Stop me if you've heard this one

I got laid off, like tens of thousands of others have already this year.

Hi, everyone. If you're one of the several dozen people who signed up for this newsletter when I started it back in 2020, you've probably forgotten you did that by now. I disappeared without warning, but I can explain: I got a full-time job. 

For a few years there, I was a news writer—and eventually a senior news writer—for PCGamesN. I left that job in early 2023 to take a job as a senior editor for TapTap, and also took the opportunity to start doing some consulting. 

Then, about two weeks ago, I was abruptly laid off, along with the rest of my team.

A lot more has happened in that time though, and so I find myself back at the starting line of a very different race. There’s been a deadly global pandemic. I got married, then divorced. The tech and gaming industries saw massive gains that were then followed by devastating busts.

Games media has changed, mostly for the worse. The initial wave of pandemic lockdowns led to a huge surge in traffic for most games sites, as people turned to their PCs and consoles to while away the time they suddenly weren’t spending at work or social gatherings. Views poured in, boosting ad revenue, networks bought up indie sites and hired on new staff.

That boom was never going to last, but site owners acted as though the gains they saw in that first year of the pandemic could be treated as a “new normal.” And so when the bottom inevitably fell out - thanks first to an easing of lockdown restrictions and then to Google’s growing disinterest in serving quality search results - it caught owners off-guard. Traffic was drying up rapidly, and they were desperate to get it back. SEO, or search engine optimization, had up to that point been a set of guidelines to use while writing a story; suddenly it took center stage as the only reason to ever write a story.

Suddenly, I was no longer allowed to apply any of my expertise or passion for games when selecting news to cover. Every story I produced had to be about a game on a list of “big” games, games that were proven traffic magnets, and not about a cool, weird little indie project some developer had emailed me about over the weekend. We needed multiple stories every day about Fortnite, Call of Duty, Apex Legends—and it didn’t matter whether anything newsworthy was happening with any of those games. We just needed a lot of stories about them, and we needed them right now.

The mandate to produce that many news stories per day about games that weren’t actually generating that much news created perverse incentives: You had to write something about Call of Duty: Warzone, so it might as well be some nonsense about some streamer drama, or maybe that some player on Reddit was complaining about weapon balance again. Almost none of this was useful information, but it had “Call of Duty” or “Dr. Disrespect” in the headline, and so it would get boosted by Google’s all powerful algorithm.

The algorithm came to replace every reason you might have for writing a story. You didn’t write a story about something because you cared about it, you didn’t write about something because it was really important, and you didn’t write about something because it was good. You only wrote about something if lots of people were searching for it already, and if they were, you were absolutely going to write about it, whether you had anything useful to contribute or not.

Surely, you might think, this Mephistophelian trade-off must have at least brought with it increased profitability, job security, and opportunities for promotion? And the answer is, of course it didn’t. It was a swindle, pure and simple. Google’s rules for pleasing its algorithm are never static, and so it continued to dangle the carrot tantalizingly out of reach as sites flailed and thrashed, trying and failing to hold on to even their pre-pandemic traffic levels. After spending years training sites to jump through its specific hoops in order to appear in its “Top Stories” box (a big traffic driver if you can swing it!) Google announced it would be replacing the links that appeared in that box with an AI-generated summary. Thank you for your service, now go fuck yourselves.

The end result of Google’s monopoly-curious dominance in search and programmatic advertising has been an increasingly desperate pool of games websites chasing after the same traffic by covering the same non-news stories and producing the same granular (“Killers of the Flower Moon post-credits scene”) guides in pretty much exactly the same way. 

It sucks.

Add generative AI tools like ChatGPT to the mix, which can parrot this repetitive, uncreative language at an industrial scale, and you’re left with a pool of gray sludge that stretches out to the horizon in every direction. Sure, maybe there’s good stuff in there somewhere—but it’s not worth the effort it takes to find it.

Unsurprisingly, the rapid erosion of quality and value in the professional games press has cleared space for “influencers” to step into. This is a field that deserves its own separate analysis and faces its own sets of perverse incentives, but the upshot is that they have more or less supplanted the press when it comes to establishing the narratives players follow about games both prior to and following release. You could write a 2,000 word review, but most people are just going to look up the aggregate score on Metacritic and maybe watch a couple treatments by YouTubers they’ve subscribed to.

Have I painted a bleak enough picture yet? Well, how about this: People don’t “go to websites” anymore. Not really, anyway. A succession of social media platforms have effectively trained users to stop seeking out information for themselves and to instead sit at the end of a content conveyor belt that serves up an endless stream of words and images that a computer has determined are statistically likely to hold their attention long enough to make it through a few advertisements. The act of “getting up to date” has gone from an active process to a passive one. The era of the homepage is long gone. 

Meanwhile, the crumbling husks of once-great sites—the ones that are still standing, that is—have been sold off and repackaged as financial assets to people who couldn’t care less about games or what appears on the sites. They are now short-term investments whose only value is in how much blood can be squeezed from them before they’re unable to function anymore. They can also sometimes serve as ballast for when someone wants to load up a bunch of debt and toss it off the side of the corporate ship. Either way, the end result is the same: mass layoffs, often culminating in complete liquidation.

That’s where I find myself after four years of full-time staff work in this field, plus all the time I spent freelancing, interning, and blogging for years before that, always for far less money than I needed to survive. This is a real gut check moment for me: Do I really want to keep fighting this battle, when it’s this difficult to even imagine what “victory” would look like? Do I want to keep trying to work in an industry that’s this hostile to workers? Or writing for an audience that’s become this indifferent to writers?

I suppose that’s what I’ll be figuring out over the coming weeks and (probably) months. Where do I go from here? Quite a few of the editors and writers I’ve worked with over the years have gone on to work for PR firms, and my consulting work has opened up my own interest in the development side. Those are both avenues I plan on exploring as I hunt for work again.

When I got into this field, what I wanted to do was write about the joy found in games for people who find joy in games. Over the past few years, it feels like that’s become almost impossible to do.