Gaming Journalists Make No Damn Sense

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CriticalGaming

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I just don't understand why people act like they hold personal grudges over it.
It's because nerds never forgive and never forget Nick.

Also it's because gamers have a buried anger that they feel like their hobby isn't respected or treated like a legit thing, so when they see "officials" reporting and writing about this subject but are terrible, it feels like not even the people who are supposed to be making the hobby legit give a shit about it.

Whether intended or not, sites like Kotaku, Destrutoid, Polygon, etc, all have a status to them. They try to feel like "official" sources, and when gamers have been fighting a long stigma of media saying things like "GTA makes you a murderer" or "Mass Effect is a perversion of sex" on Fox and CNN it makes people sad to see that even sites dedicated to video game coverage don't give enough of a shit about it to try.

It's also about relating to your audience right? You want your reader to be on your same page and know where you are coming from, but nobody will do that when all the readers know you're writing nonsense.
 

Nick Calandra

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It's because nerds never forgive and never forget Nick.

Also it's because gamers have a buried anger that they feel like their hobby isn't respected or treated like a legit thing, so when they see "officials" reporting and writing about this subject but are terrible, it feels like not even the people who are supposed to be making the hobby legit give a shit about it.

Whether intended or not, sites like Kotaku, Destrutoid, Polygon, etc, all have a status to them. They try to feel like "official" sources, and when gamers have been fighting a long stigma of media saying things like "GTA makes you a murderer" or "Mass Effect is a perversion of sex" on Fox and CNN it makes people sad to see that even sites dedicated to video game coverage don't give enough of a shit about it to try.

It's also about relating to your audience right? You want your reader to be on your same page and know where you are coming from, but nobody will do that when all the readers know you're writing nonsense.
That's my point exactly though. All of the people constantly hating on the things you mentioned KEEP GOING BACK. Lol.

I've read enough Kotaku in my time to know I never feel like I get anything of value from reading their stuff aside from Jason's big reports. So I stopped reading them.

Polygon used to be fun to read and I love their Cover Stories, but the rest of their stuff aside from news is just negative all the time. So I stopped reading them.

People spend so much time bitching and complaining about these sites they don't like, writers they don't like, and then don't go out and support or help promote the sites / writers they do like. It's ridiculous how much time people spend just being angry about this sort of stuff. If you're really that bothered by it, remove the toxicity from your life and move on to content you do like.
 

CriticalGaming

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That's my point exactly though. All of the people constantly hating on the things you mentioned KEEP GOING BACK. Lol.

I've read enough Kotaku in my time to know I never feel like I get anything of value from reading their stuff aside from Jason's big reports. So I stopped reading them.

Polygon used to be fun to read and I love their Cover Stories, but the rest of their stuff aside from news is just negative all the time. So I stopped reading them.

People spend so much time bitching and complaining about these sites they don't like, writers they don't like, and then don't go out and support or help promote the sites / writers they do like. It's ridiculous how much time people spend just being angry about this sort of stuff. If you're really that bothered by it, remove the toxicity from your life and move on to content you do like.
Well i dunno about anyone else, but I tend to use Kotaku to get my gaming news. Game announcements, summaries of presentations that I can't watch myself (like the Xbox thing that just happened). Along the way of checking for news, I see articles like what I originally posted and I think it's something to write about.

I don't think the "If you don't like it, don't read it" thing is valid because the standards of the community should be better. Why don't other "journalists" talk more shit about all the others who bring the standards of game's reporting down? I don't understand why other people who do good jobs at this stuff like Jason Scherier (despite some of his politics he is a good reporter) try to improve the standard of everyone else. Those of you who write professionally seem completely okay with the reputation being dragged through the mud, instead of trying to get your fellow peers to stop treating your job like crap.

When someone does badly in almost any other profession, other perfessionals in that field either try to get that person to improve or they get them out of the field. From Sports, to news, to my personal field of travel souvenir sales. Believe me as a traveling salesman, all of us know who the scumbags are and we all collectively work together to make sure that the one person doesn't ruin the rep of the rest of us and eventually that person is forced to either improve his work ethic or they leave the field. Nobody wants to watch someone drag their job through the mud because they don't care about it.
 

Houseman

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You obviously don't think the guy is credible as a games journalist, so why even bother wasting time thinking about it?

Because it's indicative of a much larger problem with the industry as a whole. It's brought up whenever journalists get dunked on because it so perfectly illustrates the point: "people like this are in charge of writing about games".

