This is, as many of you know, a subject near and dear to my heart, so it breaks my heart every time I have to write something like this. But it seems that what we think of as “the traditional video games press”, at least in the profitable, commercial sector, is circling the drain.
The latest site to “fall” is Kotaku, a publication which most certainly has had its ups and downs in terms of reputation with different groups over the years, and one which I’m definitely not surprised to see affected by the growing trend for enshittifying everything.
While I had very little time for Kotaku itself, particularly over the course of the last decade or so, it’s still saddening to see once-prominent institutions in the games press landscape gradually sinking into the mire of slop that a significant portion of the Web has been becoming for years now. Let’s ponder the reasons for that a little further.
I saw it coming. The writing was on the wall when I was let go from USgamer back in 2014. While I’m still exceedingly skeptical about the reasons for that — the stated excuse given was that “they wanted an all-American staff”, whereas I actually suspect the editor-in-chief at the time just wanted sycophantic cronies on staff rather than someone who dared to challenge his rather blinkered viewpoints — the things I was tasked with doing prior to my departure gave me a considerable amount of pause.
Two words: “guide content”.
In what I can only presume was an attempt to keep me out of “trouble” by not giving me the time to write things about how Japanese games weren’t all that bad, actually, and that sexually suggestive content perhaps wasn’t going to be the downfall of society and the entire games industry as we know it, I was tasked with taking stuff from the Prima Games site, which was also under the Gamer Network umbrella at the time, rejigging it slightly and republishing it on USgamer.
The reasons for this should be fairly apparent for anyone who understands how today’s Web works: it was all about search engine optimisation, or SEO. The theory was that if you saturate the Internet with coverage of something, you’ll rank highly for when people are searching for that thing, and thus people are more likely to come to your website, thereby making you more ad revenue.
Thus, immediately after the release of games like Watch Dogs and Dark Souls II, I was tasked with churning out “guides” for these games in an attempt to bump USgamer’s SEO rankings for them. The task involved zero creativity or any use of my skills at all, really, since I was, as I say, just tweaking stuff that already existed on Prima Games’ website rather than writing it myself. It was kind of sickening at the time, but things are so much worse now.
Because these days it’s not just about posting one guide for a thing that has recently been released. No, it’s about posting as many guides as possible, with each one preferably covering the most specific (and, in many cases, blindingly obvious) things possible about things that are likely to get the clicks. If you’ve ever searched for help on big games like Zelda or Grand Theft Auto, you’ve probably noticed that you’re very likely to get hyper-specific article results these days — one article per shrine, quest, mission or whatever, instead of one self-contained searchable FAQ.
One of the most egregious examples I found relatively recently was an article called “How to Enable PS5 Game Boost” from Push Square (archive link), the entire substance of which boiled down to “you don’t need to do anything, it’s just on by default”, making it an entirely pointless article — and one with a misleading headline, to boot.
This insidious, creativity-free slop infests the Web of today, not just the games press, as you’ll have doubtless noticed any time you’ve searched for something like what time a livestream starts, or when the release date of something is. Search for something like that, and it’s highly likely you’ll see hundreds of results from press outlets all jostling for position with articles that all say something easily determined from the product in question’s official website, social media or press release.
Then there’s the stuff that just seems pointless, such as sites posting daily Wordle solutions. Even the fucking New York Times does this, and they host the fucking game. Why actually play Wordle when you can just look up the answer on 400 different websites, some of which have nothing to do with the games press? You can maintain your streak, safe in the knowledge that no-one will ever know you did so without using your brain at all. Incidentally, you can also be safe in the knowledge that no-one in their right mind gives a shit about your Wordle streak anyway, so you’re only really cheating yourself.
The biggest concern with all this is how much of this drivel is going to end up “AI” (i.e. ChatGPT) generated, if it isn’t already. One of the reasons Kotaku is in the situation it’s in right now is because the current staff are apparently going to be asked to produce fifty pieces of “guide content” per week, and there’s absolutely no practical way that is possible for a human without some form of automation being involved in the mix — likely combined with the same sort of SEO-baiting hyperspecificity outlined above.
The end result of all this is that games press sites that you could once simply read and enjoy like a magazine become a mess of piecemeal content rather than worthwhile pieces of writing. The joy of reading a favourite author’s regular column or unique perspective on reviews is replaced with slop that might as well have been (and probably has been) produced by a machine.
And the frustrating thing is that while everyone (apart from the money men in charge) appears to understand and recognise that this is shit, no-one is willing to actually resist it. It’s the same reason every platform is adopting “short-form” media — even fucking PornHub is doing it now (NSFW, obviously) — despite it commonly being regarded as lowest common denominator, attention-deficit garbage that is the very worst sort of mindless content the Internet has to offer. People agree it’s shit, and yet they still engage with it.
With this in mind, it’s honestly difficult to know exactly how to resist this sort of thing. For example, stopping reading a site that insists on polluting its quality material with bottom-of-the-barrel SEO slop and telling them why is a pointless endeavour, because the people who make the decisions about that sort of thing don’t care — and they likely feel that the loss of one reader when they’re enjoying the traffic from millions of less net-savvy users with self-diagnosed ADHD doesn’t really matter that much.
Telling sites like YouTube that you don’t want Shorts doesn’t work either, because you can’t turn the fucking things off, only hide them for 30 days at most — and that’s only on their desktop website; on mobile, you’re stuck with them. Likewise, simply refusing to use TikTok doesn’t work either, because of however many billion users the site already has; you’re a drop in the ocean.
That’s the really upsetting thing; the endless enshittification of everything appears to be both inevitable and unavoidable without something truly radical happening… and that doesn’t feel like it’s going to happen at this point, because people are too lazy and complacent.
As someone who once wanted nothing more than to be involved in online media in general and the games press specifically — well, actually print publications, if we’re being strictly accurate about things, but by the time I was of career age those were already on the way out — it saddens me deeply to see what this part of the world has become, both as a reader and as someone who specifically developed his skillset in the hopes of getting involved.
Cover image adapted from a photo by the Video Game History Foundation.
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