I think game journalists in general need to learn how to write. The irony of whining about wages for your writing job when you write like a hack anyway.
@@therealMrA The problem is that most of this "journalists" are just activists that think it's the same, they're not trying to review games, they're going at them with their ideology, and then writing a review based on a checkbox list, if the game doesn't check one of those, it's bad, and the company should be targetted by bad press until they bow down and change the game, and if the game check all boxes then they will have only prise for the game. They never cared if the game was good or bad, or it has good gameplay, or an interesting lore/story.
If they were good journalists they wouldn't be in gaming that's their biggest issue they are resentful because they hate their job they wanted to be political activists in some mainstream outlet but they got stuck talking about games they don't like writing for gamers they hate, they are talentless hacks and they attack gamers as a coping mechanism
Also, maybe I'm misremembering, but wasn't she also given backlash because she said "I'm not even bothering with side quests" and such? Or was that someone else? Edit: I was right, same person, but the whole situation wasn't as simple as youtubers made it out to be.
I like JRPGs but I hate the modern punklord aesthetic Persona has. But even then I know thats a my taste thing and not a flaw with the series, journos man, dey stoopit.
That entire review was a fucking mess and honestly just a giant projection. The "offensive depiction of minorities" had to do with the Voodoo Boys, of which there is nothing offensive. Their existence and depiction is with a specific intent surrounding who they are, where they come from, and what they do These people just cant help but to project their internal biases onto others and completely expose themselves for how they truly view the world and the people around them. People arent just people to them, we're all just monoliths to whatever intrinsic physical characteristics we were born with
@@Ghalion666 They see the edgy aesthetic as something immoral and "harmful", that's why it's so important for them to speak out against it and to admonish other people not to indulge in that particular "sin". They're like Christian pastors. It's not just a matter of taste like in your case with Persona.
@@EndThusIAm Must have been someone else. She explicitly stated that she couldn't stop doing side quests because she liked the Delamain side quest so much.
Trust is earned, not given. The balls on that guy. Edit: The Gamer is a fucking trash website, BTW. Ragebait articles like that are their bread & butter where they espouse bad-take opinions then weirdly admit they're not qualified to give them. Don't give them any more attention than they deserve by highlighting another one of their garbage articles.
Yeah that's the ultimate irony. The gamer is the absolute scummiest of the scum, and proves every single day why we should not trust shameless journalists. Clickbait and ragebait is all they do.
The Gamer is also the one who made article complaining about FF16 having no black people. Even after being explained that it's a fantasy medieval setting, they still demand black "representation" in it. Even in their own comment section which is a pure echo chamber of their ideology, the writer of the article actually go out of their way to argue with anyone who think this demand for representation is stupid.
Yeah, I don't read the articles, youtube reviewers for me seem to give more of the background of a game, they look into any odd bugs and such, and you can tell if you think you can trust their opinion more. Also, most the youtubers will be open in saying "I don't like this game because this is a game play that does not work for me but I can see why others would like it" vs "this game play makes it impossible to enjoy the game 1/5 ducks with an f".
I never trust what I hear, and only half of what I see. In my opinion, anyone that has ever trusted a journalist about anything is a _complete_ fool. This opinion was confirmed when modern media corporations admitted to congress that they were "news entertainment" therefore didn't have to be factual.
you know its sad when I was a kid growing up to Nintendo Power and Gamepro magazines I read articles and went wow being a Game reviewer must be one of the coolest jobs in the world! You're getting paid to play and write about video games...fast forward to now and I'm amazed how even knowing how to pick up a controller or turn on the system is considered OPTIONAL skills for today's gaming "journos"
I think the BEST example I can pull from my memory of the absolute insincerity that pollutes modern day gaming "journalism" is the Digital Foundry discussion surrounding Stellar Blade back when it first dropped a showcase trailer. Digital Foundry, more so than ANY OTHER gaming related informer, is very technical and detail savvy when it comes to their overviews, reviews and discussions surrounding games. They sorta have to be when they deep dive into the nitty gritty details of how a game functions and performs showing all sorts of FPS charts and graphs and discussing any of the finer details of performance such as screen tearing, or artifacting or anti aliasing etc. So you can imagine MY SURPRISE when they went on this tangent in the middle of their overview discussion on Stellar Blade about how Eve looks like a child and is wearing clothing they found objectionable and just, it really had NO PLACE in the discussion of how the game was shaping up performance wise. And yet they did it anyways... because this is how they so disingenuously operate in the modern WESTERN gaming sphere. On the surface they portend to provide you with a straight forward service of giving you the low down on news, events and speculations as to how a new game coming out will play or perform. But sprinkled through out said service, are these little turd nuggets of politically driven and biased motivations to crap on or dress down any perceived SLIGHT (imagined or otherwise) to their personal morals, political leanings, values, or world view! As a customer, I gotta say, THATS NOT WHAT IM HERE FOR PEOPLE! Just give me the low down on the game. Check your biases and holier-than-thou puritanical BS at the door. The Christian right had a REAL issue with this back in the 80s and 90s and it DIDNT endear them to nerds and gamers even remotely. Now that the left is seemingly in the same spot with their inability to separate reality from fantasy, we are merely giving them the same treatment as we gave the right all those years ago. They have no leg to stand on, no right to complain. They have become the VERY THING they claim to hate.
Been gaming since the beginning. OG Atari kid. In the last decade, I can't even begin to count how many times I've thought that the current left sounds exactly like the televangelists we made fun of back in the 80's. It's cyclic. Change happens when X amount of the population admits that the summit of Mt. Virtue is made of soft slippery manure.
"A shield of inclusivity that they hold up because the rest of the game is garbage." Cannot be more straightforward or on point than that right there. Whether its games, comics, movies or shows this is the real problem. They use minorities like a human bullet shield to deflect genuine criticism of the quality of the end product. The examples of it not mattering are slowly growing, whether its Cyberpunk 2077, Baldurs Gate or shows like Arcane...the diversity itself isnt the problem. Its when its malicious and false because they chose to use that AS the product instead of creating a good product that happens to have it.
The amount of people hating on media simply bc of “inclusivity” is still insanely annoying. Criticize media on their merits not simply because there’s a pronoun selector in character creation
@@Nicole_whatsgood Its entirely justified though. Why does the extreme end of the alphabet crowd get their desire for representation catered to but no other religion does?
@@Twentyand1no, both extreme sides are equally stupid, just like how both side of the usa centric "cultural" war are idiocy in the extreme, and both "sides" are equally moronic and are even similar to each other.
@Nicole_whatsgood I think it's because it often accompanies a lack of quality these days. It absolutely doesnt make a piece of media bad, but if half if the people you met that wore red shirts were assholes, and wouldn't stop talking about how great their red shirt was, you'd probably look at everyone that wore red a little differently.
No journalists. Your time is done. You ruined it by gaslighting, lying, and pushing your own faults onto your audience, along with a warped worldview and political propaganda. We just wanted good games and fair reviews. How do you mess this up?
"we shouldnt hire gamers, we should hire journalist majors from the most left universities in the country. we should hire fat lesbians that hate gamers and talk down to everyone."
you are addicts and game developers are your dealers. there is no beneficial aspect of the industry. all it does is pervert the minds of overgrown spoiled toddlers into thinking they are more special than they are. and severely impede their capacity for understanding life outside their tiny little spoiled brains.
Game Journalism stopped being for the gamer once the "Gamers are Dead" articles came out a decade ago. I don't need them. In fact none of the games I put most of my hours into are hardly mentioned by game journalists anyways. And yet, I heard about those games, and I play those games. They need me, more than I need them. And the intro to that article shows how tone deaf the journalists are. The issue isn't that you hate video games, or are bad at them. The issue is that they hate their core audience. And the intro shows it.
Give it time. Once they get the attention they're one step closer to shutting down! This song and dance is entertainment at this point, rather than something to be taken seriously. The instant the novelty runs out, apathy kicks in. And once it does, bye bye urnalists~!
To me, the progession is very clear. When UA-cam reviews of video games, along with playthroughs from channels large and small, became a thing, gamers were able to see gamers playing games. They saw someone playing games for the simple reason thay they love to play video games, experiencing the same bugs and issues, laughing at the the same physics glitches in Skyirm, and more; it was something that not only was easy to identify with, but more human and less corporate: A more honest game review. Needless to say, this has become an increasingly large viewership base, with hundreds or thousands of viewers who love a certain game jumping over to watch a stream from someone new who picks it up, ballooning their subscriber numbers overnight. But most importantly, it puts a face, a voice, or simply a "real human" behind those videos and channels, someone who responds to comments or addresses things people say, and with streaming becoming more and more relevant, more and more of the time someone can send a message to the person playing the game and get a response immediately. There's community, humanity, and a general sense of almost family around so many of these channels (consider the one we're on here.) Not so for journalists. At most, they have a photo of them posing in a suit with a stiff smile plastered on their face sitting in a blurry office; at worst, they'll have a pen-name or an alias instead of an actual author's name (having an alias works fine for a streamer or gaming channel because that's a gamer thing, most of us have gamertags, someone from outside doing it feels like mockery to some extent.) If they deign to allow comments on an article, the author never responds to questions or feedback. It's like a mask, impersonal and distant, which you can't identify with nearly as much. To me, it seemed at the time almost the embodiment of that "stop having fun!!!" meme, where the gamers are all in a group together playing and discussing and reviewing games for themselves, and the journalist is outside screaming for attention, irrelevant. The days of outsiders telling us how to play games, or how to perceive games, were over, replaced by informative and funny videos, streams, wiki pages, walkthroughs and guides by fellow gamers. Like a society discovering farming and suddenly becoming independent from outside food suppliers, the gamers were free, and the suppliers were mad. Then came the tryhard times; journalists, who really were from the "outside", subsequently proved how disconnected from the rest of us they are by trying to 'hello fellow kids' us into watching them do what our own streamers did; playing a game and letting us see it happen, instead of playing however little they used to off-screen and then scribbling out their personal review (I like to refer to this era as the rise of the IGNorant.) Needless to say, most of them got cooked over this (there's a reason everyone goes back to that video showing a literal stupid pigeon playing Cuphead better than a journalist), because they were part of an industry where they got paid to write things first and foremost, and where anything else was secondary, including literacy on the subject. So, what happened? The journalists figured out that they had been left behind, an irrelevant industry, a footnote, history. That's when we entered into the third age, the Age of Aggression. Suddenly, it seemed like everyone in the games journalism industry was writing articles about gamers being bad people, liking bad things, embracing bad traits, living bad lives in bad houses, believing in bad things, having bad hygiene, and being bad to other people. Suddenly, the very audience they had originally been intended to serve became the villains of the story (an irony that the same thing has happened to Hollywood) and the journalists began to use almost every platform they could to spread the word on just how wretched the "gamer" is, to put them down and call them refuse. Suddenly, larger publications like Forbes got involved, trying to spread this ridiculous smear campaign farther among broader audiences in an effort to rally support to "crush the istic, phobic, toxic gamers!" Suddenly, they proved to all of us that they were driven by agendas, greed, and revenge, not by trying to provide a product or a service. Is it any wonder they utterly abhor Kabrutus and DEIdetected for calling out the invasion of our pastimes and joy? Is it any wonder they have ranged themselves against us in an effort to corrupt the companies, studios and teams who make games for us? Is it any wonder that so many gamers immediately assume journalists are bad at games and seethe over it by calling games, or us, bad, instead of getting gud? Is it any wonder that so many of us can't help but keep an eye out for token inclusivity, pointless virtue-signalling, and "modern character designs for modern audiences", and that we feel a little piece of our culture die every time another blow is struck against it, when the vast majority of us have never done *anything* to hurt these journalists, consulting companies, or dev teams? Is it any wonder we have no trust in them? I've heard an expression attributed to, I believe it was Miyamoto Musashi, and if not to him specifically, then to other samurai of the time or to Bushido itself, that goes something like this: Man is born with a measure of honor to his name, from which he can only lose honor, and which he can never regain when lost, even if he tries to attone. Since, ironically, corporations seem to be treated before the law as having the same sorts of indelible rights as individuals, then corporations, too, may be said to be created with a measure of honor, or journalists, or politicians, or movie directors. So too are they able to forfeit that honor, and so too are they unable to reclaim it once lost. Despite trolls and such being a big part of gamer culture, there's always been parts where a sort of honor is maintained (heck, just look up the thousands of videos of honorable duels in Dark Souls III fight clubs for an example.) It's really not a stretch to describe the gamers as their own, albeit quirky, breed of "samurai" with their own sets of values and honor, and to perceive outsiders trying to break in and tear it all down as filthy gaijin invaders, honorless dogs who cannot be trusted. Let this be a lesson: Don't attack your customers if you don't want them to despise you.
It should be people like you who write on the condition of the industry profressionally. Only then will we actually see this hobby we've come to adore become sustainable once more.
Shit, that was long. I'm surprised I read all of it. Not sure I agree with the sentiment that honor, once lost can't be regained. It sounds very defeatist, and seems to imply (to me) that you might as well dig deeper into the hole if you aren't pulling yourself out. Maybe that's why these people double down so often.