And that's the point. The journalists in charge of games journalism often display a lack of passion for gaming. Dean is just the prime example of someone who clearly has no passion for games, because otherwise, he'd know how to play them.

That's what gamers object to. They object to having their hobby covered by people that have no passion for it.


Also, what dreiko and criticalgaming said.
 

Nick Calandra

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Well i dunno about anyone else, but I tend to use Kotaku to get my gaming news. Game announcements, summaries of presentations that I can't watch myself (like the Xbox thing that just happened). Along the way of checking for news, I see articles like what I originally posted and I think it's something to write about.

I don't think the "If you don't like it, don't read it" thing is valid because the standards of the community should be better. Why don't other "journalists" talk more shit about all the others who bring the standards of game's reporting down? I don't understand why other people who do good jobs at this stuff like Jason Scherier (despite some of his politics he is a good reporter) try to improve the standard of everyone else. Those of you who write professionally seem completely okay with the reputation being dragged through the mud, instead of trying to get your fellow peers to stop treating your job like crap.

When someone does badly in almost any other profession, other perfessionals in that field either try to get that person to improve or they get them out of the field. From Sports, to news, to my personal field of travel souvenir sales. Believe me as a traveling salesman, all of us know who the scumbags are and we all collectively work together to make sure that the one person doesn't ruin the rep of the rest of us and eventually that person is forced to either improve his work ethic or they leave the field. Nobody wants to watch someone drag their job through the mud because they don't care about it.
I guess I should clarify that I do read things I wouldn't agree with. I'll read anything to gain insight or a different perspective. I just don't like reading publications where I constantly feel condescended or pandered to.

And there are writers that do call that stuff out, but like I mentioned earlier in this thread, when you do you run the risk of being labeled any number of things. So long as you're good with that and the harassment that comes with it, go for it. Do I think there's some secret organized cabal of journalists? No. Is there a clique of folk that show up in just about every conversation to defend their friends when they're called out? Yes.

People never want to admit it, but it's so painfully obvious if you follow games journalism in any capacity that I'm not afraid talking about that part of it anymore, and it's part of the reason why I'm pulling The Escapist away from traditional games journalism into our own little sphere of creating content that's both informative and entertaining.

Again as someone pointed out before, I could call it out and I have in the past, but I just have no intention of being involved with it or getting dragged into any of that drama.
 

Nick Calandra

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Because it's indicative of a much larger problem with the industry as a whole. It's brought up whenever journalists get dunked on because it so perfectly illustrates the point: "people like this are in charge of writing about games".

And that's the point. The journalists in charge of games journalism often display a lack of passion for gaming. Dean is just the prime example of someone who clearly has no passion for games, because otherwise, he'd know how to play them.

That's what gamers object to. They object to having their hobby covered by people that have no passion for it.


Also, what dreiko and criticalgaming said.
Dean's not in charge of anything though...in fact, I don't even know what you're referring to when you say anyone is in charge of games coverage. I've been covering games for a decade, there's no such thing to what you're referring to. As I stated above, I do think there's a clique of people in games coverage and I know from experience that they do show up in convos to consistently dogpile people they disagree with. So do they try to exert their authority? Yes, but people are pushing back on that, myself included.

Funny enough, the people you're most likely referring to completely wrote Dean off a couple months ago for his story on the working conditions at Quantic Dream that challenged the reporting of someone from Kotaku on the matter and let the bosses of QD share their side of the story.

Wasn't a great piece either way because PR was in the room when he was talking to employees, so that kinda makes the whole interview worthless at that point from a journalist's perspective, but either way, they dogpiled him to oblivion for it.

I'm not disagreeing with you entirely that there's fundamental issues in games reporting, and yes I do think there should be some standard of coverage and that if you're going to review something, you should have the basic knowledge to know what you're talking about. If were asked to review an RTS, I don't expect one of our writers to be a master of RTS games, but they should understand the fundamentals of the genre and how to play it provide a review.

But again, you're focusing on people that you believe don't have a passion for the hobby. So why not go find content creators / writers that you think do have a passion for the hobby and align with your interests?
 

Houseman

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Dean's not in charge of anything though...in fact, I don't even know what you're referring to when you say anyone is in charge of games coverage.
By "in charge of", I meant "given the task of". Like, if your task is stocking the shelves, you're in charge of stocking the shelves, in a sense. I didn't mean to suggest he's some sort of decision-maker.

But again, you're focusing on people that you believe don't have a passion for the hobby. So why not go find content creators / writers that you think do have a passion for the hobby and align with your interests?
Because that's not enough.

