Hey everyone, I’ve been gone a rather long time. Yes, I’ve been switching been playing Mortal Kombat and Gears of War 3 Beta. Along with my day job, of course. But during my small hiatus, I’ve been gone just about the period of time that PSN has been down. During this time period, we have seen some great stuff and some not so great stuff. First and foremost in the great stuff has been Portal 2, Mortal Kombat, and the wonderful Mortal Kombat Legacy web series. The bad being just about everything else. From PSN to Brink. But this isn’t a post about current affairs or potential game reviews. I will probably be dropping a new feature called,”My Review in a Minute.” On you guys shortly, these will be the opposite of what I’ve been doing. A couple of sentences on the game and a score from 1-10. Yes, I know, I don’t do review scores. But until I get actual feedback saying that people read the reviews. I’m not going to write them, as they take hours to write.
What I do want to talk about here is how terribly the video game journalism industry has aged these past few years. Everything seems to have fallen apart. From people doing a small independent job to people who have all the money in world to fuel their efforts. I just can’t find anyone to turn to for news, reviews, and good commentary on video games all in one place. Sometimes one or two of those, but not all of them.
I haven’t seen hardly any critical commentary about video games. If there is someone out there who wants to get me a subscription to one of the $50 a year indie magazines that have popped up to prove me wrong on this. Please email me and let me know. Because the normally priced magazines and websites have serious holes in them when in comes to critical commentary. GamePro is still the best magazine in print but they STILL are hit and miss when it comes to critical commentary.
Many sites seem to have conflict of interest issues when getting a review the very first day and time a review can be written and then also having the huge ads for the very same game. Regardless of review score, this kind of thing should have been a thing of past many years ago.
Reviews in general seem to have been cut for space or content. Doing this in the past was either much slighter or done with a more deft hand because sometimes the reviews have been cut SO MUCH that the review score doesn’t make any sense with that review’s text. It seems that some reviews are written by a person who doesn’t necessarily play the type of game they are reviewing normally. Therefore, they sometimes repeat things others have said ad nausea and end up being worthless in the end.
Then I begin to read from different places about how website video game journalists have to wear many hats and work long hours. What is this? Are we trying to get the very worst product from these people. Now, I can understand where all of this terrible work product comes.from. What’s more amazing is that some good product gets out there. It sounds as if the big companies that have constantly been trying to turn their little websites and magazines into content factories have actually succeeded.
To all this I ask, “Why are we here?”
Did we wake up one morning and decide that good enough was enough? That things the mattered yesterday, don’t matter today. Or worse, matter less today? I didn’t lose my interest in the critical when John Davison left GamePro. Or when Games for Windows Magazine shuttered its doors. All the magazines complain about small distribution and losing all their ad dollars to the internet. And websites complain about lack of advertisers and worrying eternally about click per view numbers. So who is crazy and who is just being greedy? I don’t know. But if everyone keeps going as is, it’s very likely that publishers will just start running their own community websites and people will start reading the reviews of other gamers for their info and not worry about the overly formulaic website or magazine du jour.
There are certainly wonderful examples of small sites and publications trying to change the industry’s overall swing. But it seems like the more things change the more things stay the same. The big sites will get bigger and the super small sites will get smaller until they cannot support themselves anymore. With the midsize sites trying to compete but all ways trying to keep themselves out of the small category.
I love video games, and I love talking about video games. I even love watching people play video games. So I really don’t want to see this, the most interesting of professions vanish into some kind of social media soup; where people post their personal game reviews on Facebook. Come on guys, please, I know it’s expensive and sometimes not profitable. But things need to get better before things get much worse.
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