own life and has little to do with my generation in general.

I grew up with magazines (and demo CDs) before the Internet. I worked for a while in the game industry, so I've always kept up with it.

I just don't have time to play another 100+ hour RPG or slog my way through a FromSoftware game, but I do want to keep tabs on what is being done. Sampling 5 or 6 hours of the 100 hours of gameplay for games I know I am unlikely to purchase was a compromise. Then it became a habit. I now definitely spend more time watching people play new release games than watching Netflix, etc.

And this habit has resulted in me buying and enjoying games I never would have found otherwise.

Your mention of demo CDs just made me extremely nostalgic for the days where I played Star Wars: Rebel Assault, loaded from a CD-ROM in a single-speed Mitsumi drive. The loading times were probably atrocious but the graphics were cool…

I’m into it from like an eSports perspective, but I will say that streamed gameplay is a pretty good preview indicator for games that don’t have demos. Streamers can be biased, but there are fundamental things they cannot fake, like say how pleasant the UX is.

Demos are limited in that often they’re a short snippet of game and may not be indicative of the whole thing.

>Good creators/influencers make it abundantly clear when they are taking a sponsorship

The issues aren't sponsorships which are always obvious, it's that content creators are by the very nature of their business model completely audience captured. They don't review things that aren't going to get them clicks on their channels, and if they do they're unlikely to give a truly controversial opinion that conflicts with the views of their audience or sours the relationships with a publisher.

That is the real value of journalism, gaming or otherwise. There's a firewall between the audience and the writer and there's institutional power that gives writers independence. Content creators are, the overwhelming amount of the time, just an amplified version of their median audience member which is why companies love them much more than journalists, and it also means there's zero signal in what they say.

I think you may be underestimating the degree to which reviewers were captured by the publishers. It was a pretty big meme back in the day, where AAA titles pretty much always got a 7 or more. The incentive back in the days of magazines was early access to games. If your magazine didn't have the newest blockbuster on the cover along with an in-depth review then your magazine wouldn't sell. That meant that you had to have a relationship with the publisher, a relationship that would get chilly if you didn't consistently give the publisher good reviews.

I remember when Kotaku started (long before they were bought out) and they were lauded as being immune to this interference. Same with Giant Bomb, which has now changed hands many times.

I'm not saying the current system is perfect - I'm just saying that my own preference has completely changed. I stopped reading game reviews probably a decade ago and now I have a small selection of creators who have proven themselves to me. They didn't do so by trying to be a YouTube equivalent of game journalism (ala TotalBiscuit or Zero Punctuation) but simply by playing thousands of games. The review is incidental, their primary focus is on playing the game.

The days of listening to the opinion of someone who played the game for 5 hours in a rush to meet a deadline are gone for me. The days of someone shoe-horning reviews into gameplay/sound/ui/audio breakdowns are gone for me. For almost any game I care about there is someone who is just playing it, and I watch them play it, and decide for myself.

Exactly, I remember so many of the mags being hot garbage, and the industry itself would gladly blacklist a journalist that said anything bad about them.

The thing with lets-players and different youtubers is there are a bunch of small time ones that like a particular genre and play things around that. If you don't like the ones you're seeing, search around and you'll typically find a number of different people playing the game and putting up on YT.

Gaming journalism was never good in the first place. People like to dream about some supposed golden age there, but it was always 99% press releases and puff coverage designed to never acknowledge that any game could ever be bad.

"Game doesn't run, and it also killed my cat. 6 out of 10."

I used to write for one of the bigger Danish gaming sites back near 2000. Some of my articles even made it to some of our national news papers which contracted particularly well written reviews back then. One of the first thing I was told by the bosses was that certain games needed a 8-10/10 or they would stop sending us review copies, and that was just how it was. It wasn’t in anyway serious. One of my articles which ended up in Jyllands Posten was for a dogs life or whatever it was called and I had spent maybe 5 minutes playing the game. I think that was the reason my review got so popular, because I covered my ass by being creative writing it from a dogs perspective and basically saying nothing about the actual game. I also once gave temple of elemental evil 8/10 even though it was so horribly bugged that it could barely run solely because I liked Trokia games.