Let's say you own a restaurant. You've created a nice little walled garden out front so customers can eat outside. It's pleasant, and clean and safe and the food is good.
However, your restaurant is the exception. 9 times out of 10, if you enter any other restaurant, it's horrible. It's infested with rats, there are addicts doing heroin in the bathroom (which is never cleaned), and the food is gross.

So when people complain about the other restaurants, you say "Why complain about those places? My place is nice and clean and rat-free! Just come here and never go to those places again!"

Well, because those places still exist and are an absolute blight on the town. They need to be fumigated, and the rats exterminated, or otherwise burned down. They're breeding grounds for disease and cause no shortage of problems for everyone else. People from the next town over go to those places as a joke, solely to make fun of them. The restaurant needs to be protested, people need to be made aware of the problems, the mayor needs to be alerted, and Vice needs to be called in to make a documentary.

We think our town deserves better. We know those restaurants can do better, as well. We care so much about our town that we want to see it reach its potential, and do, what we believe, deep down, our town is capable of doing.

See the point? While you might be fine, focusing on your own restaurant, things are NOT fine everywhere else. Your restaurant doesn't fix the problem, unless you somehow gain the power to change how other restaurants are run and managed.

And for a second illustration: It's kind of like saying "Why are you out here protesting racism? Why not just go back to your own country?" I don't think this needs any explanation.
 
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NewClassic

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I think my biggest stumbling block for discussions like these is there is seemingly no depth a person will go to in search of something to dislike.

Designing games takes a lot of time, and increasingly, costs a lot of money. Players who hate this about games will criticize it loudly and furiously, wielding it like a cudgel on anyone who doesn't criticize whatever game has their ire. They will also, almost without fail, buy this games on or around launch, and the companies that make these games will see these numbers and continue to do what they want, insulated from the community's ire while critics who reviewed it well (or even just too okay for someone's taste) and the social media managers get the brunt of it.

Criticizing games is a road that could take any number of forks. Kotaku has covered genitalia mods in games, discussing the relative difficulty of dealing with certain bits over others, and how that has made a prevalence of nude mods for (N)PCs of one physical sex, but a near total absence of mods for the other. However, this kind of thing is weird to cover, but of interest to someone out there. Probably multiple someones. Likewise, some critics spend a ton of money doing deep, in-depth research, interviews, scouting, to produce excellent and incredibly journalistic reports about something some readers don't care about, so they ignore it while complaining that "game journalists never do anything." Austin Walker's excellent coverage on the Sleeping Dogs game that will never be. Wesley Yin-Poole's Lionhead Studios retrospective. Cecilia D'Anastasio's Sexism at Riot Games piece. Some critics spend a great deal of effort writing 1,600 words of a review on a popular title, and spare 200 other words in the same review to discuss something of social or political importance to them (and probably a section of their readership as well), and despite the 1,600 words of review that covers exactly what some vocal complaints call for, they only focus on the 200 they disliked even though that same article gave them exactly what they want. There is no single road to a good review, criticism, or opinion, but there is a pretty singular guarantee that someone, someone, will hate something in any piece of criticism, for any reason.

Plop a professional speedrunner of Doom in front of Smash Bros. Ultimate and they might struggle to defeat some of the higher level enemies. Put a master of flight sims in a driving pit for iRacing and they will very probably crash more than once around a track. Plop me in front of a Street Fighter II cabinet and I'll lose every round, plop me in front of a Soul Calibur III arcade and I'll probably win more battles than I lose. Plop anyone on the road to gaming, and that road could take many forks. I am better than you, no matter who is reading this, at some games. Of this I have almost no doubts. I am worse than you, no matter who is reading this, at some games. Of this I have almost no doubts. So, "good at games" is a weird metric to get stuck on, particularly because the examples people often site — a handful of the same writers — across the entirety of games criticism, is such a comically small number that it makes almost zero difference in the grand scale. But I will hear these same names over, and over, and over, and over again.

The internet loves to focus on what makes it angry. Anger is far more viral than mirth. So it doesn't matter what the subject, or how it's executed, people will find and circulate reasons to be angry at it.

In this kind of environment, why should anyone spend their energy worrying about what the disproportionately angry people are yelling about, when that same energy could be so much better used doing good? Especially because the largest missteps are seemingly "has a bad opinion about <x>" or "doesn't love games enough by an arbitrary gatekeeping metric that changes depending on who and when you ask."
 

