RPGWatch Forums - Players and the Game

Chance's are you have read about corruption and the seedy side of game journalism these last two months. A blog called Wings over Sealand goes into more detail. I thought I would share the link and a few phrases.

Quote:

"Those who have been angry about all this – don’t investigate the people, investigate the system." (Robert Florence, writing on John Walker's blog last week.)

The first quote pretty much sums up the problem the whole system as it is now. The next one shows why the system is the way it is.

Quote:

But why is games journalism now so focused on tightly-managed "news" released by marketing departments in a careful, slow drip?

If you're a website whose revenue is entirely based on pageviews and clicks, you need to spew out content round the clock to survive, and you can't produce that volume of copy just from interesting, informed features and time-consuming in-depth reviews. You need filler, and tons of it, and since you're not going to be able to afford to send staff out to source it for themselves, you need to have it spoon-fed directly from the horse's – well, "mouth" seems a bit too dignified for what we're shovelling here.

Games journalism is terrible because gamers are getting what they're prepared to pay for. As we said a year ago, games journalists are merely serving the people who pay the bills, and that isn't the readers any more, because they demand all their journalism for free. If you're not even prepared to pay peanuts, you're going to get something less than monkeys. Though on the upside, you'll at least get a near-infinite supply of them, prepared to hammer away at their infinite typewriters for the sheer thrill of a review copy and a free t-shirt or two until they either get their own PR job or burn out, to be replaced from a willing cast of millions of fresh faces.

Link-http://wosland.podgamer.com/the-players-and-the-game/