Is there any merit to it or is it just more gamer seething?
as far as video game media magazines or websites existing mostly as extra advertising space for big publishers, it’s all true. publishers reward video game magazines that provide good coverage and/or good reviews with insider scoops, access to early review copies, etc… which is an invaluable resource for any news outlet competing with other news outlets. but i think gamers have a diffuse idea of how profit motive works so they tack on whatever ad-hoc theory they can imagine into why IGN is “corrupt” (their words), the most popular just happened to be some baffling story of sexual bartering you happen to know as gamergate.
i think game reviews with a score are a thing of the past though, consumers are too savvy now and either they’ll trust their own instinct or follow individual curators whose opinion they trust before buying a game, so early access is becoming less of a valuable resource, which means some outlets can now start to skirt the line drawn by publishers, which is good and i hope this keeps up.
A complete misunderstanding of the profit incentive does seem to do wacky things to a person’s brain. They end up coming to the conclusion there must be some organized group effort to do things simply out of a desire to make g*mer types miserable.
Also games journalism is broadly three things in one mess: consumer review (does this shit work), art review (plot, design, characters), and people things (actual journalism) - labor rights, rumors, stuff about people (creators) themselves. They really hated last two, if it destroyed precious thing in the first one
Games journalists used to be pretty shitty, like the joke about IGN “worst game ever, 10/10” but they’ve come a long way from what I’ve seen. They seem to be more critical about games and actually touch on relevant shit in society in their reviews now. But the brunt of the hatred journalists get from G*mers is due to gamergate.
I dunno about :reddit-logo: gamers, but I hate them because they too often act as public stenographers for whatever the billionaire publishers state, give them glowing reviews, and never question their awful labor practices and workplace abuses. I also hate them for not taking awful devs and publishers to task for their awful takes, like when the 6 Days in Fallujah devs said the warcrime simulator was not political and they left it at that, or when they interviewed the CoD MW4 devs about what politics the game was advancing and they couldn’t be bothered to press them harder on what they meant by their “apolitical” game. This keeps happening over and over again, and the meain fault is that gamer press doesn’t criticize or analyze the industry’s own practices as a whole instead of focusing on their product output.
There was one instance where the devs of CoD WW2 made the confusing decision to include black Nazi soldiers in the multi-player and when confronted about how bizarre that is, rather than offer a historical explanation or get into the politics of a decision like that, they instead side stepped it entirely and were like “it’s just a game, bro. You can make your own character.” (yes I know there were black German soldiers in the North Africa campaign it was still really weird)