@@AdonanS I don't claim to be a moderator of honor; most "honor" systems end up being little more than contrived notions for the "in" crowd to feel more self-righteousness than those on the outside, and often expect genuinely stupid actions to prove one's "honor". But what I can compare it to is general public sentiment; whether it's right or wrong (or even inconsistent), there are times when a public figure, a nation, a group of people, a company, or whatever it is garners a negative reputation, and there are very, very few cases in history of thoroughly negative public sentiment being fully reversible. Even if that sentiment is only in a minimal percentage of the public, that doesn't make its simmering dissatisfaction any less genuine, or less prone to enduring regardless of any efforts to reverse it. You're right though, most of them do double down on their stances over time or when accosted over them. That behavior is more akin to a cult (which most progressive behaviors and even rhetoric parallels almost perfectly), and cults don't apologize to "heretics", they persecute them. Even if we don't consider it a cult mentality, the simple aspect of human nature that people tend to have pride and don't like to be told they're wrong, irrelevant, or anything less than the most special pretty princesses anywhere; how ironic it is that the chiefest of the seven deadly sins is a rallying cry for them. Humility is the opposite: Make a mistake? Acknowledge it and learn from it to grow into a wiser and better person. Pride makes people refuse to admit they can be wrong. Another kind of pride is patriotism, and people love to feel like patriots, heroes of justice, by espousing causes like social justice. Having been on the inside of a religious cult, once upon a time, I've seen human pride lead people to turn on their audiences just to try to prove they're holier than thou. Morality is considered a religious thing, but when topics completely deviating from religion - like, say video games - inspire nearly an entire group of people to call other people moral degenerates, to say that they're wrong or bad or evil, or even openly admit to hating them over something as simple as a character design, goes a long way toward proving how morally corrupt they really are behind their flags and masks. A humble man knows he has flaws and admits to his mistakes so he can learn from them; he listens to feedback, because he knows he may not be able to see the whole picture from where he stands. That's something the games journalists, on the whole, can almost never do: Admit when they're wrong. It's really, really hard to trust someone who refuses to let life itself paint them as wrong about something.
Good game journalists are not useless, in fact, a lot of those streamers are doing what game journalists would do, the thing is, we don't have good game journalists on these sites, or they're so buried that most people never find them. But a review made by a journalist (a good one) will always have bits that a casual Steam review won't be able to tell you, they're supposed to be professionls, that know what they're talking about, and know what their consumer wants, clearly, that's not the case for most "journalists" that for the most part, are really activists that think they're doing the same.
@@Acuas Thats only because of access journalism. They get the games first, as well as direct communication to the devs and higher ups. Now companies are atleast trying to give interviews directly to content creators who play the game and who have their own organic base of fans.
Honestly yeah usually word of mouth from friends or a handful of UA-camrs are probably the only people I trust for honest reviews of games. The UA-cam ones I always question just for the mere fact that they can be bought and these companies have a lot of cash to spend.
Literally all you have to do is wait one day past release find a large collection of pretty detailed reviews on Steam, written by people who payed good money and really wanted to enjoy the game. By then you'll have more than enough information to decide if a game is worth buying or not. It's especially enlightening to look at the negative reviews, and see if the points mentioned even matter to you. I'm generally not going to trust anyone who treats playing games as a job.
Actually, game journalism isn't really about gameplay anymore. It's about digging through games to figure out which ones will be abusive micro-transaction horror shows, uncovering mistreatment of the developers, and finding out what happened when something goes horribly wrong. Real journalism work in gaming and video game reviews have basically completely separated.
Can you imagine if Car and Driver, or other car enthusiast media, wrote about cars and car enthusiasts the way these game journos write about game enthusiasts? Can you imagine if every issue was saying that car repairs and modification should be illegal, we had to stop using gasoline now, sports cars are the devil and you were evil if you drove one, if you have an old car you need to turn it in for scrap for green initiatives, and that everyone needs to switch to a plug in electric smart car for city driving and switch to mass transit for out of city driving, while following electricity rationing due to the lower power output of wind and solar. Do you think that publication would do well? HELL NO! But these game journos do the equivalent thing with games and they wonder why everyone hates them and won't buy what they're selling. It's insane. This is what happens when you create an entire industry out of people who got useless degrees from a college industry that seems more concerned with churning out useless grads instead of getting important roles filled. It seems every game journo wanted to work at the times and quickly found out they weren't cut out for it and it was either this or shilling pharma drugs.
It's a bit tiring that games journalists are just writing their articles for the haters to hate read. Journalists should just leave Twitter, it seems to be dominating their minds and work too much.
Honestly just not being active on twitter AT ALL is healthier for a lot of people. The place is a cesspool of toxicity in the 'culture war' and not engaging with it is the key. Don't want to see Maga idiots give their dumb opinions, get off twitter. Don't want to see radical feminists give their opinions? Get off twitter.
"Game reviews are objective and no game reviewer is out to ruin a developer". Anyone remember when Kingdom come: Deliverance either got bad to middling reviews or no coverage at all because there was not enough diversity in a game based on historically accurate version of the medieval Europe country of bohemia and the lead dev refused to back down from pressure from "journalists" to change it into a medieval version of LA? The first IGN articles covering KCD2 was about their "controversial sins of the past". The same happened to a lesser degree with Final Fantasy 16 and when Square lost money after several previous bad investment into stuff like NFT's the articles tried to make it seem that it was FF16's fault that the company lost money despite being one of the best selling games that year.
Pretty sure I remember Witcher 3 also getting that "not inclusive enough" treatment for a game based on polish folktales and mythology, but at least CDPR had their own good history to fall back on for the journalists to do any real damage.
@@Franku40keks Tried several times now to link different articles that talk about this but I think YT blocks links. But look up Metro's article titled "Games Inbox: Kingdom Come: Deliverance r*cism, Sonic All-Stars Racing 3, and Fire Emblem on Switch".
@@Braiam Uh, because they flat out tell you they don't complete games. I don't know what planet you live on but the vast majority off game journos have said time and time again they don't complete games. Typically they play a few hours until they feel they can write a review. Reviewers that complete games are a very very small minority. It's why reviews missing late game shenanigans has become a real big problem. You are probably confusing youtube and twitch streamers with game journos. Professional games journalism has been dead since around 2012.
You don't necessarily have complete the game to see what the loops are. Along with where the grinds are and are not. The problem is they don't play enough of the games to see these loops or are ignorant to them and instead make subjective reviews of their experience rather than the merits of the game itself.
I still remember how they reviewed dark souls 1, they only gave elden ring as high as praised as they did because the last time they tried to say one of the fromsoft games was bad the internet collectively gave them a notarized list of how wrong they were. The sad fact of the matter is with most of these sites it's a popularity contest mixed with bribery (and yes a company allowing them to have extra time to review a game before it drops so that they have a day one review ready is bribery in this situation)
I have teenagers, man. You think I need a game critic to tell me what's good? One guy at my kids' school pirates the game and plays it and then spreads the word across school if its good. If I haven't heard of it, it's not good. And oh by the way, they wouldn't stop talking about Elden Ring for 6 months. Never heard anyone talk of a game for that long. So of course I bought it and played it. Playing through the DLC now. And it's as good as they said. They've never steered me wrong, these kids.
Nah it's time for them to just fk off already. They write useless garbage. Just read steam reviews. They are thousands of times better and more useful.
What this author doesn't bring up is that the reason people don't trust games journalist isn't just because they are bad at games or because they have controversial takes, it because they have spent the past decade trying their best to be as insulting to their readers as humanly possible. They have made no secret that they hate straight white men and what they define as "toxic gamers" and people are less likely to believe the words of a racist and a sexist regardless of what their take is. The stuff he claims is the reason are simply the "further evidence" bullet points that reinforce that belief, not the core reason why people dislike them. Even if games journalist made perfect reviews, the fact that they are bigots and hate their audience would still remain.
so lets see if I understand this right because my english is not that good... this "game journalist" is directly telling us to not watch them because 99% of the gamers point of view dont aline with what they think... do they even realice they are digging their own tumb at this point?
It's all politics - pushing their left or right leaning ideologies. FYI - your English writing is decent - I was able to understand your point! I'm always impressed when I see someone confidently talking in another language when I'm still struggling with my primary language, lol.
Digging their own grave is the phrase your thinking of, and no, they don't. They haven't 10 years ago when they came under fire for doing under the table deals with publishers to get good reviews and they still don't by attacking their supposed "audience". I'm not surprised by this in the slightest, games journalism at this point is and has been dead for years.
@@SamWulfign I would say they never stopped doing under the table deals, the fact that most games, even when they're bad as hell, get a 7/10, is all I need to know, the 7/10 score now a days mean absolutely nothing, because it includes the 7/10 games, and all the games below that, that this so called journalist are too scared to give the proper score because they might not get a review copy from that company next time? Or because there is some other incentives under the table? I wouldn't understand if that's not the case.
@@Acuas Oh I wholly agree with you. they tried to deny it then be hush hush about it hoping people wouldn't remember. It's not that we forgot it's that we're tired about mentioning it.
friendly help from an english speaker aline-> align , tumb -> tomb 👍🏻 thank you for trying to converse in english, we stupid americans appreciate it lol
They are targeting the reader. They are trying to lecture, guilt and shame people into giving them respect and doing what they want. This has become the norm, it's toxic and needs to be abolished entirely. We don't need them as we have many options for seeing an actual review. Being told what we should like and how we should feel..is absurd and not how this works. It's not just gaming media, it's all corporate media. No longer providing an informative service, but instead trying to force people to think and feel ways they feel are appropriate. Why pay for a lecture is a good summary. Even if it's 'free' it's not. No one should enable it by listening. I don't mind the occasional opinion piece which is clearly labelled as this, but the media is outright hostile toward the people they need to stay afloat. Never bite the hand that feeds you, through payment or watching your ads.
Wow...that's a good point; I never though about that. If you have data and the truth on your side-facts-then you don't need to constantly plead for people to trust you. The truth speaks for you and itself.
It's pretty easy to write plausible reasons as to why the game journos hate games: They wanted to use game journalism as a stepping stone to more prestigious journalism, but failed. When they graduated with their degrees in journalism, they imagined they'd be interviewing world leaders or exposing billion-dollar corporate scandals, but instead they have to write a review of Generic Live Service Looter Shooter #123657 by the end of the week and give it at least an 8/10 or the Chinese megacorporation that owns it will pull the ads that make up 40% of their revenue. Also explains why so many of them are so active on social media: They know they're in a dead-end gig, and are trying to leverage it for as much clout as possible in the hopes that it lands them something better.
This is exactly what I've been saying. They had grans visions of writing pieces that would influence the world in their vision, except they got hired for the gaming division because they know how to operate a console. They detest this and try to instead force their politics and viewpoints into gaming.
There's a ton more reasons to not trust/respect game journalist reviews: "Hot take" titles to get more clicks, paid good reviews for bad games, calling out gaming companies for their non inclusive/difficult games, starting drama to also get more clicks... It's like trusting any comments on twitter. I just wait for the games to drop and watch some yt videos from creators that I trust to see if there's any red flags.
The guy has way more faith in games journalists than most. Ive read so many articles where it's super obvious they didnt actually finish the game and are just pretending to.
Journalism in general is getting gutted, along with dozens of other formerly stable jobs but, in general, when it comes to entertainment (Games, Movies, Music, etc.) it really is ideal to just find reviewers and people in general who have similar interests as you do. Honestly, in this case in particular as long as your echo chambers are focused more on things you love than things you hate it's (usually) fine, but negativity is what sells so much it can sometimes feel completely exhausting just finding those people. Not to mention people change. Such is life.
He starts out saying that most game journalists are better gamers them most gamers. They have access to prerelease games, pre patch games, when they are the most difficult and beat them faster then other your average gamer. etc. etc. Then he says they are just like us. I can't relate to any of that stuff. I'm looking at my bank account trying to decide if a game is worth $40, $60, or $80 of my hard earned money for an entertainment expense. For me, those amounts are not trivial. I don't get comp copies. Also, I don't care about any of the DEI vs. Woke crap. If the game is good, I'll play it. If it isn't I won't.
"So find someone with similar opinions to you." This is actually good advice. That works for movies and tv shows too. As long as it is not taken to the extreme where you purchase a product just because someone you normally agree with says it's good.
One of the major issue with most people nowadays, not just game journos (although they seem to be doing this more often than anyone else) is that everyone reprimand others for being part of a Culture War while they themselves do everything in their power to further and thrive in said War.
Actively hating on your customers pushes them away, who would have thunketh? But to be honest, I have always preferred reviews from independent people or friends over a journalist who is most likely coerced into writing a positive review (otherwise they will not get a preview again next time or no paycheck). Steam reviews and discussions on reddit work better for me at least...
Trouble is there are so many articles nowdays that are less about the games and more about a stance either political or ideology. I was looking at some games mags from the 90s and just seeing them talk about the games and little else was refreshing
This. I get that things are more polarized these days, but it wouldn't kill any of these journalists to be inclusive towards people with opinions that are different of their own.