I was a teenager doing it as a side gig for paper route money, so it’s not like my integrity was ever really in it. Nobody reading my reviews knew that, however, I was presented as an adult full time employee by the company. So yes, it was always pretty bad in a lot of places.

Heh, I always thought "There is no way they wrote this article about the actual game, the game didn't work", and I guess it's true!

> Very hard to find a good game these days

Super Mario Wonder, Unicorn Overlord, Elden Ring, Hifi Rush, Monster Hunter World or Rise. Like A Dragon. Cyberpunk 2077.

There are plenty of great games you just need to listen more to the fans (and small youtubers who share your tastes).

Escape from Tarkov is exceptional and was not possible 10-20 years ago

Escape from Tarkov is a dumpster fire of a game, and scav AI is almost as good as the AI in a single-player NovaLogic game back in the early 2000s. There was great potential when I was playing it back in real beta, when the only map was Factory and you kitted your PMC out with weapons still missing receivers because that was all you could get. Streaming, along with incompetent devs desperately trying to avoid conscription, ruined that game,

The biggest problem with EFT, IMO, that also affects other games is that the game needs a constant stream of newbies to act as "content" for the high-tier players and those willing to stream the game.

There's three things that exacerbate this issue:

* Everyone is in the same lobby

You're matched up with players with no regard for skill or gear. If they split the community by some sort of skill measurement, the high-tier players would be stuck in queues waiting for their peers, so that option is probably out. Splitting by gear is possible and worth exploring, IMO. (Imagine a zero-to-hero lobby where everyone starts with a pistol and a can of beef stew.)

* Insurance, post-raid recovery of items

People can get many of their items back when they die during a raid for a relatively small upfront price. They can commit "fraud" by ditching insured items before they die, guaranteeing they can get them back later. This allows high-tier players to preserve more of their high-end loot indefinitely and the fraud part makes it harder for lowbies to get the good stuff earlier. IMO, insurance should be ditched entirely.

* Characters can level up skills, attributes

Like a lot of games, in EFT you can boost your skills and attributes in game. For example, you can make it easier to spot loot and reduce how much water/food you need. Naturally, experienced players will have characters with higher attributes, which tips the balance even more in their favor. I think ditching this would help a lot.

Similarly, characters can gain access to higher tier loot that they can simply purchase in-game. They can buy items lowbies will have basically no chance to ever buy, and because of insurance fraud, may never even be able to loot.

All of this is usually written off as a "skill issue". I concede that my issues are mostly related to skill. But the fact is that different people have different skill limits (and of course time to practice) and adding game mechanics that exacerbate the differences makes the game less fun for newbies -- the very newbies that they need.

A strange jab at avoiding conscription - I’d rather everyone in Russia did that and not gone to that insane war.

As for the game, well that’s a hot take

If you only played in early Factory-only days you probably have seen maybe… 5% of the game?

It’s the deepest and most complex FPS there is mechanics-wise, not to mention the map design is simply above and beyond any other first person GAME, not just shooter. The developers seem to craft enormous multi-level maps inch by inch, with minimal copy-pasting. It’s on the level or better than Red Dead Redemption 2 level design and that’s a multi-billion dollar game.

Not to mention the mechanics that turn any engagement into a 10D chess.

As far as AI, eh, it has improved (you can call the scavs using voicelines and they will reply, and ever eventually command them, so you can have 5 scavs following you around the map reenacting some degenerate version of D&D :) I assume AI will keep improving faster now as they’ve added PVE mode (if that’s your thing).

Ultimately Tarkov is PvP that is unparalleled and the emergent storytelling that comes from encounters with other humans.

If you really haven’t touched in 5(?) years I’d urge you to give it a shot - the new wipe starts Aug 20 (booby traps, Molotovs and burning mechanic, UZI and M60 are coming). I heard it may be the last one wipe before the release - at least the devs started to talk about 1.0 and that the game is close to being ready (I agree actually).

Yea, there are massive piles of good games these days. With that said, there's an even bigger pile of total crap, so it really does take a bit of work to figure out what's good. But the thing is, that information is out there if you spend just a bit of time on YT looking for it.

