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If your job is to play games for reviews or other journalistic purposes, how much time do you spend playing other titles on your own time?

Essentially professional reviewers are literally the worst situated types around to get the best out of gaming. Gaming isn't passive, there's learning and experience gathering involved which can take significant amounts of time.

 

[Nickolaidas]

Legitimate game reviewers died once gaming became mainstream with the rise of social media.

 

[Aenima]

Most are wanna be writers and the only gig they get where they are paid to write stuff is on videogame sites. They are not journalists and some dont even like gaming that much.

 

[Fbh]

I imagine a big part is that the people who are good at games and have a somewhat engaging way to express themselves probably realized they could be more successful launching their own youtube channel or streaming on Twitch than working for something like IGN or Polygon.
The fact mainstream gaming media also pushes away anyone who doesn't ideologically and politically align with them probably doesn't help either and just shrinks the available talent pool.

Also there's hardly any "journalism" in gaming. 90%+ of what gaming media does is regurgitate press releases.

 

[SEGAvangelist]

They don't play games.

 

[deriks]

Because they're not gamers, just a reporter

Let me put a personal example: I'm a college degree journalist. I was hired on a regional newspaper here in my town first to write on local news. A few months later I asked to change to tech, and then I got in. Everything was fine, doing some games, phones and etc. Someday, the responsible for the politics news was sick, so they just sent me to write the stuff, and I didn't knew shit. I wrote just like a generic news and there was. Nobody complain, but I'm 100% sure that it was crap. A little later, I got invited to a Samsung event, but now I got sick, and they sent a girl that didn't know shit. She wrote a crappy generic thing. That's how it works

I remember also when Abby was hired to GiantBomb. She didn't play fucking Resident Evil 4. She was basically "I like The Sims and Animal Crossing". Dude...

I have to say that they need a "gaming resume" or something. Because I wouldn't hire a person on a gaming news site that never played Doom or Resident Evil. It's the basics of video games

 

[ClanOfNone]

Game 'journalists' are mostly political activists in 2024...

Indeed. They’ll spend maybe a paragraph on actual game mechanics and the rest is usually a soapbox diatribe about representation or other “problematic” elements. I miss the old days of EGM and Gamefan n such.

Thankfully the enthusiasts have flooded YouTube with content. Yeah, a lot of grifters just moved their outrage content to there too, but there are a ton of people producing content, you just gotta find the ones you gel with.
Personally I kinda love the fact that there is a sea of content to choose from, especially all the retro enthusiast stuff. Watched a great vid on Sierra’s Robin Hood game just the other day.