What has happened to gaming journalism and the games industry in general?

I have noticed a change in the way games and gaming news is reported on over the last few years. I find many of the articles and reports need to be catchy or create buzz. Now I realise that has much to do with us as games news consumers and their need to ensnare and retain us and our fickle attention span, as it does with the basic tenant of how the internet as a whole functions. There is, of course, a need for the relevant entities to ensure there is income available, and the journalists (or in many cases talking heads) are paid. But essentially, by saying everything I am saying, I am flogging a dead horse or at the very least stating the bleeding obvious. Almost everyone who consumes gaming content knows this as is evident in the comments section of every article or review.

I follow many gaming sites and podcasts. I am finding more and more that I am wanting to shout at whoever is presenting the relevant bit of information I am currently consuming that they are essentially wrong or at the very least are not being as factual as they could be. This may be due to my advancing age and the barely held in check need I have to yell at people to ‘Get off my lawn!” I have also seen more and more situations where people I once looked to for detailed factual information are themselves falling into this trap.

A good example of this recently, is a podcast I follow discussing the new Xbox Ally handheld device. They flip flopped between discussing the device and it’s technical specs, to deriding it as they did not understand the need for the device, to going down the well worn road of Xbox not having a clear idea of what they want to be, to saying this is Xbox’s last chance saloon for consoles (ignoring that Sarah Bond has stated they do not intend to stop making consoles), to then saying that the device could be successful for an intended audience. I feel that this device is what I, as a PC gamer, was asking for years ago. I thought to myself 10yrs ago that Xbox is in the perfect position to do this as they already had Windows operating system and that it just needed some TLC and modification to remove the usual Windows bloat and make it more accessible and user friendly. I always enjoyed the idea of a handheld device (the DS, 3DS and GameBoy and so on) and longed for a device for me to play my PC games on. Enter the Switch. I thought the Switch was going to be the device I wanted. Spoilers, it wasn’t. I have never been a big Nintendo fan as their games are not the type of games I play. There is nothing wrong with Zelda, Pokémon, Mario and Co, but they were never my proverbial cup of tea. But the concept of the handheld device that I wanted was out there. And apparently, Gabe Newell thought so too, because a few years later they announced the Steam Deck. This was obviously a day one purchase for me and one I remain happy with. Since then, there has been a plethora of devices enter the market all with their own strengths and weaknesses.

During the conversation on the podcast, they stated that the Steam Deck did not sell well. This immediately made me think, based on what, or more importantly who’s, metric? As far as I have seen Valve has been over the moon by the sales numbers. Yes it is not the 30Mil of Xbox Series or 80Mil of PlayStation 5 or the astonishing 190Mil of the first Switch, but was that ever Valves aim? I feel the device performed as Valve intended, or quite frankly, beyond their expectations. There are issues with the device. Linux is not overly user friendly and harkens back the old days of PC gaming where you needed to be neck deep into PCs to achieve simple fixes or changes. Not all games work on Linux and need various layers to make them playable (Valve and the community have done an incredible job just to make this work beyond the normal Linux experience). It isn’t as streamlined as Windows. I know regular Linux users will say it is easy to use and has far more adaptability and configurability than Windows ever will be due to its user generated content, but for the average Joe, they just want to plug and play to varying degrees. But the device is a great device to play your games on the go, and more importantlt for me the device I had been looking for. Mostly.

But overall, the discussion of this is a well-trodden, and what I feel is a safe, discussion of the zeitgeist around the console war. I will re-stress here that I am a PC gamer. The console war is of no consequence to me. But I have noticed there is this, and I don’t want to call it a bias, but a certain conversational refrain when discussing Xbox and PlayStation. I feel this has organically grown from the console war and the fact that PlayStation has for the better part of the time been the dominant console. This leads to majority of the fan bases being PlayStation fans and, by extension they then become the vocal majority. Pc gaming and Nintendo have effectively lived in a little bubble of their own and have been immune from this for a while. The people in this podcast, although having worked in games journalism for years, discuss dates based on what PS era the game came out.

I highlight this to show that even when discussing a new device, it has to have a tilt to it and I do not think this is intentional, but rather an organic change based on the fact PlayStation has had the lion share of games and coverage for years and there is a well-deserved connection to PlayStation and the media based purely on the quality of their consoles and games over the years. The gaming space is changing and it is a rapid, seismic change and many people don’t really know how to deal with it. The ways to make money in this industry is either making a games as a service game that breaks through, creating a AAA killer game like GTA or smaller bets that may or may not pay off. Corncord was a flop to put it mildly, but PlayStation is still continuing on. Herman Hulst has stated that they need to learn to fail early and fail cheaply rather than stopping liver service all together. I think this is what all companies are doing, hence the layoffs.