That and check the demos out. Unicorn Overlord for example released a (massive) demo. In my case though I just listened to a small youtuber who has excellent taste in games... and I thought that it was a better game than he did at first (although he's now also on the 10/10 bandwagon).

The Elder Scrolls Online is awesome as well. Never ending adventure.

> Just buy off a few “influencers” with significant following

If it was that easy there would be no unsuccessful games.

> Very hard to find a good game these days

Hard hard disagree. We're drowning in great games. The 90% of everything is shit rule is the same as it's always been so I'm sympathetic to having to sift through hay but there are more needles than ever before.

A lot of the difficulty finding good games is simple volume. The cost to build a game has come way down from a quarter century ago, and more people than ever who have an idea have fewer gatekeepers than ever putting that idea on your screen.

In many ways this is good (consider Minecraft started as a dream and a very clever price curve). But I think we have passed the event horizon where content comes out faster than it can be consumed.

> Very hard to find a good game these days.

2023 was arguably the best year for gaming since it became completely mainstream with Baldurs Gate 3, Zelda (tears of the kingdom), spider man 2, cyberpunk dlc and more.

You're probably just too active on streaming/YouTube game review sites if you honestly think that.

>No need to push out quality anymore. Keep milking the cash cow game series.

The opposite is happening which is the scale, detail and complexity of these games have instead dramatically increased resulting in much larger teams and longer development times. The sequel to Breath of the Wild (one of the best selling games which has no online transactions to milk) took 6 years to develop. We still don't have a new 3D Mario game since 2017 but is supposedly in development.

I think this is out of touch with reality. Nobody is "buying off" influencers (except for scummy gatcha games). And companies are still making quality games. I think what happened is gaming companies started targeting younger audiences. If you grew up playing Doom II or Quake you probably won't want to re-experience new games that are made for kids. You want games made for you, in your 30s or whatever. But they don't exist, or if they do, they're poorly made.

> The reception of these quality articles largely determined the success of games.

Sure it's marketing but I don't think Game informer held any special sway that any other review didn't.

Can you list an example where a review significantly changed a games reception?

As someone who mostly plays (J)RPG's nowadays, I have to say that there never was a better time for the genre. So many great new stuff and ideas, but also some incredible remakes that came out in the last few years.

Game journalism was literal ads/dogshit. I used to buy them a lot for the free games included as kid but the reviews were laughably bad even at a time when there wasn’t much of this content online available.

Now you have excellent reviews by real people actually playing the game instead of some „journalist“ pretending to.

Good riddance, you won’t be missed game journalism

Play Elden Ring

Elden Ring is sloppy. Play Sekiro

Those influencers are for sale but they're still more reputable than the traditional media. For the most part they're not very good at faking enthusiasm for a bad game because they betray more genuine emotion in the video format they use, vs text-based mediums where it's trivial to lie with a straight face.

No they aren't more reputable, they're cheaper and unfortunately have greater impact. A streamer playing a game to their 10k audience, despite the game being shit, will still result in guaranteed sales in a way that makes full blown marketing campaigns in traditional media pale in comparison.

It literally doesn't matter how good or bad they are at acting, all that matters is the game gets coverage on their channel, that's exactly what the campaigns are paying them thousands for. Yes, thousands.

Reputable was the wrong word; the point is it's easier to tell when they're lying because their face is on camera. Written reviews don't have that.

I can tell if a game is good or not by watching people play it. I haven't been duped yet. It's always obvious when the game is a stinker and the person playing it is straining to look like they're having fun.

Influencers is such a better system. I think two things sealed the fate of gaming journalists: (1) the Internet killed journalism revenues, and (2) the Internet showed gaming journalists what their fans are really like. A lot of them couldn't handle the double whammy and spent their twilight years using all their power and influence to destroy their readership, sort of like how Hitler tried to destroy Germany on the way out. I wouldn't call that quality and I doubt anyone misses them.

In this analogy, game journalists are your Hitler equivalent? I guess there's an epistemic closure where it certainly wasn't The Gamers who decided to have a pretty massive case of "any woman in gamedev must be a slut and feminists are destroying video games" for half a decade, but that closure has little bearing on reality.

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