After 5 years in games media, I was laid off from my editorial job at TheGamer. I can’t say it was unexpected; I’ve seen hundreds of colleagues and peers laid off in the post-pandemic years, and I knew the reaper would eventually come knocking.
My dedicated fans (of which there are thousands, I’m sure) may have noticed that I didn’t make any posts expressing interest in new work, or new challenges, or whatever people say on LinkedIn to look appealing to recruiters and/or LLMs. There’s no telling what the future will hold, and I don’t want to appear pessimistic, but I’ve seen incredibly talented and experienced writers go jobless for years.
To put it bluntly, games media is in trouble. The algorithms that kept everyone afloat for years have turned sour, with Google prioritising forum posts and anything that can be easily digested and then regurgitated by Gemini. The numbers are down, the easy wins are fewer, and corporate leadership doesn’t understand how to pivot to survive.
I, like many, pine for a bygone era I didn’t even live through. Back when media had physical form, and writers could pursue interesting topics they were passionate about. When transactions were made before the magazine/newspaper was opened, when not every article had to be geared towards capturing the immediate attention of one’s readership.
No doubt the pioneers of games media had their own struggles; physical publishing isn’t cheap, after all. And yet, anything must be better than the situation today’s generation of writers find themselves in.
They’ve been left to fend for themselves in a hellish attention economy, their subject matter dictated by algorithms and their payment stemming from dubious revenue streams. They’re writing what they have to, not what they want to. To a certain extent, that’s always been true, but now young writers are forced to bastardise their passion, turning something that should be wholly positive into something dirty. They are writing not to inform, but to elicit (often negative) emotions in their readers.
This isn’t the case for everyone. There are outlets doing fantastic work, and in an ethical manner. But, in a world where most major media sites are owned by multi-site parent companies, there is constant pressure to grow, and that isn’t going anywhere.
Capitalism necessitates growth, always. It’s a simple fact of the unfortunate economic system we find ourselves living in. Corporations only understand growth, because negative growth is the antithesis to their existence. When applied to games media, this means ‘number must go up’. The day-to-day becomes about getting the numbers up, at all costs.
The open secret in games media is that Google is not wholly predictable. Any writer will tell you that longshots can pay off, and sure things can and will fail. I’ve worked with several data analysts over the years, and they rarely had any useful advice. You can’t always control the number; that’s just the nature of being beholden to search engines.
The path forward has always been to disentangle from Google; having 80%+ of a business dependent on a company that has different, often conflicting, goals is not a good strategy. This can’t be done all at once, but when sites should have been finding ways to diversify and differentiate, they were instead entrenching themselves further, sacrificing their relationship with their readership to try and ‘game’ Google results.
In the modern media ecosystem, a successful site must be constructed around the personality and knowledge of its writers. Yeah, reporting on the news of the day 38 seconds after it broke on Bloomberg will net you some traffic, but does it build your audience? Not likely, unless the writer is very funny and charming (“He makes reading about layoffs so joyous!”).
What actually builds an audience is accurate, in-depth reporting that transforms the original story; writers need time to demystify current events and consider alternate angles. They also need to be allowed to show off their personalities and their passion through their writing. In an ideal world, someone comes to your site because they enjoy the work of an individual. Better yet, they realise the other writers are personable too, and they grow to love the collective. This is why distinct editorial identity is so important; something that seems lost on multi-site ownership.
The earliest example of this phenomenon for me was reading the work of Christopher Livingston on PC Gamer; I enjoyed his pseudo-roleplay features on Skyrim (I was actually inspired to write a similar article in 2023, one of the first pieces I wrote that I was proud of) and then I became a regular reader of his work, and then of PC Gamer as a whole.
But do you know what kills an audience’s engagement with a writer and a site? Having them write articles designed to mask and/or embellish the truth. You’ve got the click, but you’ve lost the trust. As in life, sites only have their reputations at the end of the day.
So, why is everyone still trying to game Google? It’s because games media is time-poor. Rehashing the news of the day is quick, and you’re guaranteed some traffic because the news cycle is abuzz with new information. A proper, nuanced and informed piece on something takes time, and still isn’t guaranteed to traffic. Not to mention the writer could have regurgitated five more news articles in the time it took them to research a complex topic. This is the reality of many full-time writers; they are being forced to make value judgements about what they report on because they live in fear of being let go for ‘poor’ performance.
In essence, the number must go up now regardless of the long-term consequences for the site. It’s hard to convince a corporation to sacrifice short-term wins for a long-term plan that’s not guaranteed to work because, regardless of how talented a team is, we’re still in a bloated space competing against one another and also creators on alternative platforms like YouTube and TikTok. Establishing an audience is difficult, and today’s writers almost certainly don’t have the runway and freedom they need to make a good go of it.
Instead, these writers have managers, analysts and executives dictating their daily lives despite possessing very little knowledge of what actually works in the digital publishing space. Naturally, despite their personal reputation being at stake, the writer will benefit the least from this arrangement. Those at the top of the ladder will enrich themselves through the hard work and crushed dreams of young writers, who will emerge from the experience tired, pessimistic and with a contentious relationship to the thing they used to love.
Eventually, all value will have been squeezed out of a site, and after everyone is gone, a skeleton crew will remain in place to manage the outlet’s controlled death. The people responsible for the site’s demise will fail upwards, claiming on their résumés that they optimised a struggling business by reducing headcount and bringing the website closer to “sustainability,” before moving on to fire more people in the next dying industry. And so, the wheels of capitalism keep on turning.
As long as there are people who play games, there will be people who want to read about games. The future is likely with independent, audience-funded outlets that aren’t limited by shareholder growth. As much as I think we need mainstream outlets—to act as a Fourth Estate in the industry and to give aspiring writers somewhere to ply their trade—I believe the degradation of editorial independence will slowly chip away at the legacy of these sites.
I’ll end this by saying that if you’ve been laid off from a writing gig over the past few years, I implore you to keep writing and to keep expressing yourself. Whether your work ends up on a personal blog, in a novel or is expressed through alternate media like video, I want to be able to find it. You weren’t laid off because you aren’t good enough; you were laid off because the world isn’t good enough.
Jack Coleman 