What I feel is never said when people are discussing CEOs and their decisions is the fact that they have all the data. They know what their gaming audience, and quite frankly everyone else’s audience, is playing at any time. They have more data than we can ever gain and by proxy they know what gamers want. It may not be what we capital G Gamers want but what the vast majority of gamers want. There is a reason why Call of Duty sells gangbusters every year. There is a reason why NBA2K and all the other services make so much money. We don’t need to like it, but facts are facts. We praise Expedition 33 for its rich story world, deep characters and its sales. We praise Silksong for its art style, direction and its sales. We praise Baldur’s Gate for it’s creativity and point to its sales but they pale in comparison to the money made by COD, GTA, the sports games, Fortnite and so on. This is what the CEOs aim see and therefore what they aim at.

I sent an email to this podcast which was more of a rant than a direct criticism of them directly. In it I stated that I found the negativity in gaming conversations was contrary to the number of amazing things that we currently have in gaming in general. There is plenty of negativity to be sure but the number of incredible and creative games that have released in the last few years would blow my 6yr old brain when I played my Donkey Kong Jnr console I received for my birthday 40 odd years ago. As a side note I have no idea how my parents managed to pay their mortgage and feed the family with the number of C batteries I went through playing that thing. As any parent knows those cost a fortune to replace!

One of the biggest changes I have noticed in gaming is the idea that a 5\10 or 7\10 game is rubbish. Unless a game scores a 9\10 or perfect 10\10 it is not worth our time or energy. Again, this is an obvious thing to many who consume gaming content and has an obvious explanation in the fact that there are just too many games to play and limited time to play them. Mix that in with the increase of people playing time sucking games as a service games, as shown by Mat Piscatella with his weekly report of Player engagement numbers on all platforms. I would be remiss in not mentioning that you need to add the increase in the number of players in general playing games on any system. There is also the metaverse style systems (like Roblox and Fortnite) to mention as well as they not only suck time but add ideas that others have devised to their system (Roblox via user generated content) and therefore remove the need to play the original game. My son and daughter, as many other gamers lament their kids doing, play Roblox religiously. My son is often aware of the original game that the Roblox game he is playing mimics (or blatantly rips off), but Roblox is where his friends are and is of course free. Why would he play the original if he needs to buy it? He has, in his defence, recently stated playing more games outside of Roblox such as Teraria, Ultrakill and Deltarune (he loved Undertale, a game I could never get into.) But for most of his friends, Roblox is where they play games. 

This is overall the state we find the gaming industry in. We are in, as they say, the best of times and the worst of times. I think there is more choice than ever before. There is a game if not three for everyone at any given time. 18 639 games released on Steam in 2024, and 13 322 games released so far this year (on the 9\9\2025). This is just Steam where no Nintendo, new PlayStation or mobile games are. These numbers are up from 14K in 2023 and 12K in 2022. The industry is saturated. I realise that many of these games are shovelware, but of the top 10 top reviewed games on Steam 5 are free games with over 90% review score. Claire Expedition 33 is 10th on the list a game many claim to be the game of the year (I include myself in this number). StemDB has a wealth of information when looking at data available if you are willing to take a look.

This started as a thought dump and dissecting my issues with games journalism and conversations around games in general, hence the incoherent rambling, and inevitably morphed into a discussion on the games industry itself. The two are so intertwined I feel that is where the lines get blurred. I have always seen games as escapism and a way to relax, even when the game in and of itself is not necessarily relaxing. I enjoy speaking about games and feel joy speaking about games I don’t even necessarily enjoy. I have never liked exclusivity (not a huge surprise coming from a PC gamer) and wish people could see the benefit of more people being able to play that game that you really love.

A really good example of this is Helldiver II coming to Xbox. Although there were many people who bemoaned this coming to Xbox and others using it as a weapon for console waring, most just welcomed their new Helldivers in to die along side them and partake in the mirth and absurd stories that that game creates. The release of Elden Ring brought another example of people being ecstatic about new people coming to the game genre they love. When the usual ‘get gud’ brigade came out to play and troll new players there was overwhelming support and push back from the community as a whole against this kind of rhetoric.

I feel when it comes to gaming conversation, we seem to have lost the joy we get from gaming. Either that or people who enjoy games are just playing games and not interacting online or in the gaming space in general. I want gaming journalism to bring back the joy to gaming news. There will always be bad news in gaming. The shuttering of studios, cancelation of games and the loss of developer jobs are inexcusable even if they are predictable and inevitable. The shuttering of Tango Gameworks and the refusal to create Hi-Fi Rush 2 is still one of the most baffling things I have ever witnessed in my life. But this year alone we have had a plethora of games that are just outstanding and anyone trying to predict game of the year (a pointless award I may write about at some point) is wasting their time.

Overall I think that gaming is still an amazing hobby and as someone who grew up in a world where gaming was not cool, I think there is a lot of hope. We need to bring back joy to gaming and at the same time make sure we call out behaviour in the industry that is ignoring what destroys that joy. But essentially there is more reason for enjoying and speaking about games then the level of doom and gloom present in the current journalism space.