When did covering games become a side gig for selling them?
Gaming journalism used to be about curiosity. Writers covered games because they were fascinated by them. They wanted to tell stories about how games were made, how studios worked, how systems interacted. They wanted to shine a light on the weird, the broken, the brilliant. Now it’s hard to tell the difference between a news outlet and a sponsored tweet.
Legacy sites like Kotaku, IGN, Polygon, and the rest have gutted themselves trying to keep up with traffic goals and shifting ad budgets. You can still find a well-written feature once in a while, buried under a flood of press releases, reaction posts, and useless listicles. But those features are exceptions. Most of what’s published is forgettable, reheated content. A new trailer. A patch note. A dev tweet repackaged as “news.”
Actual reporting is almost gone. Investigations are rare. Interviews are bland and safe. Reviews are carefully worded to avoid offending anyone. The line between editorial and marketing disappeared a long time ago. These sites aren’t covering the industry. They’re smoothing it over.
And the worst part is they did it to themselves. The audience didn’t ask for this. Readers didn’t say, “please write more SEO junk.” They didn’t beg for another article titled “Top 10 Saddest Endings in Gaming.” The big outlets made those decisions. They leaned into clickbait and sponsor-friendly fluff until the core audience stopped caring.
Now they’re bleeding staff. The same companies that tried to act like media empires are publishing AI-generated reviews and laying off actual writers. And somehow, they still think the problem is the readers.
It’s not.
The problem is they forgot why people read gaming news in the first place. We wanted insight. We wanted critique. We wanted someone to explain how a mechanic worked, or why a studio’s direction changed. We wanted writing that took games seriously without taking itself too seriously. What we got instead was branded content pretending to be editorial.
And it’s not just about fluff content or safe previews. The review system is just as broken. You’ll see a review admit that a game is buggy, unfinished, maybe even poorly optimised and then slap a 10/10 on it anyway. That’s not critique. That’s pandering.
We’re not talking about Assassin’s Creed: Shadows because of some culture war nonsense. The issue here isn’t politics. It’s about trust. If you can acknowledge that a game has serious problems and still give it a perfect score, then what does your rating even mean? You’ve just told your audience that the flaws don’t matter. That objectivity isn’t the goal. That scoring is just guesswork.
You don’t have to hate the game. You don’t even have to say it’s bad. But when you gloss over glaring issues and reward mediocrity with a perfect score, you’re not reviewing. You’re advertising.
The result is a system no one trusts. And they’re right not to.
The good news is that there are still people doing real work. Smaller blogs. YouTubers who don’t read from a script. Podcasts that spend two hours actually discussing mechanics instead of reading from the marketing sheet. Substacks and newsletters written by people who still care. They might not have the reach, but they have the freedom.
And that’s where things are headed. The old outlets are dying, and that’s fine. They had their shot. They could have adapted. They could have doubled down on quality, hired people with actual opinions, cut the brand deals, and rebuilt trust. Instead, they chose to be inoffensive and forgettable.
So let them burn.
Let them get swallowed up by the algorithm while smaller creators rebuild what they abandoned. The audience didn’t go anywhere. The interest in proper games writing never disappeared. It was just ignored by people chasing the wrong numbers.
We don’t need more trailers disguised as news. We don’t need puff pieces on industry trends written by interns. What we need are voices that aren’t afraid to be honest. People who aren’t trying to stay on the publisher’s good side. People who aren’t filtering every thought through a PR lens.
Let the old guard fall apart. Make space for something better.
Who’s actually worth reading these days—and why?
