this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2024
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I briefly wrote articles for an oldschool PC hardware outlet (HardOCP if anyone remembers)... And I'm surprised any such sites are still alive. Mine shut down, and not because they wanted to.
Why?
Who reads written text over their favorite YouTube personality, or the SEO garbage that pops up first on their search, or first party articles/recs on steam, and so on? No one, except me apparently, as their journalistic integrity aside, I'm way too impatient for youtube videos, and am apparently the only person on the planet that believes influencers as far as I can throw them.
And that was before Discord, Tiktok, and ChatGPT really started eating everything. And before a whole generation barely knew what a website is.
They cited Eurogamer as an offender here, and thats an outstanding/upstanding site. I'm surprised they can even afford to pay that much as a business.
And I'm not sure what anyone is supposed to do about it.
Few layers to that.
SEO still heavily favors sites like IGN and Eurogamer. Most people aren't looking at the by-line to see who actually wrote the article.
The other much more insidious aspect? A lot of the legacy influencer outlets ARE still using contractors.
Remap (formerly Waypoint) is awesome and are generally well regarded for having great rates for both written and on-air content. They are also a very "lean" org consiting of three people but pay Janet Garcia to show up for a podcast every week and even a stream or two a month. Janet is ALSO a "cohort" on MinnMax where it is less clear who are contractors and who are core staff.
And, to clarify, I don't have a (significant) problem with that. It is how you get a broader range of voices out there. But it is still similar to having most of your writing team be contractors (... also, Remap contracts out a decent number of articles).'
But then you look at other outlets. Gamespot spent years HEAVILY dependent on "reaction" content. If you ever watched Jonathan Ferguson talk about guns in video games, that was Dave Jewitt's work. And... they fired Dave two-ish weeks ago. Haven't heard if Jonathan plans to still do reaction content for them but you can bet they can find other contractors (like the douche bag who rants about armor).
And... on the other side of the Fandom family you have Giant Bomb. Who have outright fired two core staff members (Voidburger and Jason Oestreicher) as well as a regular collaborator from Fandom proper (Bayley) all so they could repurpose that funding for contractors. And... at this point there are good arguments that Mike Miniotti is in more content than most of the core staff.
So the influencer based outlets are rapidly doing the same. Some of it is just the necessity of working in a dying industry where funding is mostly dependent on whether fans "vibe" with you. But it is only a matter of time until we have the same content farms. Hell, I want to say that is exactly what Fandom DID until they bought cnet gaming.
Damn I actually like the firearms series, and the "douchebag" who rants about armor. I really like when they have Dave Rawlings (the sword guy) and the armor guy together and they're just needing out over their passions.
Yeah, Rawlings is awesome. I forget if Matt Easton ever did anything for GS or if he only does Insider (and scholagladiatoria) or what.
For me it is mostly that everyone else has fun and does the "Okay, this wouldn't work but it is really cool. It might be inspired by XYZ". Whereas the armor guy just gets incredibly smug and complains that the armor on that Ork isn't historically accurate.
And yeah. Had a bad feeling when they skipped the week after the Fandom layouts were announced. And last week (the ArmA 3 DLC one) has a note from Dave saying that is the final episode because he was fired.
For what its worth, Jonathan and the rest of the Royal Armouries do weekly-ish shows. Less video game oriented but the same gun nerd logic and the discussion of historical context.