@@escthedark3709or focus on the game itself. I swear the worst one was the review for the ps5 where it doesn't even talk about the specs or upcoming games for the console but the writer's politics and nastiness just spewing throughout the article. How is stuff Luke this approved?
"Journalists" destroyed any trust and credibility I could associate with them over a decade ago when they were writing that "gamers are dead and we don't need to treat them as our audience anymore", and have made negative progress in proving those articles wrong
game journalist SHOULD BE GOOD AT GAMES! that is their job. they must be objective, concise, and can spit out an educated opinion about a game. this article are pure projection. trust are earned and their conduct leave a lot to be desired. game journalist also need to distance themselves from game activist, right now they are indistinguishable.
I don't think that's true. If a rocket explodes then you don't need to be a rocket scientist in order to see what's wrong with it. I get what you mean, but it's more nuanced than that. Maybe it should be more like base competency? Maybe you meant that and I got it wrong. lol
Journalists being bad at video games is one of the smallest issue with gaming journalism. It was just a red herring threw in by this lying piece of work and even while doing that he couldn't help himself and had to straw-man and misrepresent it.
@@TheOneGreat ''If a rocket explodes then you don't need to be a rocket scientist in order to see what's wrong with it'' Incorrect, you know it exploded, yes, but you don't know why, which could be one or more aspect(s) of the the rocket.
You don't need to be a good aeronautical engineer to understand why a rocket exploded, but you still need some level understanding. For example, you might suck at Elden Ring because you have bad timing, but you can still understand the mechanics well enough that you don't blame the game for making it too hard to dodge when you are in fact fat rolling. If we wanted an uninformed, surface level impression of the game, we wouldn't need a journalist, se could just ask Billy down the street.
Ah, poisoning the well before even starting any arguments in your own favour. Your customers SURELY will want to empathise with you now! Game journalism is just as much of a, if not a worse, circlejerk than it was a decade ago. Even when they try to somehow get customers to side with them, they manage to only regurgitate woe-is-mes that their journalist friends agree with. I do think that the written form is the best way to pass on information. It's terrible that people are losing their jobs in writing professions en-masse now, but I can't help but think that not much is ultimately lost. Many of the sites being shut down produce low effort ragebait or those obnoxious "Here's five things you should know before you play *insert game here*" articles with no actual substance. All they can really offer is their activism that they can fit into an article. And there really isn't an audience for thinly veiled sneering at the audience they wish they could reach, but can't; they already drove them away years ago.
You must be pretty young. A decade or so ago games journalists had some credibility and two decades ago you pretty much had to listen to them if you wanted any news from the games industry.
Ever since gamergate and that whole situation, I've never trusted gaming journalists, I trust steam reviews more than them. There are few UA-cam channels I also trust. Sometimes, the games they review or rate are great, but I've been burnt with that as well, starfield, for example. It's a hard thing to navigate now, especially if there is a financial motive.
I remember reading a game informer review on elder scrolls oblivion when I was a teenager and how they talked about how massive the world was, how the npc's aged with time, the new tech, the story and the side quests. Now nobody on either side can write up a review without mentioning the inclusiveness of a game and blah blah instead of- Is the game fun? Is it clunky or or smooth and natural? Does it have a well written story? Is it innovative? What are the neat unique quirks or repetitive features? Is it fresh or just another tower climber like Far Cry? Obviously it's partly the games that are made, partly the journalists that think that the majority of players actually care about representation. We are moving towards finding hidden gems from small dev teams that game journalists aren't even talking about. That's usually where the fun and innovation is nowadays.
Journalists as a whole are invaluable, once they tell me to do something, say something, act a certain way, i do the exact opposite. Its literally saved my life at least once.
Are we just gonna skip over how many games drop and when you go to their scores on metacritic, the journalists and reviews are all too often saying it is great while the player base hates it and downvotes it. Gran Turismo 7, a game that came out at the same time as Elden Ring, got 87 out of 100 on Metacritic from reviewers and 2.4 out of 10 from players. So yeah, its hard to trust you when its obvious that, even if we put aside the idea that there MIGHT be an alternative agenda, you at least aren't an accurate representation of the community that plays these games.
It's the mixing of actual tangible info about the game that contributes to a gamer being able to make an informed purchase, and including personal narratives that don't contribute to an informed purchase. It's like what the government does when putting together a bill they're trying to pass. They include the things that will actually help, but then mix in a laundry list of stuff that doesn't help, but hurts the country for their own personal gain.
You are absolutely right, it DOESN'T matter that pay is tight and you have to play hundred hour games with bafflingly short turnarounds, it's your job. You applied for it. I don't care if you like it or not, you get paid to do something. If you think that argument is going to make me trust you then I've got news for you, hearing that you are under a lot of pressure and seemingly not liking your job that much? That makes me trust you **less**.
We can't find critics or reviewers or journalists who have our like mind because they are canceled, slandered, demonetized, and simply not allowed to exist.
In the same breath that they called her boring they said the creator had never seen a real woman … even if this particular guy didn’t do that in this instance there are FAR too many examples of “games journalists” piggy backing off other “games journalists” that it all starts to appear suspicious. You can’t just hand wave stuff like that away.
They beat the game? Pretty sure most game journalist only play the first 10 hours of the game they review and rarely ever finish the game. Even the most normal gamer finish more games than they do and it doesnt matter how long they take to beat it.
@@KaleSerpent but it’s easy to infer that they don’t play games much, because they would naturally always be trying to paint themselves in a better light, and they could verify it tho posting their hours on steam or something, and the fact they don’t, when it would obviously help their case is weird to say the least. It’s like, they could have that piece of evidence to help them in the court of public opinion, but by not including some information that could help them, it leads me to believe that it actually isn’t there. That if they posted their hours it would be clear they don’t play a lot of games. So they don’t.
@@tannersandusky2621 Ah see, that's what I'm getting at. They can make all sorts of claims, and since it's their life that isn't in the public eye, you can say they didn't but they will just say prove that they didn't. You can make conclusions, but it's not exactly definitive fact. It's a guess, even a highly educated and well reasoned guess, but it's not definitive.
@@KaleSerpent yeah but when you're split hairs like that, there's no real insight. It's pretty obvious these people aren't always finish games. The tell is that they don't talk about the game. They immediately pivot to RL social issues to fill up the page because they didn't do their job, which was actually play the game and review it. They instead start reviewing Twitter comments.
Video game journalism was one of my fantasy jobs as a youngster. I grew up reading Computer Gaming World, PC Games, EGM and Gamepro. These people were THE ONES...they had the access to devs and publishers, they had the expertise and they had a very exclusive platform. Nowadays the magazines are long dead. I may try to pick up an expensive issue of Edge now and then because their production quality is so nice but I'm generally not turning to professional trade journalists for info about video games. The democratization of video games critique and news has been a net positive but I still believe there's a place for pros to operate. It's more along the lines of long-form features and investigative reporting, as these larger media firms will have many more resources to invest into this content vs. your average UA-camr.
The memes can be informativ i bought a game because a review said its a game where you tell anime girls to get in the big fucking robot and start killing. Best 10 € i spent and the review was correct i did yell: i don't care if your brain flows out those ears get in there!
I treat the steam reviews like I do Amazon reviews. I look at the highs and discount idiots who always give 5s look at the lows and discount people using it wrong, everything else has the potential to be informative.
Great video conversation... I agree with most of what you had to say on this subject... I also believe it's multiple factors leading people to stray away from main stream journalist sites and blogs with relation to the gamer space... It's kind of happening across most spaces these days as well... You were very right when it comes to what most gamers are seeking these days when they peruse the web... They are seeking as much information as possible, sometimes various opinions, to get a wider picture on specific topics/games/movies/etc... While journalists use to be the big thing, with magazine articles and game review websites (i.e. IGN, Polygon, GameSpot, etc), the range of opinions were limited mostly to those avenues... But over time, these news outlets and websites began gobbling up all their competitors, and so the number of articles and reviews became fewer and much more commercialized... Some of this was due to the industry influencing the media, and some of it was due to more fast profit focused tactics when it came to journalism... It became harder to find trustworthy articles with lots of useful information from those sources... Add in the boom of online content creators making gameplay videos, reviews, guides, and so on... The quality and amount of available content a gamer can refer to has become wildly diverse and numerous... To the point where you can watch a few reviews by fellow gamers and get a better picture then you can from a journalist's article... I also highly agree that many of these journalists nowadays pay far too much attention to social media websites, as well as comments on their own sites... You would think professional journalists with degrees would already know many of the points you made... But I think we have a newer breed of journalists who don't have the professionalism, training, and/or enough experience to know what to take away from comments and what to ignore... Many times, it feels like these entertainment journalists and bloggers can be their own worst enemies... The industry they work in has become less and less relevant as well, and sometimes desperate times breeds desperate content... When I look at an article like that one, I see a journalist lashing out at his/her readers... And it makes me wonder, is this just a desperate person treading water as they seek help for their industry, or is it just another person desperate putting out controversial talking points just for clicks, to keep the lights on?
During Gamergate 1, the only gaming reviews that I could trust and were generally fun and enjoyable was Giant Bomb when they were with Whiskey Media. It was Jeff Gerstmann firing for not giving a positive game review Kane & Lynch. They resisted being sucked into the controversy despite Brianna Wu and Patrick Klepek efforts for them to pick a side. Ryan Davis passing months before didn’t help matters. It led to Klepek leaving. The problem with game journos is they are in bed with the games publishers acting more like evangelists than impartial reviewers. The publishers buys ads on their websites and gives full access in return for positive articles. At the core of what Gamergate was really all about…. Now, Giant Bomb has been assimilated into the woke collective with Alyssa Mercante infamous appearance challenging critics to fight her with that dumb smirk as the “fake” Giant Bomb team cheers. Jeff Gerstmann was fired weeks before he was set to quit. Their articles are nothing more than propaganda. I‘ve all but quit buying games. It’s no longer fun with everyone monopolizing the industry with half billion dollar games. Gaming is ruined. I refuse to give these people a single cent after enduring constant name calling over a decade.
You’re hitting the nail on the head, even in this article they state the review for cyberpunk; mentioning only one thing the players and journalists agreed on, with the performance of the game. Those other things make people believe they don’t understand or why people like and play games
Trust them? Hahahahahahahahaha! No. As long as there are people like Nathan Grayson, Ben Kuchera, Alissa Mercante and Arthur Gies still around theres no trust to be had.
The way I choose games is by UA-cam. I follower a lot of gamers and their opinions…and suddenly if I see an explosion of great videos on one specific game, then I believe there’s a reason to play it and I do…it’s how I ended up on Elden and fell in love. Same with cyberpunk reboot, and BG3, and Red Dead 2….and the UA-cam follows have NEVER MISSED. The best part is reading the reviews after beating the games only become comedy article. NEVER TRUST THOSE WHO JUDGE FOR A LIVING!
The biggest problem with this guy is he's not even looking at the whole picture as he attempts to vilify gamers attitudes towards game journalists. He did nothing to call out or acknowledge the elephants in the room. Those journalists who spend their times writing opinion pieces about how gamers are racists for not liking a specific game or anything like that. He glossed over that GIANT GIANT pain point between journalists and gamers. The reason gamers are so ready to tell journalists they hate games or gamers, is because they constantly bash the games a lot of us like for reasons typically aligned with their personal ideology rather than actually reviewing the game, and if they are reviewing any technical aspects of the game, the reviews are peppered with character attacks on the people who enjoy the game... most commonly seen in the headline even. Where jabs about players being "weird about eve" were prevalent, whenever players had an issue with censorship on the part of stellar blade. Lots of us find it weird that censorship exists in an M rated game... why is it needed? Its NEVER made sense. But what often happens is the response to this by games journalists and allies is "Y'all are just gooners." Meanwhile a fully naked Aphrodite in Hades 2, more revealing than Eve in stellar blade also, mind you, is getting praise on how hot she is. She gets a pass cause shes the goddess of love or somesuch, when love DOES NOT MEAN lewd. Baffles the mind. Its nuts he doesn't acknowledge these parts of the argument at all and tries to convince people journalists aren't out to get them. Like, brother, I'm not convinced at all here, even though I disagree they aren't out to "get us"... whatever that is supposed to mean anyways... we do know that they are out to get our games. - It was made quite evident when Games Science suddenly saw article after article pointing out a previous article calling them sexists over a mistranslation immediately after showing Sweet Baby Inc's ass on X. - It was made quite evident with Stellar blade and the journos writing article after article doing victory laps when stellar blade got censored, and then similarly groaning when new versions of the outfits that were sexier were released. - It was made quite evident when articles were being written showing concern about players becoming "fascists" because they were playing Helldivers 2 and because the woke cant meme or understand memes they took the jokes way too literally. - It's made evident now, by the twisted articles related to assassin's creed shadows. Players are racist because the protagonist they expected to be Japanese is not Japanese, when in all previous releases the Main protagonist hailed from the area they were in. They refused to acknowledge the context that players are suspicious of forced DEI into the game and instead just call them racists for disliking that the black guy is in the game. Given all of the above context there's absolutely NO reason we should trust journos, especially if they cant even be honest about the problems we're facing between gamers and games journos, and it is baffling that he has the audacity to ignore all these issues when telling us we should just trust the same people that are actively doing this now. Writing this piece was a poorly thought out decision, or a dishonest one.... and sadly with the journos' track record, I'm more inclined to believe its dishonest. That's how bad things are between gamers and journos atm. Acknowledge all of it and then we can try to rebuild or recover, otherwise shut up.
