The Quiet Consolidation of Game Journalism

[ThirdMarioBro]

Okay, I know nobody here really cares, but I thought I would post it anyway. I'm a game journalist, so things like this concern me. I've been thinking about this for a long time, but now that the week that we normally would have had E3 has come and gone, I think this article from the International Game Journalists Association is appropriate. I follow with a mini-editorial.

Originally Posted by IGJA

The Quiet E3
May 9th, 2007 by David

Hear that?

Yup. Silence. The odd silence of no May E3.

For a dozen years, May was filled with the marketing chatter and clatter of E3. During a time that not much else was going on in the games business, the world of game journalism buzzed with a sympathetic humming PR hype.

Strangely, minus the volume, not much has changed.

Quietly, the big companies are still hosting exclusive gamer days and spring events—in many cases the same events they held prior to E3 in years past to ensure that writers on tight deadlines would not have to rely on E3 to actually report on E3. The top of the journalism stack didn’t need E3 in the old days and they don’t need it now.

As one magazine editor told me a few years ago on the show floor when I asked him how much was actually new to him at E3 he said, “Not much.”

So even though the visible E3 is gone, the invisible E3 continues. Well-placed journalists trade access for coverage long before games hit the shelves and, as often as not, long before NDAs allow.

And the irony of all of this is simple. While E3 was chastised a big hustle, a marketing con or a carnival sideshow filled with barkers shilling crap to anyone that would listen, it turns out that it was a pretty even playing field. Sure, you could fill up 10.000 square feet of show floor space with fire and extreme sports stunts and girls in bikinis tossing plastic swords into the crowd to try and sell a game. But if people discovered a little title like Katamari Damacy or The Sims tucked into a little display at the back of some booth, guess what the got the attention?

In the much more managed and controlled setting of a gamer’s day or, certainly, the new scaled down E3, journalists can talk about getting the story, but we all will just be sitting there, being fed content.

In many ways I wont miss the grand stupidity of old E3. But watching the game industry consolidate further control over game journalism isn’t a good thing. For anyone.

This has bothered me for some time, and from a PR side of things, I watch it happen daily. I see it happen first hand at AMN, and editors at IGN & 1up have told me similar stories. This is one of the real reasons that game journalism isn't considered real journalism. We as press are mostly fed our stories at the whim of the business. Sure, we have the power to control review scores, and we'll print what we want as far as editorials go (with a disclaimer to protect the site), but if a publisher doesn't like our opinion, they'll just take their news elsewhere. That's the problem. In this industry, it's hard to find a story on your own without the help of a publisher feeding you news, and when you do find a story, they will occasionally threaten you. Very rarely does it get to this point, but it happens. Hollywood solves this issue with filler content such as harassing celebrities about their love lives, but nobody in gaming cares about the private life of some nerd who sits at a computer coding his life away.

E3 was a level ground; the one free-for-all where journalists went out and found what they needed in the wild. It too was controlled to an extent, but because of the scale of the event, stuff leaked out. It helped the little guy compete on the same level as the big outlets who signed NDA's to get that content weeks ago. They could scuffle up a story nobody else was covering (of had found), and gain some attention. How do you think a simple blog like Kotoku gained recognition in the first place? They've been threatened by Sony many times. They were the first to use that to their advantage, but of course, they'll never see another press release in their inbox again because they were blacklisted for unveiling info about PlayStation Home early by unearthing that information through their own means. In no other industry would this be an issue.

Now, at AMN, we no longer have that problem of being "the little guy", but what about the next start-up outlet? Will they be able to get into the business, or has the collective door been shut? It's progressing to the point that publishers see the collective games media as an extension of their PR department that they will use or discard at their own whim. The replacement of E3 for smaller "controlled" conferences was yet another step in that direction. Will the media fight back, or can we even fight back at all? I fear not, because the industry was built from the standpoint at the very beginning.