CriticalGaming

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Plop a professional speedrunner of Doom in front of Smash Bros. Ultimate and they might struggle to defeat some of the higher level enemies. Put a master of flight sims in a driving pit for iRacing and they will very probably crash more than once around a track. Plop me in front of a Street Fighter II cabinet and I'll lose every round, plop me in front of a Soul Calibur III arcade and I'll probably win more battles than I lose. Plop anyone on the road to gaming, and that road could take many forks. I am better than you, no matter who is reading this, at some games. Of this I have almost no doubts. I am worse than you, no matter who is reading this, at some games. Of this I have almost no doubts. So, "good at games" is a weird metric to get stuck on, particularly because the examples people often site — a handful of the same writers — across the entirety of games criticism, is such a comically small number that it makes almost zero difference in the grand scale. But I will hear these same names over, and over, and over, and over again.
Your point here falls apart because the theme of what you are saying is that no what the game is, someone who plays video games will be able to have some sort of progress in playing it. If you are primarily a fighting game player, but someone sits you down to play an FPS, you'll probably get through a good portion of the game because you have basic concepts of how a video game works. You have the ability to figure out quickly what the buttons on the control do and what you need to press to handle the task at hand.

This becomes apparent when taking a look at articles you've referenced here. Many of them could be written without ever picking up a controller. It isn't hard to google "nude video game mods" and then write about the pictures you've found, rather than writing about your experience playing through Skyrim with a bunch of these mods installed. Notice the point of those articles is never "My experience playing Skyrim with nude mods" and instead is "Nude mods are sexist here's why", the later has nothing to do with the gaming experience in any way and is simply a political rant.

Then there is the article I started the thread with, easy is too easy and normal is too hard, and there really isn't much justification for the provided opinion other than the author didn't want to bother trying very hard....but wanted to try a little. Which again an example of an article in which you have to wonder what even the author is doing writing about video games in a professional manner anyway. If this was an article on youtube, or some random blog somewhere on the internet then fine, but someone posted this on a "Professional" site. Some Editor read that and went, "Yeah that's good." The lack of self-awareness is mind boggling and that's the problem.


And I do want to be fair to Kotaku because I feel like they get a lot of shit. The Majority of their fluff pieces are fine. They are boring imo, but they are fine. A recent article by Heather Alexandria about how they didn't want to finish FF7 Remake, not because the game was bad, but because they didn't want to leave the world and the characters behind, was fine. It didn't provide anything overly insightful, it was just a piece that expressed a feeling about the game and probably was written to fulfill a quota if I had to guess. But while fairly uninteresting, it's harmless and inoffensive so whatever. And a lot of Kotaku's shit is like that.

It's things like critiques, reviews, and news articles that i feel should have a level of professionalism to them, and part of that professionalism must come personal capability and knowledge.
 

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There is no single road to a good review, criticism, or opinion, but there is a pretty singular guarantee that someone, someone, will hate something in any piece of criticism, for any reason.
I feel there is a simple way to properly review a game (or anything), reviews aren't by any means anything new. You simply have to be honest on how you felt about the game. When you see that how often IGN and GameSpot are 0.5 difference between each other on the same game, something is "up" or "wrong" because no two people (or groups of people in that case) should ever be so agreeable in how good something is. People naturally don't like the same things to the same degree nearly that often. The "objective" review has ruined professional game reviews for well over a decade now. If a game is amazing it gets a 98/100 AVERAGE score whereas if a movie is great, 98% people just LIKE the movie, it's average score is nowhere near 98/100. And movies are static in what everyone sees and they only run for 90 minutes to 3 hours whereas video games are not static and run for far far longer. How can games have less variance in critical opinion than movies?

The other end of reviewing is being good at expressing why you liked/disliked something, which is what separates the good reviewers from the bad ones. For example, I feel Jim Sterling is perfect on the 1st part about being honest but is bad at the 2nd part so he's not that good of a reviewer IMO, and I feel him just doing Jimpressions now works much better than his reviews. I feel I'm pretty good (but not great) at describing why I like/dislike the game part of the game but I'm pretty bad at explaining what makes me like/dislike the story and character portion. Whereas I love Movies with Mikey because he's like a million times better than me at that. The trick that makes game reviews much harder than pretty much every other medium of reviews is that you have to good at both those things (the game half and "literary" half) and very few people are.

The internet loves to focus on what makes it angry. Anger is far more viral than mirth. So it doesn't matter what the subject, or how it's executed, people will find and circulate reasons to be angry at it.