@@Daddynurg Interesting take. Perhaps you're referring to the fact that I did practically write an article here, or perhaps you didnt read too much of what I wrote and assumed what my opinion was.
@@Daddynurg You're wasting your time responding to me, cause its likely I agree with your opinion about the situation and you're attacking me because you didnt read. Pretty low IQ.
The main problem with "games journalists" is the fact they obviously could not jobs as actual journalists. The other main problem; they are college educated activists who use their journalist careers as a soapbox for their activism.
How about journalist actually doing their job and reviewing the genres they have experience and a way to compare to other games? If someone has no way to tell if some system is good or bad but it seems decent enough all of a sudden most games are 9 or 10/10 which is a joke coming from ppl who are supposed to be critical
The industry was better when both the media and the developers were just hardcore fans, many self taught. Now the industry is mostly college kids who just got into development because they thought it be cool.
I can't stand all the politics and ideology included in game reviews. You said it perfectly. Those things add no value to the regular gamer. More than that, I have been completely driven away from games media by the crazy politics in their game reviews They have completely lost touch with the regular gamer.
Game journalists are not woke, journalism is a BUSINESS and the main aim is MONEY. They don't care about "honesty" or "morality", but just clicks and ad revenue. Due to the diminishing reader base, they can only write clickbait titles that are so catchy and ragebait that a random youtuber covers it so that they can became relevant again. They can then meet the monthly quota and show it to their boss that they probably despise.
10:21 The Elden Ring DLC wasn't that hard pre-patch. It was just that most people did the usual "bang you'r head against the wall" tactic and did not realized that you need to go and explor + did not used the new tear stone which to be fair should have been given to them at the start because it changes the game in a very drastic way.
you're not the customer, you're the product! The companies buying ads are the customer, the opinions don't matter outside of getting clicks, nothing matters but the clicks...
Lol, this is so manipulative. "she talked about stereotypes, sexism, sjw stuff, crass stuff and optimization. Look. Now you ALL agree with her" No, we agree with one thing out of 10. Yes, she(?) deserves an apology from some people for that one point about optimization. Nothing more.
Also, 14:13, so, like a streamer/youtuber. Because when we talk about a publication, there are a lot of people who are hard to destinguish, who all use same platform and for the game you are interested in, the guy you wanna see a review from, won't be on that task. Unlike some streamers you agree with, where you always see their face, and they alone are on that source
Journalists used to come from the working and middle class. Once you understand that only a few wealthy kids born into wealthy families are able to work at "the press" today, you understand why this article was written. A random blogger has more integrity and understanding of a topic than the journo these days, and I remember when these journalists used to laugh about the people who are retaking journalism back into the hands of regular people and now get hundreds of thousands of views on their honest work. Journalist today don't understand the concept of honest work.
Honestly, it's almost too much irony. Trust game reviewers? No one has for at least a decade. Turns out, it really WAS about ethics in games journalism.
Games journalists are so unnecessary now. Why listen to someone who is a part of a company with a ton of potential bias and conflict of interest when we can just communicate with actual gamers anywhere else on the internet? We do not need a mouth piece for gaming communities anymore, the community can just speak for itself amongst itself. Even if they could earn trust and do a better job, it's still redundant.
Things would go a hell of a lot better for game journalists if they just remembered one simple fact. 90% of Gamers aren't on Twitter! Instead they keep getting mad at trolls and labeling Gamers, putting us in a box and saying "this is what you are" then getting mad when gamers lash out and say f*** you. Of course we're going to get mad at you. You keep freaking pretentiously telling us we're terrible no matter what like you have some deep insights into our souls.
none of this addresses the fact that many times (though certainly not always) journalists are only given early access to a game because the outlet they work for is in an implied quid pro quo relationship with the developer. fromsoft and elden ring are terrible examples to raise up as reasons to trust games journalists because fromsoft 1, actually cares about making good games, 2, welcomes criticism when it's deserved, and 3, stands by their work when it isn't. personally, i didn't think the dlc was harder than the base game, in the sense that the progression felt the same as it did in base. you went somewhere new, got your ass handed to you, found some new tools and learned some new mechanics, leveled up, and by the time you beat the boss of the region you have a solid handle on things until you move on and repeat the process. did i die a bunch of times to the final boss and try a bunch of different strats until i finally won? you bet, just like i did in the base game. everywhere you look in society you're going to find judgmental purists. they're basically the same person, an extremist who takes whatever you're discussing to the nth degree, and if you're not as extreme as them, you're doing it wrong. example: when i was recovering from spine surgery, i was bored out of my skull, so i took up knitting and crocheting, and got into a social media group that centered on the topic, sharing patterns, techniques, links to small businesses who made custom tools and yarn, etc., and people would post pics of their work, and of course there would be at least one nasty comment (couched in flowery language because it was a group predominantly of women) about how their project wasn't absolutely perfect. the mods were very good about kicking them out, but the fact remains that even in such a low-stakes arena, people will always do this. the rest of us need to learn to identify this unwarranted criticism as stemming from something being wrong psychologically with the other person and let that shit go. as for the whole "wokerati" thing, i'm just going to leave this here and let you, the reader, figure it out: if someone tells you you're doing something that hurts them, and then you either 1, tell them it shouldn't hurt, and/or 2, continue to do it anyway because you like doing it, don't then be surprised if they tell you to go screw yourself. this goes in both directions, and is applicable to any scenario you're willing to analyze, including your own behavior.
Beginning of the article be like "wah WAAAH im offended on behalf of underpayed, overworked game journos who have to beat games fast and unpatched!" yea dude that's why you get PAID to do it while rest of the players is not. So players expect at least average-player-level insights from game magazin articles, not pro-analytics about metagame and builds before release (player community will do this themselves for free later) but responsible review that will help average player understand if they have to give this game a try or it for different audience really But no, game journalists write either nonsense that barely intersect with any content of the game, or articles that is not about games completely, maybe game in question shortly discussed in first sentences and then its just soy blog about world and society 10 "Elden Ring have bad UI"/10
I don't understand how you could forget steam has a 2 hour return window, it's the best form of a review, just play the game and if you don't like it's first impression, return it. It's all digital, they don't give a shit.
Tbh, it never appeared to me that I can listen to a game journalist instead of reading steam reviews/watching trailer and checking out previous games of the studio. I realized that until this very moment I lived like the game journalists exists just to make a funny videos about them :o Why do you need journalism in a place where there is a ton of statistics and customers reviews??
It's funny how a game journalist boasts about being able to beat games they review despite having no guides or whatever while completely ignoring the fact that they do it on easy/story mode and in longer(like say MMOs)/more difficult(like say FromSoft games) games they don't actually finish them, nor get anywhere near that. Similarly the whole journalists hating games is not so much about them actually hating the games they play but rather about journalists bowing to their corporate and ESG overlords which in turn colors their criticism of games and make it seem like they hate games since their criticisms mostly revolve around ESG issues rather than things actually related to the games themselves.
It was really eye opening seeing the reviews come out for the Elden Ring DLC. There were youtubers whose entire channel is Elden Ring content who got passed up for early review access, but then random journalists from gaming news publications got access just to give embarrassingly cringe "I obviously jumped into this conversation 30 seconds ago" reviews. It just made it very clear to me that something is off in the gaming journalism world.
The first contact I had with reviews and commentary on games were from TotalBiscuit. I do remember one of his videos where he discussed the nature of what a review is and what was that he actually did do. He Mentioned the whole "subjective" nature of the thing and in the end, what he said is that a person can be objective on his reviewe. He can recognize a good game, even if he don't like it. I often wonder what he would say about so many things in this hobby for the last years.
Sure is lucky that thousands of chinese accounts made negative reviews about the mascot of the anti-cheat so it looks like gamers agree with reviewers on the difficulty of the DLC. I have no doubt there are people around complaining the DLC is too hard, it IS hard, it's supposed to be. But if you use the tools the game gives you it isn't unfairly hard (though perhaps some bosses could be tweaked, but I'm not gonna get into the weeds here), you have the tools you need to beat these bosses, just use them. I don't not trust professional reviewers because I think they want to destroy the gaming industry (specific reviewers notwithstanding), I don't trust them because over time the companies they work for have shown that they care more about their writers being corporate mouthpieces who mindlessly re-write advertising copy from other companies in exchange for lucrative marketing deals than actually being a source of news and useful information. We've seen it over and over again, probably the biggest and most public being when Giantbomb was created because IGN was trying to force a reviewer to give a better score to a game they had been pushing in marketing for months, and they refused and quit instead. If I'm looking for a game review these days I have youtubers I'm subscribed to for that purpose, people who love the genre of games they play and are always looking for new and exciting games in those niches and are as ready to complain as they are to praise. I know I'm probably getting an honest opinion and a real look at what the game has to offer to a player, but hey, that's me.
Catch me live: www.twitch.tv/legendary_drops
Trust me "I'm a Physician"
@@SpadeApeiron what?
Guy starts a "persuasive" article by immediately poisoning his audience. Forget game reviews he needs to learn how to write, period.
But you don't understand, it's everyone else that's the problem!
I think game journalists in general need to learn how to write. The irony of whining about wages for your writing job when you write like a hack anyway.
@@therealMrA The problem is that most of this "journalists" are just activists that think it's the same, they're not trying to review games, they're going at them with their ideology, and then writing a review based on a checkbox list, if the game doesn't check one of those, it's bad, and the company should be targetted by bad press until they bow down and change the game, and if the game check all boxes then they will have only prise for the game. They never cared if the game was good or bad, or it has good gameplay, or an interesting lore/story.
If they were good journalists they wouldn't be in gaming that's their biggest issue they are resentful because they hate their job they wanted to be political activists in some mainstream outlet but they got stuck talking about games they don't like writing for gamers they hate, they are talentless hacks and they attack gamers as a coping mechanism
“My job sucks and that’s why you should appreciate me, even if I don’t do a good job.”
Imagine criticizing a cyberpunk game for "edgy aesthetics" and expecting people to take anything else you say about it seriously.
Also, maybe I'm misremembering, but wasn't she also given backlash because she said "I'm not even bothering with side quests" and such? Or was that someone else?
Edit: I was right, same person, but the whole situation wasn't as simple as youtubers made it out to be.
I like JRPGs but I hate the modern punklord aesthetic Persona has. But even then I know thats a my taste thing and not a flaw with the series, journos man, dey stoopit.
That entire review was a fucking mess and honestly just a giant projection. The "offensive depiction of minorities" had to do with the Voodoo Boys, of which there is nothing offensive. Their existence and depiction is with a specific intent surrounding who they are, where they come from, and what they do
These people just cant help but to project their internal biases onto others and completely expose themselves for how they truly view the world and the people around them. People arent just people to them, we're all just monoliths to whatever intrinsic physical characteristics we were born with
@@Ghalion666 They see the edgy aesthetic as something immoral and "harmful", that's why it's so important for them to speak out against it and to admonish other people not to indulge in that particular "sin". They're like Christian pastors.
It's not just a matter of taste like in your case with Persona.
@@EndThusIAm Must have been someone else. She explicitly stated that she couldn't stop doing side quests because she liked the Delamain side quest so much.
Trust is earned, not given. The balls on that guy.
Edit: The Gamer is a fucking trash website, BTW. Ragebait articles like that are their bread & butter where they espouse bad-take opinions then weirdly admit they're not qualified to give them. Don't give them any more attention than they deserve by highlighting another one of their garbage articles.
They don't need our attention with all that money from Blackrock and Vanguard.
Clickbait is the gift that keeps on giving. I wonder when I'll hit cap on 'do not recommend'.
Yeah that's the ultimate irony. The gamer is the absolute scummiest of the scum, and proves every single day why we should not trust shameless journalists. Clickbait and ragebait is all they do.
fuck i was gonna say that, cheers
The Gamer is also the one who made article complaining about FF16 having no black people. Even after being explained that it's a fantasy medieval setting, they still demand black "representation" in it. Even in their own comment section which is a pure echo chamber of their ideology, the writer of the article actually go out of their way to argue with anyone who think this demand for representation is stupid.
The real game journalists now are youtube gamers that dont have bosses to impress.
Adding a comment here to push this up. Spot-on.
@@frodoadventure1 if you a fan of Helldivers 2 thats what my content is all about. Just another small channel doing what I can🫡
Exactly this.
Thank goodness for the Second Wind gang
Yeah, I don't read the articles, youtube reviewers for me seem to give more of the background of a game, they look into any odd bugs and such, and you can tell if you think you can trust their opinion more. Also, most the youtubers will be open in saying "I don't like this game because this is a game play that does not work for me but I can see why others would like it" vs "this game play makes it impossible to enjoy the game 1/5 ducks with an f".
