The impossible finally happened: We went a full week without a beloved video game publication being gutted or shut down. Instead, The Old Site ended up in the hands of seemingly benign new owners, and a new home for games writing, Endless Mode, sprang forth from Paste’s media mini-empire. On the latest Aftermath Hours, we allow ourselves to experience a small amount of hope for the future.
This time around, we’re joined by Ethan Gach of Kotaku dot com and Garrett Martin of Endless Mode, two beneficiaries of the only good week for games media in the past century. We talk to both about the state of games journalism and their cautious optimism for the future now that MBA-brained business idiots seem to have moved on from blindly buying up websites for ponzi schemes.
Then we discuss decidedly less good news: Microsoft just laid off 9,000 more workers, many of them in games, resulting in cancellations of multiple promising projects as well as general industry brain drain. Finally, prompted by a mailbag question, we talk about the many cool world records we’ve broken, only some of which involve eating a waffle to discover a clue.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can overtake the Joe Rogan Experience on the podcast charts and confuse all the business idiots into believing they got out of the website business at the wrong time, throwing the entire ecosystem into chaos.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Nathan: Ethan, you’ve been at Kotaku for pretty much its entire up-and-down cycle. Obviously Kotaku has, over that time period and due to a number of factors – none of which necessarily stem from the quality of writing being published – lost readers. What do you think contributed to that, and why was it entirely Jim Spanfeller?
Ethan: I can neither confirm nor deny any Mr Spanfeller’s involvement in the success or decline of Kotaku. One of the things that I think is nice about doing subscriptions or having a physical product is, it’s very clear what you’re making and who you’re giving it to and what you can get from them – as opposed to this sort of amorphous internet machine where all of the ad tech is inscrutable to most people and is controlled by very few companies, and you’re increasingly at the whims of forces beyond your control. That’s very different from having a news stand and a direct relationship with people.
I think so much back to when I first joined Kotaku and what the expectations were – and not realizing at the time that it was kind of the peak of digital media, or maybe right after the peak. It was taken for granted that what people want to do when they’re sitting at work on their computer is visit websites and what people want to do on their phones is visit websites – and that websites are sort of the main distraction. Versus now: People joke about the pivot to video being so dumb and terrible, but that is the content format most people live in. So I think a large part of the decline is just people moving away from a certain medium of getting their information.
And what you have then is a flight of investors being like “OK, the numbers kept going up here, so we can make money by selling this to the next person. And once the numbers stop going up, we now have to make money off a sustainable business.” And there are far fewer people who want to do that. Kotaku was sold to what is essentially a mom ‘n’ pop media company; Paste is owned by a guy. There are individuals or small groups who might like the idea of running a media business in the same way as I might want to open a restaurant because I like food or I like seeing people. It might be hard to make money that way, but that’s how I want to make the money, because that’s how I want to spend my time.
I think media is shifting back to needing to rely on people who want to do media to do media and try to make money at it, versus the [mentality] of “We’re flipping houses right now; we’re gonna sell Vice to Disney for billions of dollars.”
Nathan: The business-brained MBA dummies.
Ethan: Right, the dumb money. When that comes into any industry, things start to go off the rails because when any bubble bursts, immediately after the bubble things are worthless. Nobody wants them, or the right people who would want them can’t afford them. There’s an incongruency. The service people need or want is interesting writing. Do the majority of people in the world want to read about a game? 1) They probably don’t play games, and 2) they probably don’t want to read about them. But do millions of people want to read about games? Yes. Do hundreds of thousands of people want to pay to read good stuff about games? Probably. And so I think it’s a matter of finding a sustainable way to do that.