In this kind of environment, why should anyone spend their energy worrying about what the disproportionately angry people are yelling about, when that same energy could be so much better used doing good? Especially because the largest missteps are seemingly "has a bad opinion about <x>" or "doesn't love games enough by an arbitrary gatekeeping metric that changes depending on who and when you ask."
I don't get why gaming has such anger with reviews and journalism. Has anyone ever DDOSed someone's site that gave a Marvel movie a 7/10 instead of a 10/10 like what happened to Jim Sterling? Why do so many more gamers care about a game's review score than moviegoers care about a movie's review score? I'm going to love my favorite movies and games regardless of what Metacritic or RottenTomatoes aggregated score says about them; Tom Hanks' greatest movie is The 'Burbs, I don't care it has a 53% rotten rating. I'm especially not going to say some reviewer is straight-up wrong about a score of something I haven't seen/played, yet that happens quite often with video games and rarely ever movies. Maybe the gamer community got (and created) the game journalism they deserve...
 

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I don't get why gaming has such anger with reviews and journalism. Has anyone ever DDOSed someone's site that gave a Marvel movie a 7/10 instead of a 10/10 like what happened to Jim Sterling? Why do so many more gamers care about a game's review score than moviegoers care about a movie's review score?
I'm just guessing, but part of the reason might be because gaming has a barrier to entry, and movies don't. Anybody can watch a movie, but not anyone can beat a game. This requires a certain level of investment. This investment manifests in feelings of ownership and protectiveness.

Again, that's just a guess about one part of the reason.
 

TheMysteriousGX

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The article that originally spurred this whole thread was an article in which a writer struggled with basic combat in FF7 in a fairly early mission that even provides extra NPC help, so they bumped it down to easy and then COMPLAINED that the said "easy" was too easy. Which to me is like saying, "I don't want a challenge, but I want a challenge." It contradicts itself, and just isn't presented to the reader with any logical argument imo.
That's because it's two different articles written by two different people. It's not a single self-contradictory article. Sam "Games" Journalis isn't a single individual.

And heck, I agree with that assessment of FF7R: It's normal mode is full of bullshit if you don't know what kind of fight you're walking into *and* it's Easy mode is so piss-easy, you might as well just go all the way down to Classic and save yourself some wear and tear on the controller.

I don't see why it's unreasonable to ask for someone doing a job to know HOW to do that job. Writing about video games means you should know how to play video games. It's not a difficult ask.
Except, in every example brought up, they *can* play video games. That CoD video shows Dean Takahashi maneuvering in a 3D space, picking up and using grenades and guns, tracking the target, and ending the match in about a minute with a victory. It showed what the mode looked like and how it played.

And, I guess, means he's not a real gamer because he didn't do it fast enough, or something? Sure, he doesn't have the reflexes of a twitchy CoD kid, but neither do I. Can I talk about video games? I mean, my KDR is probably gonna be atrocious in CoD, I've got no interest in Fortnight, and I lose a life to the first goomba in stage 1-1 25% of the time, but wandering around Apex Legends awhile before my inevitable demise is occasionally fun and I've got a Golden Toothpick in Splatoon 2, so where does that rate?
 

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And, I guess, means he's not a real gamer because he didn't do it fast enough, or something? Sure, he doesn't have the reflexes of a twitchy CoD kid, but neither do I. Can I talk about video games? I mean, my KDR is probably gonna be atrocious in CoD, I've got no interest in Fortnight, and I lose a life to the first goomba in stage 1-1 25% of the time, but wandering around Apex Legends awhile before my inevitable demise is occasionally fun and I've got a Golden Toothpick in Splatoon 2, so where does that rate?
Let me ask you this: How good would you expect someone to be at video games, if their job involved playing video games, after 20 years of allegedly doing that job? And if they weren't particularly good at playing video games, what would you think?

Also, your job doesn't involve playing games, so you asking "can I talk about video games?" is irrelevant when discussing whether or not games journalists can discuss games in their professional capacity.
 
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CriticalGaming

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Let me ask you this: How good would you expect someone to be at video games, if their job involved playing video games, after 20 years of allegedly doing that job? And if they weren't particularly good at playing video games, what would you think?

Also, your job doesn't involve playing games, so you asking "can I talk about video games?" is irrelevant when discussing whether or not games journalists can discuss games in their professional capacity.

I mean I don't see what DarkSydePhil has to do with any of this.
 

TheMysteriousGX

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Let me ask you this: How good would you expect someone to be at video games, if their job involved playing video games, after 20 years of allegedly doing that job? And if they weren't particularly good at playing video games, what would you think?