I honestly will never trust/care about game journalists at this point.
I never trust what I hear, and only half of what I see. In my opinion, anyone that has ever trusted a journalist about anything is a _complete_ fool. This opinion was confirmed when modern media corporations admitted to congress that they were "news entertainment" therefore didn't have to be factual.
Trust me "I'm a Physician"
Now? The last gaming journalist wrote in Magazines.
you know its sad when I was a kid growing up to Nintendo Power and Gamepro magazines I read articles and went wow being a Game reviewer must be one of the coolest jobs in the world! You're getting paid to play and write about video games...fast forward to now and I'm amazed how even knowing how to pick up a controller or turn on the system is considered OPTIONAL skills for today's gaming "journos"
I think the BEST example I can pull from my memory of the absolute insincerity that pollutes modern day gaming "journalism" is the Digital Foundry discussion surrounding Stellar Blade back when it first dropped a showcase trailer. Digital Foundry, more so than ANY OTHER gaming related informer, is very technical and detail savvy when it comes to their overviews, reviews and discussions surrounding games. They sorta have to be when they deep dive into the nitty gritty details of how a game functions and performs showing all sorts of FPS charts and graphs and discussing any of the finer details of performance such as screen tearing, or artifacting or anti aliasing etc.
So you can imagine MY SURPRISE when they went on this tangent in the middle of their overview discussion on Stellar Blade about how Eve looks like a child and is wearing clothing they found objectionable and just, it really had NO PLACE in the discussion of how the game was shaping up performance wise. And yet they did it anyways... because this is how they so disingenuously operate in the modern WESTERN gaming sphere. On the surface they portend to provide you with a straight forward service of giving you the low down on news, events and speculations as to how a new game coming out will play or perform. But sprinkled through out said service, are these little turd nuggets of politically driven and biased motivations to crap on or dress down any perceived SLIGHT (imagined or otherwise) to their personal morals, political leanings, values, or world view! As a customer, I gotta say, THATS NOT WHAT IM HERE FOR PEOPLE!
Just give me the low down on the game. Check your biases and holier-than-thou puritanical BS at the door. The Christian right had a REAL issue with this back in the 80s and 90s and it DIDNT endear them to nerds and gamers even remotely. Now that the left is seemingly in the same spot with their inability to separate reality from fantasy, we are merely giving them the same treatment as we gave the right all those years ago. They have no leg to stand on, no right to complain. They have become the VERY THING they claim to hate.
This. People with this sort of attitude are doomed to fall into irrelevance just like the ones who said Doom, D&D, and Harry Potter was demonic.
Been gaming since the beginning. OG Atari kid.
In the last decade, I can't even begin to count how many times I've thought that the current left sounds exactly like the televangelists we made fun of back in the 80's.
It's cyclic. Change happens when X amount of the population admits that the summit of Mt. Virtue is made of soft slippery manure.
I've been called crazy for positing that the left is acting in the same purity spiral cycle the right did up to 2010. Glad I'm not crazy alone
Digital foundry is partially owned by IGN, after all.
"trust us because we said so." thats not how it works.
"And if you don't trust me, you're a bigot." 😂
"And if you don't trust us, you're a bigot." 😂
"A shield of inclusivity that they hold up because the rest of the game is garbage." Cannot be more straightforward or on point than that right there. Whether its games, comics, movies or shows this is the real problem. They use minorities like a human bullet shield to deflect genuine criticism of the quality of the end product. The examples of it not mattering are slowly growing, whether its Cyberpunk 2077, Baldurs Gate or shows like Arcane...the diversity itself isnt the problem. Its when its malicious and false because they chose to use that AS the product instead of creating a good product that happens to have it.
Very well said
The amount of people hating on media simply bc of “inclusivity” is still insanely annoying. Criticize media on their merits not simply because there’s a pronoun selector in character creation
@@Nicole_whatsgood Its entirely justified though. Why does the extreme end of the alphabet crowd get their desire for representation catered to but no other religion does?
@@Twentyand1no, both extreme sides are equally stupid, just like how both side of the usa centric "cultural" war are idiocy in the extreme, and both "sides" are equally moronic and are even similar to each other.
@Nicole_whatsgood I think it's because it often accompanies a lack of quality these days. It absolutely doesnt make a piece of media bad, but if half if the people you met that wore red shirts were assholes, and wouldn't stop talking about how great their red shirt was, you'd probably look at everyone that wore red a little differently.
No journalists. Your time is done. You ruined it by gaslighting, lying, and pushing your own faults onto your audience, along with a warped worldview and political propaganda.
We just wanted good games and fair reviews. How do you mess this up?
"we shouldnt hire gamers, we should hire journalist majors from the most left universities in the country. we should hire fat lesbians that hate gamers and talk down to everyone."
@@Tuvok_Shakur 😁
you are addicts and game developers are your dealers. there is no beneficial aspect of the industry. all it does is pervert the minds of overgrown spoiled toddlers into thinking they are more special than they are. and severely impede their capacity for understanding life outside their tiny little spoiled brains.
feels weird that you asked a question that you answered in the previous paragraph
You know the answer to that question...
Game Journalism stopped being for the gamer once the "Gamers are Dead" articles came out a decade ago.
I don't need them. In fact none of the games I put most of my hours into are hardly mentioned by game journalists anyways. And yet, I heard about those games, and I play those games.
They need me, more than I need them.
And the intro to that article shows how tone deaf the journalists are. The issue isn't that you hate video games, or are bad at them. The issue is that they hate their core audience. And the intro shows it.
"I went to touch grass and the sun rejected my presence" 😂I'm so stealing this one lol
No touch grass. Only touch grace.
@stryker0ae but what if Grace doesn't want you to touch her?
@@gumblybear foul, maidenless comment
You can never hate games and media journalists enough.
This is purposeful, they need to generate outrage for the attention.
Give it time. Once they get the attention they're one step closer to shutting down! This song and dance is entertainment at this point, rather than something to be taken seriously. The instant the novelty runs out, apathy kicks in. And once it does, bye bye urnalists~!
@@Kyugorn Kotaku Australia is already shutting down
Outrage is a finite resource. They are running out now.
To me, the progession is very clear. When UA-cam reviews of video games, along with playthroughs from channels large and small, became a thing, gamers were able to see gamers playing games. They saw someone playing games for the simple reason thay they love to play video games, experiencing the same bugs and issues, laughing at the the same physics glitches in Skyirm, and more; it was something that not only was easy to identify with, but more human and less corporate: A more honest game review. Needless to say, this has become an increasingly large viewership base, with hundreds or thousands of viewers who love a certain game jumping over to watch a stream from someone new who picks it up, ballooning their subscriber numbers overnight. But most importantly, it puts a face, a voice, or simply a "real human" behind those videos and channels, someone who responds to comments or addresses things people say, and with streaming becoming more and more relevant, more and more of the time someone can send a message to the person playing the game and get a response immediately. There's community, humanity, and a general sense of almost family around so many of these channels (consider the one we're on here.)
Not so for journalists. At most, they have a photo of them posing in a suit with a stiff smile plastered on their face sitting in a blurry office; at worst, they'll have a pen-name or an alias instead of an actual author's name (having an alias works fine for a streamer or gaming channel because that's a gamer thing, most of us have gamertags, someone from outside doing it feels like mockery to some extent.) If they deign to allow comments on an article, the author never responds to questions or feedback. It's like a mask, impersonal and distant, which you can't identify with nearly as much. To me, it seemed at the time almost the embodiment of that "stop having fun!!!" meme, where the gamers are all in a group together playing and discussing and reviewing games for themselves, and the journalist is outside screaming for attention, irrelevant. The days of outsiders telling us how to play games, or how to perceive games, were over, replaced by informative and funny videos, streams, wiki pages, walkthroughs and guides by fellow gamers. Like a society discovering farming and suddenly becoming independent from outside food suppliers, the gamers were free, and the suppliers were mad.
Then came the tryhard times; journalists, who really were from the "outside", subsequently proved how disconnected from the rest of us they are by trying to 'hello fellow kids' us into watching them do what our own streamers did; playing a game and letting us see it happen, instead of playing however little they used to off-screen and then scribbling out their personal review (I like to refer to this era as the rise of the IGNorant.) Needless to say, most of them got cooked over this (there's a reason everyone goes back to that video showing a literal stupid pigeon playing Cuphead better than a journalist), because they were part of an industry where they got paid to write things first and foremost, and where anything else was secondary, including literacy on the subject.
So, what happened? The journalists figured out that they had been left behind, an irrelevant industry, a footnote, history. That's when we entered into the third age, the Age of Aggression. Suddenly, it seemed like everyone in the games journalism industry was writing articles about gamers being bad people, liking bad things, embracing bad traits, living bad lives in bad houses, believing in bad things, having bad hygiene, and being bad to other people. Suddenly, the very audience they had originally been intended to serve became the villains of the story (an irony that the same thing has happened to Hollywood) and the journalists began to use almost every platform they could to spread the word on just how wretched the "gamer" is, to put them down and call them refuse. Suddenly, larger publications like Forbes got involved, trying to spread this ridiculous smear campaign farther among broader audiences in an effort to rally support to "crush the istic, phobic, toxic gamers!" Suddenly, they proved to all of us that they were driven by agendas, greed, and revenge, not by trying to provide a product or a service.
Is it any wonder they utterly abhor Kabrutus and DEIdetected for calling out the invasion of our pastimes and joy? Is it any wonder they have ranged themselves against us in an effort to corrupt the companies, studios and teams who make games for us? Is it any wonder that so many gamers immediately assume journalists are bad at games and seethe over it by calling games, or us, bad, instead of getting gud? Is it any wonder that so many of us can't help but keep an eye out for token inclusivity, pointless virtue-signalling, and "modern character designs for modern audiences", and that we feel a little piece of our culture die every time another blow is struck against it, when the vast majority of us have never done *anything* to hurt these journalists, consulting companies, or dev teams?
Is it any wonder we have no trust in them?
I've heard an expression attributed to, I believe it was Miyamoto Musashi, and if not to him specifically, then to other samurai of the time or to Bushido itself, that goes something like this: Man is born with a measure of honor to his name, from which he can only lose honor, and which he can never regain when lost, even if he tries to attone. Since, ironically, corporations seem to be treated before the law as having the same sorts of indelible rights as individuals, then corporations, too, may be said to be created with a measure of honor, or journalists, or politicians, or movie directors. So too are they able to forfeit that honor, and so too are they unable to reclaim it once lost. Despite trolls and such being a big part of gamer culture, there's always been parts where a sort of honor is maintained (heck, just look up the thousands of videos of honorable duels in Dark Souls III fight clubs for an example.) It's really not a stretch to describe the gamers as their own, albeit quirky, breed of "samurai" with their own sets of values and honor, and to perceive outsiders trying to break in and tear it all down as filthy gaijin invaders, honorless dogs who cannot be trusted.
Let this be a lesson: Don't attack your customers if you don't want them to despise you.
Absolutely amazing. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
It should be people like you who write on the condition of the industry profressionally. Only then will we actually see this hobby we've come to adore become sustainable once more.
Shit, that was long. I'm surprised I read all of it. Not sure I agree with the sentiment that honor, once lost can't be regained. It sounds very defeatist, and seems to imply (to me) that you might as well dig deeper into the hole if you aren't pulling yourself out. Maybe that's why these people double down so often.
@@AdonanS I don't claim to be a moderator of honor; most "honor" systems end up being little more than contrived notions for the "in" crowd to feel more self-righteousness than those on the outside, and often expect genuinely stupid actions to prove one's "honor". But what I can compare it to is general public sentiment; whether it's right or wrong (or even inconsistent), there are times when a public figure, a nation, a group of people, a company, or whatever it is garners a negative reputation, and there are very, very few cases in history of thoroughly negative public sentiment being fully reversible. Even if that sentiment is only in a minimal percentage of the public, that doesn't make its simmering dissatisfaction any less genuine, or less prone to enduring regardless of any efforts to reverse it.
You're right though, most of them do double down on their stances over time or when accosted over them. That behavior is more akin to a cult (which most progressive behaviors and even rhetoric parallels almost perfectly), and cults don't apologize to "heretics", they persecute them. Even if we don't consider it a cult mentality, the simple aspect of human nature that people tend to have pride and don't like to be told they're wrong, irrelevant, or anything less than the most special pretty princesses anywhere; how ironic it is that the chiefest of the seven deadly sins is a rallying cry for them. Humility is the opposite: Make a mistake? Acknowledge it and learn from it to grow into a wiser and better person. Pride makes people refuse to admit they can be wrong. Another kind of pride is patriotism, and people love to feel like patriots, heroes of justice, by espousing causes like social justice.
Having been on the inside of a religious cult, once upon a time, I've seen human pride lead people to turn on their audiences just to try to prove they're holier than thou. Morality is considered a religious thing, but when topics completely deviating from religion - like, say video games - inspire nearly an entire group of people to call other people moral degenerates, to say that they're wrong or bad or evil, or even openly admit to hating them over something as simple as a character design, goes a long way toward proving how morally corrupt they really are behind their flags and masks.
