Most video game publications are dying. Good riddance!

Recently one of the most known video game publications, Polygon, was sold to another company, and the majority of its staff was outright fired.

This trend is by far not unique to that one publication. If you check most such websites (such as IGN, Kotaku, PC Gamer, etc) on some online trend tracking website, you'll see that their amount of traffic has been steadily decreasing over the last 10+ years, in most cases being a minuscule fraction of the traffic that they got in their heyday.

There are two quite clear reasons why this is happening.

Video game publications used to be very popular in the pre-internet 1980's and 1990's because they were essentially the only way that people got any information at all about upcoming video games. Before the internet there was extremely limited ways to get this information. Without these publications you could essentially just rely on some ads, which were rather obviously extremely unreliable sources of information about how good a new game is.

Rather obviously, the proliferation of the internet has changed this dynamic quite drastically. No longer are video game publications the only source of information about upcoming and recently published games. Today, regular non-journalist people can write reviews, there are tons of discussion forums and real-time chats, there are YouTube videos, and myriads of other sources where people can get lots of information about games. The need for professional publications has decreased dramatically. People just don't feel the need to subscribe to nor purchase these publications. They don't provide much useful information that can't be found elsewhere online anyway.

However, I would surmise that that's not the only reason why all these video game publications are dying. It's perhaps the biggest reason, but not the only one.

During those decades, and to a large extent the first decade of the 2000's, most gaming journalists had very high standards of quality with respect to their articles and reviews. I have myself met such a journalist, and he explained how he had a surprisingly objective way of scoring games (from 0 to 10), even to a granularity of half a point. He was also very meticulous in the review article text itself, always reviewing particular aspects of the game.

Indeed, many, probably most, of these video game journalists felt that it was their duty to inform their readers about video games in a way that was as useful but also as neutral as possible, giving their readers as much unbiased information as possible about a game in order to help them make informed purchasing decisions.

In other words, most video game journalists had a lot of integrity.

However, during the past 15-or-so years these attitudes have changed radically among the majority of such publications, especially those that moved to being exclusively or almost exclusively online publications (and, rather obviously, new publications that were online-only from the beginning.)

A good majority of video game journalists have stopped being unbiased neutral reporters and reviewers, and have become political activists. And, most crucially and egregiously, not political activists fighting for and driving the interests of gamers, but the exact opposite: Political activists who started attacking gamers, their own readers and customers.

Some of the most notorious articles directly attacking, deriding and insulting their own readers, ie. gamers, are absolutely astonishing. These "journalists" don't seem to fully realize who they are attacking. They don't seem to realize that they are attacking the very people who pay their salaries. They are biting the hand that feeds them.

Is it, thus, any wonder that gamers have stopped subscribing to and purchasing these publications? Why would they do so when all they get is political activism against they themselves?

And, of course, these "journalists" then play the victim, while being completely oblivious to the fact that if you keep biting the hand that feeds you, it will eventually stop feeding you.

So, most if not all video game publications are dying off, one by one. I say: Good riddance. You made your bed, now you have to lie in it. Live with the consequences of your chosen activism.