Also, your job doesn't involve playing games, so you asking "can I talk about video games?" is irrelevant when discussing whether or not games journalists can discuss games in their professional capacity.
I believe my posts in this thread show my attitude on all of that.
Like, I don't buy fighting games based on how balanced all the characters are when factoring priority and i-frames and whatever the hell wobbling is. So if I get a recommendation for a fighting game, I don't exactly need Sonic Fox to be the reviewer. How's the game play as a button-masher? Does the story stand up to the flimsiest scrutiny?

I'm an old fuck now. Reviews by twitchy shooter kids don't really help me out.
 

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So if I get a recommendation for a fighting game, I don't exactly need Sonic Fox to be the reviewer. How's the game play as a button-masher? Does the story stand up to the flimsiest scrutiny?
And I hope there's a journalist out there for you. If this doesn't already exist, it should be a thing: "Game reviews by people who love games, but are admittedly bad at them"

It could be marketed toward older gamers, first-timers, dabblers, parents of gamers looking to connect with their children, and the like. It could make it a point to highlight if there are difficulty and accessibility settings.

That would be great. Dean Takahashi could be the headliner. Nobody, not even the elitist git gud people, would have any objections to that.
 

CriticalGaming

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And I hope there's a journalist out there for you. If this doesn't already exist, it should be a thing: "Game reviews by people who love games, but are admittedly bad at them"

It could be marketed toward older gamers, first-timers, dabblers, parents of gamers looking to connect with their children, and the like. It could make it a point to highlight if there are difficulty and accessibility settings.

That would be great. Dean Takahashi could be the headliner. Nobody, not even the elitist git gud people, would have any objections to that.
I concur.

I think if the review or the article is labeled properly and isn't trying to pass itself off as something more than it is, then that would be pretty great.

Maybe that grandma who loves Skyrim can do reviews too.I'd watch the shit outta that.
 

TheMysteriousGX

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And I hope there's a journalist out there for you. If this doesn't already exist, it should be a thing: "Game reviews by people who love games, but are admittedly bad at them"

It could be marketed toward older gamers, first-timers, dabblers, parents of gamers looking to connect with their children, and the like. It could make it a point to highlight if there are difficulty and accessibility settings.

That would be great. Dean Takahashi could be the headliner. Nobody, not even the elitist git gud people, would have any objections to that.
And yet, here we are, getting mad at CoD review because he wasn't 360noscope1337 enough.
Getting mad at a positive Cuphead *preview* almost 3 years later. Which explicitly said the writer did particularly bad and at no point tried to pass himself off as an expert.
I concur.

I think if the review or the article is labeled properly and isn't trying to pass itself off as something more than it is, then that would be pretty great.
He literally called it "my 26 minutes of shame" in the headline.
 

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and at no point tried to pass himself off as an expert.
If people are being hired to play and then write about video games, but don't have expertise, then it's just a matter of misaligned expectations.

The gamers who aren't satisfied with the current state of games journalism expect the professionals that cover their hobby to have expertise in the field.
The journalists and the people who hire journalists don't.

Simple, isn't it?
 

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Sep 16, 2014
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If people are being hired to play and then write about video games, but don't have expertise, then it's just a matter of misaligned expectations.

The gamers who aren't satisfied with the current state of games journalism expect the professionals that cover their hobby to have expertise in the field.
The journalists and the people who hire journalists don't.

Simple, isn't it?
You're suggesting Games Journalist publications don't let anybody who doesn't meet some arbitrary level of expertise *at all times* ever, ever cover games. And if they fuck up in public, even once, despite the disclaimer literally being in the title, they should be removed from games coverage immediately.

All because Gamers shouldn't have to find writers and publications they actually like and support those instead. If all y'all nerds stopped clicking on this stuff, they'd cease to exist. That's how the business works. There's dozens of defunct game sites to prove it.

And if people *keep* clicking on their stuff, well...what do you expect? All the personal attacks and 43 minute Games Journalism Bad YouTube rage videos in the world won't stop it. That's how the business works. Just like how every other YouTube gaming controversy is some kid named Mylar with 2 million subscribers I've never heard about before. I could go get infinitely mad at infinite numbers of gaming personalities, but I just...don't go there.

Hell, 97% of the Games Journalism articles I've read in the last decade I only read because weird nerds were spreading it around to get performatively angry at and I wanted to know what their damage was. And now I get to adda CoD review to that list because the writer was on camera having the same reflexes as I've got when I start a new game.

Might see if there's a demo. Been a hot minute since I've played a CoD
 
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