A humble man knows he has flaws and admits to his mistakes so he can learn from them; he listens to feedback, because he knows he may not be able to see the whole picture from where he stands. That's something the games journalists, on the whole, can almost never do: Admit when they're wrong.
It's really, really hard to trust someone who refuses to let life itself paint them as wrong about something.
Bro, post this on Substack, not the YT comments, lol
In the age of social media and streaming, game journalists are useless. I can just watch some gameplay and decide if I want to buy it myself.
Good game journalists are not useless, in fact, a lot of those streamers are doing what game journalists would do, the thing is, we don't have good game journalists on these sites, or they're so buried that most people never find them.
But a review made by a journalist (a good one) will always have bits that a casual Steam review won't be able to tell you, they're supposed to be professionls, that know what they're talking about, and know what their consumer wants, clearly, that's not the case for most "journalists" that for the most part, are really activists that think they're doing the same.
@@Acuas Thats only because of access journalism. They get the games first, as well as direct communication to the devs and higher ups. Now companies are atleast trying to give interviews directly to content creators who play the game and who have their own organic base of fans.
Honestly yeah usually word of mouth from friends or a handful of UA-camrs are probably the only people I trust for honest reviews of games. The UA-cam ones I always question just for the mere fact that they can be bought and these companies have a lot of cash to spend.
Literally all you have to do is wait one day past release find a large collection of pretty detailed reviews on Steam, written by people who payed good money and really wanted to enjoy the game. By then you'll have more than enough information to decide if a game is worth buying or not. It's especially enlightening to look at the negative reviews, and see if the points mentioned even matter to you. I'm generally not going to trust anyone who treats playing games as a job.
Actually, game journalism isn't really about gameplay anymore. It's about digging through games to figure out which ones will be abusive micro-transaction horror shows, uncovering mistreatment of the developers, and finding out what happened when something goes horribly wrong. Real journalism work in gaming and video game reviews have basically completely separated.
Can you imagine if Car and Driver, or other car enthusiast media, wrote about cars and car enthusiasts the way these game journos write about game enthusiasts? Can you imagine if every issue was saying that car repairs and modification should be illegal, we had to stop using gasoline now, sports cars are the devil and you were evil if you drove one, if you have an old car you need to turn it in for scrap for green initiatives, and that everyone needs to switch to a plug in electric smart car for city driving and switch to mass transit for out of city driving, while following electricity rationing due to the lower power output of wind and solar.
Do you think that publication would do well? HELL NO! But these game journos do the equivalent thing with games and they wonder why everyone hates them and won't buy what they're selling. It's insane. This is what happens when you create an entire industry out of people who got useless degrees from a college industry that seems more concerned with churning out useless grads instead of getting important roles filled. It seems every game journo wanted to work at the times and quickly found out they weren't cut out for it and it was either this or shilling pharma drugs.
cars are for adults. games are literally made for exploiting bored well off CHILDREN
That's probably one of the best comparisons anyone has shown.
People with gender studies degrees are like this game journalist
These people are not journalists, they are activists. End of story.
Cringe
@@viddotts44 found one
Activists doesnt feel luke the right word, propagandists seems more like it. (not political propagandists, just propagandists)
@@TabbyVee fanatics, zealots, acolytes, useful idiots .. there's such a wide variety of things to call them, English is a wonderfully rich language.
@@TabbyVeeagreed some activists are actually good people who just want equality these are propagandists they want their agenda
It's a bit tiring that games journalists are just writing their articles for the haters to hate read. Journalists should just leave Twitter, it seems to be dominating their minds and work too much.
Honestly just not being active on twitter AT ALL is healthier for a lot of people. The place is a cesspool of toxicity in the 'culture war' and not engaging with it is the key. Don't want to see Maga idiots give their dumb opinions, get off twitter. Don't want to see radical feminists give their opinions? Get off twitter.
just wanna say I am still wheezing at the fact that they named the easy mod ' Journalist mode '
Are you serious? 😂
Wich game did that?
"Game reviews are objective and no game reviewer is out to ruin a developer".
Anyone remember when Kingdom come: Deliverance either got bad to middling reviews or no coverage at all because there was not enough diversity in a game based on historically accurate version of the medieval Europe country of bohemia and the lead dev refused to back down from pressure from "journalists" to change it into a medieval version of LA?
The first IGN articles covering KCD2 was about their "controversial sins of the past".
The same happened to a lesser degree with Final Fantasy 16 and when Square lost money after several previous bad investment into stuff like NFT's the articles tried to make it seem that it was FF16's fault that the company lost money despite being one of the best selling games that year.
Pretty sure I remember Witcher 3 also getting that "not inclusive enough" treatment for a game based on polish folktales and mythology, but at least CDPR had their own good history to fall back on for the journalists to do any real damage.
I love kcd but it got mid reviews because it had serious problems, especially technical ones. And the melee combat is garbage.
@@Franku40keks ua-cam.com/video/0MqHva92TWI/v-deo.html
@@Franku40keks Tried several times now to link different articles that talk about this but I think YT blocks links.
But look up Metro's article titled "Games Inbox: Kingdom Come: Deliverance r*cism, Sonic All-Stars Racing 3, and Fire Emblem on Switch".
Many journalist don't complete the games, and they suck at them. Never listen to them.
Ok, how do you know? As far I've seen, almost all reviewers get either credits or at least an ending.
@@Braiam Uh, because they flat out tell you they don't complete games. I don't know what planet you live on but the vast majority off game journos have said time and time again they don't complete games. Typically they play a few hours until they feel they can write a review. Reviewers that complete games are a very very small minority. It's why reviews missing late game shenanigans has become a real big problem.
You are probably confusing youtube and twitch streamers with game journos. Professional games journalism has been dead since around 2012.
Yeah, that was just a straight up lie. Frosk admitted that she had a wholeass team that beat the games she'd review.
You don't necessarily have complete the game to see what the loops are. Along with where the grinds are and are not. The problem is they don't play enough of the games to see these loops or are ignorant to them and instead make subjective reviews of their experience rather than the merits of the game itself.
@@Braiam you never get to watch video game journalists play, you are thinking of streamers, two very different things.
I still remember how they reviewed dark souls 1, they only gave elden ring as high as praised as they did because the last time they tried to say one of the fromsoft games was bad the internet collectively gave them a notarized list of how wrong they were.
The sad fact of the matter is with most of these sites it's a popularity contest mixed with bribery (and yes a company allowing them to have extra time to review a game before it drops so that they have a day one review ready is bribery in this situation)
My attempt at being a game journo "NASCAR 2024 Track design is uninspired, mostly consisting of Ovals, 1/10 too many left turns"
Sorry. You need at least 2500 words in order to submit an article. 🤣😂🤣😂🤣
I have teenagers, man. You think I need a game critic to tell me what's good? One guy at my kids' school pirates the game and plays it and then spreads the word across school if its good. If I haven't heard of it, it's not good. And oh by the way, they wouldn't stop talking about Elden Ring for 6 months. Never heard anyone talk of a game for that long. So of course I bought it and played it. Playing through the DLC now. And it's as good as they said. They've never steered me wrong, these kids.
It is time for video game journalists to earn our trust again
Nah it's time for them to just fk off already. They write useless garbage. Just read steam reviews. They are thousands of times better and more useful.
I do not care about their opinions, i never read their reviews, they are obsolete.
At this point if I open their articles, it’s mainly for my laugh of the day. They’ve become the very thing they sought to fight off
Trust is like a shattered vase, you can glue it back together, but it will never be whole again. The damage is permanent and cannot be undone.
@@joelhodoborgas I feel like print games journalism was obsolete 20 years ago when old G4 was a thing. Idk how it's existed this long.
What this author doesn't bring up is that the reason people don't trust games journalist isn't just because they are bad at games or because they have controversial takes, it because they have spent the past decade trying their best to be as insulting to their readers as humanly possible. They have made no secret that they hate straight white men and what they define as "toxic gamers" and people are less likely to believe the words of a racist and a sexist regardless of what their take is. The stuff he claims is the reason are simply the "further evidence" bullet points that reinforce that belief, not the core reason why people dislike them. Even if games journalist made perfect reviews, the fact that they are bigots and hate their audience would still remain.
so lets see if I understand this right because my english is not that good... this "game journalist" is directly telling us to not watch them because 99% of the gamers point of view dont aline with what they think... do they even realice they are digging their own tumb at this point?
It's all politics - pushing their left or right leaning ideologies. FYI - your English writing is decent - I was able to understand your point! I'm always impressed when I see someone confidently talking in another language when I'm still struggling with my primary language, lol.
Digging their own grave is the phrase your thinking of, and no, they don't. They haven't 10 years ago when they came under fire for doing under the table deals with publishers to get good reviews and they still don't by attacking their supposed "audience". I'm not surprised by this in the slightest, games journalism at this point is and has been dead for years.
@@SamWulfign I would say they never stopped doing under the table deals, the fact that most games, even when they're bad as hell, get a 7/10, is all I need to know, the 7/10 score now a days mean absolutely nothing, because it includes the 7/10 games, and all the games below that, that this so called journalist are too scared to give the proper score because they might not get a review copy from that company next time? Or because there is some other incentives under the table? I wouldn't understand if that's not the case.
@@Acuas Oh I wholly agree with you. they tried to deny it then be hush hush about it hoping people wouldn't remember. It's not that we forgot it's that we're tired about mentioning it.
friendly help from an english speaker aline-> align , tumb -> tomb 👍🏻 thank you for trying to converse in english, we stupid americans appreciate it lol
They are targeting the reader. They are trying to lecture, guilt and shame people into giving them respect and doing what they want. This has become the norm, it's toxic and needs to be abolished entirely. We don't need them as we have many options for seeing an actual review. Being told what we should like and how we should feel..is absurd and not how this works. It's not just gaming media, it's all corporate media. No longer providing an informative service, but instead trying to force people to think and feel ways they feel are appropriate. Why pay for a lecture is a good summary. Even if it's 'free' it's not. No one should enable it by listening. I don't mind the occasional opinion piece which is clearly labelled as this, but the media is outright hostile toward the people they need to stay afloat. Never bite the hand that feeds you, through payment or watching your ads.
Does "please trust me" even come up outside of straight up lies anyway ? Facts or easy enough to correlate opinions should be enough lol
Wow...that's a good point; I never though about that. If you have data and the truth on your side-facts-then you don't need to constantly plead for people to trust you. The truth speaks for you and itself.
It's pretty easy to write plausible reasons as to why the game journos hate games: They wanted to use game journalism as a stepping stone to more prestigious journalism, but failed. When they graduated with their degrees in journalism, they imagined they'd be interviewing world leaders or exposing billion-dollar corporate scandals, but instead they have to write a review of Generic Live Service Looter Shooter #123657 by the end of the week and give it at least an 8/10 or the Chinese megacorporation that owns it will pull the ads that make up 40% of their revenue.
Also explains why so many of them are so active on social media: They know they're in a dead-end gig, and are trying to leverage it for as much clout as possible in the hopes that it lands them something better.
This is exactly what I've been saying. They had grans visions of writing pieces that would influence the world in their vision, except they got hired for the gaming division because they know how to operate a console. They detest this and try to instead force their politics and viewpoints into gaming.
There's a ton more reasons to not trust/respect game journalist reviews: "Hot take" titles to get more clicks, paid good reviews for bad games, calling out gaming companies for their non inclusive/difficult games, starting drama to also get more clicks... It's like trusting any comments on twitter. I just wait for the games to drop and watch some yt videos from creators that I trust to see if there's any red flags.
Imagine a cashier at a store starting to talk shit about you as a person, if you ask them questions about a product.
Trust is hard to earn easy to lose and very hard to reearn after. And they aint exactly going in a direction to reearn earn mine.
The guy has way more faith in games journalists than most. Ive read so many articles where it's super obvious they didnt actually finish the game and are just pretending to.
Oh, those guys that can't jump-dash.
Remember that journo that play Doom Eternal and couldn't even kill the first zombie in front of him? I wanted to say good times, but it was not
It's arrogance: there is no self reflection in this, not one ounce.
"Am I so out of touch? No! It's the audience that's wrong!"
Journalism in general is getting gutted, along with dozens of other formerly stable jobs but, in general, when it comes to entertainment (Games, Movies, Music, etc.) it really is ideal to just find reviewers and people in general who have similar interests as you do. Honestly, in this case in particular as long as your echo chambers are focused more on things you love than things you hate it's (usually) fine, but negativity is what sells so much it can sometimes feel completely exhausting just finding those people. Not to mention people change. Such is life.
He starts out saying that most game journalists are better gamers them most gamers. They have access to prerelease games, pre patch games, when they are the most difficult and beat them faster then other your average gamer. etc. etc. Then he says they are just like us. I can't relate to any of that stuff. I'm looking at my bank account trying to decide if a game is worth $40, $60, or $80 of my hard earned money for an entertainment expense. For me, those amounts are not trivial. I don't get comp copies. Also, I don't care about any of the DEI vs. Woke crap. If the game is good, I'll play it. If it isn't I won't.
That is a great callout and I can't believe I didn't catch that.
"We're just like you, BUT BETTER!"
hahaha.
Oh wait, they're serious? Let me laugh even harder!
HAHAHA!
HAHAHA!!
This is the part where we throw our heads back and laugh.
"So find someone with similar opinions to you." This is actually good advice. That works for movies and tv shows too. As long as it is not taken to the extreme where you purchase a product just because someone you normally agree with says it's good.
this is such cope, I'm 3 sentences in and hate this journalist.
One of the major issue with most people nowadays, not just game journos (although they seem to be doing this more often than anyone else) is that everyone reprimand others for being part of a Culture War while they themselves do everything in their power to further and thrive in said War.
Actively hating on your customers pushes them away, who would have thunketh? But to be honest, I have always preferred reviews from independent people or friends over a journalist who is most likely coerced into writing a positive review (otherwise they will not get a preview again next time or no paycheck). Steam reviews and discussions on reddit work better for me at least...
You don't really want someone's opinion that was bought and paid for.
i come from the future. Congrats on the 100k subscribers, man. ABSOLUTELY DESERVED. Love your content
Trouble is there are so many articles nowdays that are less about the games and more about a stance either political or ideology. I was looking at some games mags from the 90s and just seeing them talk about the games and little else was refreshing
This. I get that things are more polarized these days, but it wouldn't kill any of these journalists to be inclusive towards people with opinions that are different of their own.
@@escthedark3709or focus on the game itself. I swear the worst one was the review for the ps5 where it doesn't even talk about the specs or upcoming games for the console but the writer's politics and nastiness just spewing throughout the article. How is stuff Luke this approved?
@@escthedark3709And it wouldn't kill readers to be fine with minorities being in games without screaming D.i.D
"Journalists" destroyed any trust and credibility I could associate with them over a decade ago when they were writing that "gamers are dead and we don't need to treat them as our audience anymore", and have made negative progress in proving those articles wrong
game journalist SHOULD BE GOOD AT GAMES! that is their job. they must be objective, concise, and can spit out an educated opinion about a game.
this article are pure projection. trust are earned and their conduct leave a lot to be desired.
game journalist also need to distance themselves from game activist, right now they are indistinguishable.
I don't think that's true. If a rocket explodes then you don't need to be a rocket scientist in order to see what's wrong with it. I get what you mean, but it's more nuanced than that. Maybe it should be more like base competency? Maybe you meant that and I got it wrong. lol
Journalists being bad at video games is one of the smallest issue with gaming journalism. It was just a red herring threw in by this lying piece of work and even while doing that he couldn't help himself and had to straw-man and misrepresent it.
@@TheOneGreat ''If a rocket explodes then you don't need to be a rocket scientist in order to see what's wrong with it'' Incorrect, you know it exploded, yes, but you don't know why, which could be one or more aspect(s) of the the rocket.
I still remember reading gamespot and gamespy back in the late 90s, early 00s. It's night and day compared to today.
You don't need to be a good aeronautical engineer to understand why a rocket exploded, but you still need some level understanding.
For example, you might suck at Elden Ring because you have bad timing, but you can still understand the mechanics well enough that you don't blame the game for making it too hard to dodge when you are in fact fat rolling. If we wanted an uninformed, surface level impression of the game, we wouldn't need a journalist, se could just ask Billy down the street.
Ah, poisoning the well before even starting any arguments in your own favour. Your customers SURELY will want to empathise with you now!
Game journalism is just as much of a, if not a worse, circlejerk than it was a decade ago. Even when they try to somehow get customers to side with them, they manage to only regurgitate woe-is-mes that their journalist friends agree with.
I do think that the written form is the best way to pass on information. It's terrible that people are losing their jobs in writing professions en-masse now, but I can't help but think that not much is ultimately lost. Many of the sites being shut down produce low effort ragebait or those obnoxious "Here's five things you should know before you play *insert game here*" articles with no actual substance. All they can really offer is their activism that they can fit into an article. And there really isn't an audience for thinly veiled sneering at the audience they wish they could reach, but can't; they already drove them away years ago.
Again ? When the fuck did i ever listen to game "Journalists" .😂
You must be pretty young. A decade or so ago games journalists had some credibility and two decades ago you pretty much had to listen to them if you wanted any news from the games industry.
@VitalVampyr I'm 35 ... I remember when they were the only "news," but I never gave two shits about the reviews .
Ever since gamergate and that whole situation, I've never trusted gaming journalists, I trust steam reviews more than them.
There are few UA-cam channels I also trust. Sometimes, the games they review or rate are great, but I've been burnt with that as well, starfield, for example. It's a hard thing to navigate now, especially if there is a financial motive.
I remember reading a game informer review on elder scrolls oblivion when I was a teenager and how they talked about how massive the world was, how the npc's aged with time, the new tech, the story and the side quests. Now nobody on either side can write up a review without mentioning the inclusiveness of a game and blah blah instead of- Is the game fun? Is it clunky or or smooth and natural? Does it have a well written story? Is it innovative? What are the neat unique quirks or repetitive features? Is it fresh or just another tower climber like Far Cry? Obviously it's partly the games that are made, partly the journalists that think that the majority of players actually care about representation. We are moving towards finding hidden gems from small dev teams that game journalists aren't even talking about. That's usually where the fun and innovation is nowadays.
I really like the thorough review videos that UA-camrs make. They tend to be more realistic, HONEST, and in touch with gamers than journalists.
LOL journalist mode that's funny
Journalists as a whole are invaluable, once they tell me to do something, say something, act a certain way, i do the exact opposite. Its literally saved my life at least once.
I appreciate people like LD here. Saving me from having to sift through the nonsense.
This is why I love Steam. You can see other gamer's reviews before doing any purchase. This has more value than any journalist can ever provide.
lol. Journalists reported that it ER receiving negative reviews over difficulty when the vast majority of negative reviews were about performance.
I mean a game is gonna be pretty hard when you can barely play it to begin with!
Are we just gonna skip over how many games drop and when you go to their scores on metacritic, the journalists and reviews are all too often saying it is great while the player base hates it and downvotes it. Gran Turismo 7, a game that came out at the same time as Elden Ring, got 87 out of 100 on Metacritic from reviewers and 2.4 out of 10 from players. So yeah, its hard to trust you when its obvious that, even if we put aside the idea that there MIGHT be an alternative agenda, you at least aren't an accurate representation of the community that plays these games.
It's the mixing of actual tangible info about the game that contributes to a gamer being able to make an informed purchase, and including personal narratives that don't contribute to an informed purchase.
It's like what the government does when putting together a bill they're trying to pass. They include the things that will actually help, but then mix in a laundry list of stuff that doesn't help, but hurts the country for their own personal gain.
You are absolutely right, it DOESN'T matter that pay is tight and you have to play hundred hour games with bafflingly short turnarounds, it's your job. You applied for it. I don't care if you like it or not, you get paid to do something.
If you think that argument is going to make me trust you then I've got news for you, hearing that you are under a lot of pressure and seemingly not liking your job that much?
That makes me trust you **less**.
We can't find critics or reviewers or journalists who have our like mind because they are canceled, slandered, demonetized, and simply not allowed to exist.
In the same breath that they called her boring they said the creator had never seen a real woman … even if this particular guy didn’t do that in this instance there are FAR too many examples of “games journalists” piggy backing off other “games journalists” that it all starts to appear suspicious. You can’t just hand wave stuff like that away.
They beat the game? Pretty sure most game journalist only play the first 10 hours of the game they review and rarely ever finish the game. Even the most normal gamer finish more games than they do and it doesnt matter how long they take to beat it.
But you can't verify that, they can say whatever they want, its not like you can say definitively that they don't.
@@KaleSerpent but it’s easy to infer that they don’t play games much, because they would naturally always be trying to paint themselves in a better light, and they could verify it tho posting their hours on steam or something, and the fact they don’t, when it would obviously help their case is weird to say the least. It’s like, they could have that piece of evidence to help them in the court of public opinion, but by not including some information that could help them, it leads me to believe that it actually isn’t there. That if they posted their hours it would be clear they don’t play a lot of games. So they don’t.
@@tannersandusky2621 Ah see, that's what I'm getting at. They can make all sorts of claims, and since it's their life that isn't in the public eye, you can say they didn't but they will just say prove that they didn't. You can make conclusions, but it's not exactly definitive fact.
It's a guess, even a highly educated and well reasoned guess, but it's not definitive.
@@KaleSerpent yeah but when you're split hairs like that, there's no real insight. It's pretty obvious these people aren't always finish games. The tell is that they don't talk about the game. They immediately pivot to RL social issues to fill up the page because they didn't do their job, which was actually play the game and review it. They instead start reviewing Twitter comments.
Video game journalism was one of my fantasy jobs as a youngster. I grew up reading Computer Gaming World, PC Games, EGM and Gamepro. These people were THE ONES...they had the access to devs and publishers, they had the expertise and they had a very exclusive platform. Nowadays the magazines are long dead. I may try to pick up an expensive issue of Edge now and then because their production quality is so nice but I'm generally not turning to professional trade journalists for info about video games. The democratization of video games critique and news has been a net positive but I still believe there's a place for pros to operate. It's more along the lines of long-form features and investigative reporting, as these larger media firms will have many more resources to invest into this content vs. your average UA-camr.
The only people I trust with the video games industry are people in the steam reviews. They know their shit (if you can filter the memes ofc)
The memes can be informativ i bought a game because a review said its a game where you tell anime girls to get in the big fucking robot and start killing. Best 10 € i spent and the review was correct i did yell: i don't care if your brain flows out those ears get in there!
@@carbagehealth holy fuck how right you are, those places are filled any type of insult you can think of. they are never ever worth your time
I treat the steam reviews like I do Amazon reviews. I look at the highs and discount idiots who always give 5s look at the lows and discount people using it wrong, everything else has the potential to be informative.
Great video conversation... I agree with most of what you had to say on this subject... I also believe it's multiple factors leading people to stray away from main stream journalist sites and blogs with relation to the gamer space... It's kind of happening across most spaces these days as well... You were very right when it comes to what most gamers are seeking these days when they peruse the web... They are seeking as much information as possible, sometimes various opinions, to get a wider picture on specific topics/games/movies/etc... While journalists use to be the big thing, with magazine articles and game review websites (i.e. IGN, Polygon, GameSpot, etc), the range of opinions were limited mostly to those avenues... But over time, these news outlets and websites began gobbling up all their competitors, and so the number of articles and reviews became fewer and much more commercialized... Some of this was due to the industry influencing the media, and some of it was due to more fast profit focused tactics when it came to journalism... It became harder to find trustworthy articles with lots of useful information from those sources... Add in the boom of online content creators making gameplay videos, reviews, guides, and so on... The quality and amount of available content a gamer can refer to has become wildly diverse and numerous... To the point where you can watch a few reviews by fellow gamers and get a better picture then you can from a journalist's article...
I also highly agree that many of these journalists nowadays pay far too much attention to social media websites, as well as comments on their own sites... You would think professional journalists with degrees would already know many of the points you made... But I think we have a newer breed of journalists who don't have the professionalism, training, and/or enough experience to know what to take away from comments and what to ignore... Many times, it feels like these entertainment journalists and bloggers can be their own worst enemies... The industry they work in has become less and less relevant as well, and sometimes desperate times breeds desperate content...
When I look at an article like that one, I see a journalist lashing out at his/her readers... And it makes me wonder, is this just a desperate person treading water as they seek help for their industry, or is it just another person desperate putting out controversial talking points just for clicks, to keep the lights on?
I can’t think of a single mainstream gaming “journalist” who isn’t just writing activist garbage instead of gaming news
During Gamergate 1, the only gaming reviews that I could trust and were generally fun and enjoyable was Giant Bomb when they were with Whiskey Media. It was Jeff Gerstmann firing for not giving a positive game review Kane & Lynch.
They resisted being sucked into the controversy despite Brianna Wu and Patrick Klepek efforts for them to pick a side.
Ryan Davis passing months before didn’t help matters.
It led to Klepek leaving.
The problem with game journos is they are in bed with the games publishers acting more like evangelists than impartial reviewers.
The publishers buys ads on their websites and gives full access in return for positive articles.
At the core of what Gamergate was really all about….
Now, Giant Bomb has been assimilated into the woke collective with Alyssa Mercante infamous appearance challenging critics to fight her with that dumb smirk as the “fake” Giant Bomb team cheers. Jeff Gerstmann was fired weeks before he was set to quit.
Their articles are nothing more than propaganda.
I‘ve all but quit buying games. It’s no longer fun with everyone monopolizing the industry with half billion dollar games.
Gaming is ruined. I refuse to give these people a single cent after enduring constant name calling over a decade.
Holly, first time I've clicked on a video with "1 minute ago" upload time
That is a good sign. Do not hang out on yt all day :D
You’re hitting the nail on the head, even in this article they state the review for cyberpunk; mentioning only one thing the players and journalists agreed on, with the performance of the game. Those other things make people believe they don’t understand or why people like and play games
Trust them? Hahahahahahahahaha! No. As long as there are people like Nathan Grayson, Ben Kuchera, Alissa Mercante and Arthur Gies still around theres no trust to be had.
The way I choose games is by UA-cam. I follower
a lot of gamers and their opinions…and suddenly if I see an explosion of great videos on one specific game, then I believe there’s a reason to play it and I do…it’s how I ended up on Elden and fell in love. Same with cyberpunk reboot, and BG3, and Red Dead 2….and the UA-cam follows have NEVER MISSED.
The best part is reading the reviews after beating the games only become comedy article. NEVER TRUST THOSE WHO JUDGE FOR A LIVING!
The biggest problem with this guy is he's not even looking at the whole picture as he attempts to vilify gamers attitudes towards game journalists. He did nothing to call out or acknowledge the elephants in the room. Those journalists who spend their times writing opinion pieces about how gamers are racists for not liking a specific game or anything like that. He glossed over that GIANT GIANT pain point between journalists and gamers.
The reason gamers are so ready to tell journalists they hate games or gamers, is because they constantly bash the games a lot of us like for reasons typically aligned with their personal ideology rather than actually reviewing the game, and if they are reviewing any technical aspects of the game, the reviews are peppered with character attacks on the people who enjoy the game... most commonly seen in the headline even. Where jabs about players being "weird about eve" were prevalent, whenever players had an issue with censorship on the part of stellar blade. Lots of us find it weird that censorship exists in an M rated game... why is it needed? Its NEVER made sense. But what often happens is the response to this by games journalists and allies is "Y'all are just gooners." Meanwhile a fully naked Aphrodite in Hades 2, more revealing than Eve in stellar blade also, mind you, is getting praise on how hot she is. She gets a pass cause shes the goddess of love or somesuch, when love DOES NOT MEAN lewd. Baffles the mind.
Its nuts he doesn't acknowledge these parts of the argument at all and tries to convince people journalists aren't out to get them. Like, brother, I'm not convinced at all here, even though I disagree they aren't out to "get us"... whatever that is supposed to mean anyways... we do know that they are out to get our games.
- It was made quite evident when Games Science suddenly saw article after article pointing out a previous article calling them sexists over a mistranslation immediately after showing Sweet Baby Inc's ass on X.
- It was made quite evident with Stellar blade and the journos writing article after article doing victory laps when stellar blade got censored, and then similarly groaning when new versions of the outfits that were sexier were released.
- It was made quite evident when articles were being written showing concern about players becoming "fascists" because they were playing Helldivers 2 and because the woke cant meme or understand memes they took the jokes way too literally.
- It's made evident now, by the twisted articles related to assassin's creed shadows. Players are racist because the protagonist they expected to be Japanese is not Japanese, when in all previous releases the Main protagonist hailed from the area they were in. They refused to acknowledge the context that players are suspicious of forced DEI into the game and instead just call them racists for disliking that the black guy is in the game.
Given all of the above context there's absolutely NO reason we should trust journos, especially if they cant even be honest about the problems we're facing between gamers and games journos, and it is baffling that he has the audacity to ignore all these issues when telling us we should just trust the same people that are actively doing this now. Writing this piece was a poorly thought out decision, or a dishonest one.... and sadly with the journos' track record, I'm more inclined to believe its dishonest. That's how bad things are between gamers and journos atm. Acknowledge all of it and then we can try to rebuild or recover, otherwise shut up.
Found the journo
@@Daddynurg Interesting take. Perhaps you're referring to the fact that I did practically write an article here, or perhaps you didnt read too much of what I wrote and assumed what my opinion was.
@malikfoxen2045 i don't care what your opinion is too long didn't read
@@Daddynurg you're clearly a moron then, get out of my replies. I was responding to you in good faith.
@@Daddynurg You're wasting your time responding to me, cause its likely I agree with your opinion about the situation and you're attacking me because you didnt read. Pretty low IQ.
Let's not forget BG3's bear-fucking conundrum and how "game journalists" approached the matter.
0:10 That why gamers stay in doors. Vampires rules
The main problem with "games journalists" is the fact they obviously could not jobs as actual journalists.
The other main problem; they are college educated activists who use their journalist careers as a soapbox for their activism.
How about journalist actually doing their job and reviewing the genres they have experience and a way to compare to other games?
If someone has no way to tell if some system is good or bad but it seems decent enough all of a sudden most games are 9 or 10/10 which is a joke coming from ppl who are supposed to be critical
Trust is earned, not given. If you break it, it takes a lot more to fix and that is if the one you broke it with wants to fix it.
The industry was better when both the media and the developers were just hardcore fans, many self taught. Now the industry is mostly college kids who just got into development because they thought it be cool.
Nah, it's the executives that are the issue. When it comes to developers, at least.
@@Worm38p it's the same problem. College kids getting into passion fields. DEI isn't doing us any favors either.
I can't stand all the politics and ideology included in game reviews.
You said it perfectly. Those things add no value to the regular gamer.
More than that, I have been completely driven away from games media by the crazy politics in their game reviews
They have completely lost touch with the regular gamer.
Game journalists are not woke, journalism is a BUSINESS and the main aim is MONEY. They don't care about "honesty" or "morality", but just clicks and ad revenue. Due to the diminishing reader base, they can only write clickbait titles that are so catchy and ragebait that a random youtuber covers it so that they can became relevant again. They can then meet the monthly quota and show it to their boss that they probably despise.
I tell people this all the time.
Journalism is in the business of selling stories not Truth.
10:21 The Elden Ring DLC wasn't that hard pre-patch. It was just that most people did the usual "bang you'r head against the wall" tactic and did not realized that you need to go and explor + did not used the new tear stone which to be fair should have been given to them at the start because it changes the game in a very drastic way.
3:46 it’s a “myth” that games journos hates games and aren’t good at it is something this “writer” never understood yet he mentioned “Cuphead guy…”
you're not the customer, you're the product! The companies buying ads are the customer, the opinions don't matter outside of getting clicks, nothing matters but the clicks...
Lol, this is so manipulative.
"she talked about stereotypes, sexism, sjw stuff, crass stuff and optimization. Look. Now you ALL agree with her"
No, we agree with one thing out of 10. Yes, she(?) deserves an apology from some people for that one point about optimization. Nothing more.
Also, 14:13, so, like a streamer/youtuber. Because when we talk about a publication, there are a lot of people who are hard to destinguish, who all use same platform and for the game you are interested in, the guy you wanna see a review from, won't be on that task. Unlike some streamers you agree with, where you always see their face, and they alone are on that source
No she doesn't.
Journalists used to come from the working and middle class. Once you understand that only a few wealthy kids born into wealthy families are able to work at "the press" today, you understand why this article was written. A random blogger has more integrity and understanding of a topic than the journo these days, and I remember when these journalists used to laugh about the people who are retaking journalism back into the hands of regular people and now get hundreds of thousands of views on their honest work. Journalist today don't understand the concept of honest work.
The absolute fastest way you can get me to not trust you is for you to proactively insist that I can definitely trust you.
Honestly, it's almost too much irony. Trust game reviewers? No one has for at least a decade. Turns out, it really WAS about ethics in games journalism.
Games journalists are so unnecessary now. Why listen to someone who is a part of a company with a ton of potential bias and conflict of interest when we can just communicate with actual gamers anywhere else on the internet? We do not need a mouth piece for gaming communities anymore, the community can just speak for itself amongst itself. Even if they could earn trust and do a better job, it's still redundant.
Things would go a hell of a lot better for game journalists if they just remembered one simple fact. 90% of Gamers aren't on Twitter! Instead they keep getting mad at trolls and labeling Gamers, putting us in a box and saying "this is what you are" then getting mad when gamers lash out and say f*** you. Of course we're going to get mad at you. You keep freaking pretentiously telling us we're terrible no matter what like you have some deep insights into our souls.
The wages are low? I won’t be satisfied until the wages for games journalists are $0
Low seems far to high for these "journalists".
none of this addresses the fact that many times (though certainly not always) journalists are only given early access to a game because the outlet they work for is in an implied quid pro quo relationship with the developer. fromsoft and elden ring are terrible examples to raise up as reasons to trust games journalists because fromsoft 1, actually cares about making good games, 2, welcomes criticism when it's deserved, and 3, stands by their work when it isn't.
personally, i didn't think the dlc was harder than the base game, in the sense that the progression felt the same as it did in base. you went somewhere new, got your ass handed to you, found some new tools and learned some new mechanics, leveled up, and by the time you beat the boss of the region you have a solid handle on things until you move on and repeat the process. did i die a bunch of times to the final boss and try a bunch of different strats until i finally won? you bet, just like i did in the base game.
everywhere you look in society you're going to find judgmental purists. they're basically the same person, an extremist who takes whatever you're discussing to the nth degree, and if you're not as extreme as them, you're doing it wrong. example: when i was recovering from spine surgery, i was bored out of my skull, so i took up knitting and crocheting, and got into a social media group that centered on the topic, sharing patterns, techniques, links to small businesses who made custom tools and yarn, etc., and people would post pics of their work, and of course there would be at least one nasty comment (couched in flowery language because it was a group predominantly of women) about how their project wasn't absolutely perfect. the mods were very good about kicking them out, but the fact remains that even in such a low-stakes arena, people will always do this. the rest of us need to learn to identify this unwarranted criticism as stemming from something being wrong psychologically with the other person and let that shit go.
as for the whole "wokerati" thing, i'm just going to leave this here and let you, the reader, figure it out: if someone tells you you're doing something that hurts them, and then you either 1, tell them it shouldn't hurt, and/or 2, continue to do it anyway because you like doing it, don't then be surprised if they tell you to go screw yourself. this goes in both directions, and is applicable to any scenario you're willing to analyze, including your own behavior.
Beginning of the article be like "wah WAAAH im offended on behalf of underpayed, overworked game journos who have to beat games fast and unpatched!" yea dude that's why you get PAID to do it while rest of the players is not. So players expect at least average-player-level insights from game magazin articles, not pro-analytics about metagame and builds before release (player community will do this themselves for free later) but responsible review that will help average player understand if they have to give this game a try or it for different audience really
But no, game journalists write either nonsense that barely intersect with any content of the game, or articles that is not about games completely, maybe game in question shortly discussed in first sentences and then its just soy blog about world and society
10 "Elden Ring have bad UI"/10
I don't understand how you could forget steam has a 2 hour return window, it's the best form of a review, just play the game and if you don't like it's first impression, return it. It's all digital, they don't give a shit.
Tbh, it never appeared to me that I can listen to a game journalist instead of reading steam reviews/watching trailer and checking out previous games of the studio. I realized that until this very moment I lived like the game journalists exists just to make a funny videos about them :o
Why do you need journalism in a place where there is a ton of statistics and customers reviews??
It's funny how a game journalist boasts about being able to beat games they review despite having no guides or whatever while completely ignoring the fact that they do it on easy/story mode and in longer(like say MMOs)/more difficult(like say FromSoft games) games they don't actually finish them, nor get anywhere near that. Similarly the whole journalists hating games is not so much about them actually hating the games they play but rather about journalists bowing to their corporate and ESG overlords which in turn colors their criticism of games and make it seem like they hate games since their criticisms mostly revolve around ESG issues rather than things actually related to the games themselves.
It was really eye opening seeing the reviews come out for the Elden Ring DLC. There were youtubers whose entire channel is Elden Ring content who got passed up for early review access, but then random journalists from gaming news publications got access just to give embarrassingly cringe "I obviously jumped into this conversation 30 seconds ago" reviews. It just made it very clear to me that something is off in the gaming journalism world.
The first contact I had with reviews and commentary on games were from TotalBiscuit. I do remember one of his videos where he discussed the nature of what a review is and what was that he actually did do. He Mentioned the whole "subjective" nature of the thing and in the end, what he said is that a person can be objective on his reviewe. He can recognize a good game, even if he don't like it.
I often wonder what he would say about so many things in this hobby for the last years.
Sure is lucky that thousands of chinese accounts made negative reviews about the mascot of the anti-cheat so it looks like gamers agree with reviewers on the difficulty of the DLC. I have no doubt there are people around complaining the DLC is too hard, it IS hard, it's supposed to be. But if you use the tools the game gives you it isn't unfairly hard (though perhaps some bosses could be tweaked, but I'm not gonna get into the weeds here), you have the tools you need to beat these bosses, just use them.
I don't not trust professional reviewers because I think they want to destroy the gaming industry (specific reviewers notwithstanding), I don't trust them because over time the companies they work for have shown that they care more about their writers being corporate mouthpieces who mindlessly re-write advertising copy from other companies in exchange for lucrative marketing deals than actually being a source of news and useful information. We've seen it over and over again, probably the biggest and most public being when Giantbomb was created because IGN was trying to force a reviewer to give a better score to a game they had been pushing in marketing for months, and they refused and quit instead.
If I'm looking for a game review these days I have youtubers I'm subscribed to for that purpose, people who love the genre of games they play and are always looking for new and exciting games in those niches and are as ready to complain as they are to praise. I know I'm probably getting an honest opinion and a real look at what the game has to offer to a player, but hey, that's me.