Some people looooooooove to talk shit about Kotaku, a publication that all of us here at Aftermath used to work at. Over the last 20+ years the site has been at the vanguard of changing tastes and practices in video games journalism, which means that while it has done (and continues to do!) some amazing work, it has also made its fair share of mistakes and missteps along the way.
That's what happens when you're always trying to do something new. It's also what happens when you're a small and overworked group of human beings and you work at a larger company where leadership has its own ideas. For all of people's continued teeth-gnashing about the site--much of which is rooted in culture war bullshit--the site was also part of a trend in video game journalism, particularly in the mid-to-late-2000s, that I think has permanently altered how readers understand video game news.
Despite this intro, I am not going to be singling out any one person or website for criticism here. I led with Kotaku, and will mention it a few more times as an example, because I used to work there and so have the most experience with it. But you can substitute its name for any of its competitors, from Joystiq to Destructoid to VG247 to early-days Polygon, and the story will be the same. Like so many other issues with video games media--and all media, really--the problems I'm going to be talking about here are systemic, which maybe makes them easier to handwave away, but also more difficult to address. And the problem with sites like Kotaku, in the 2000s especially, is that they helped utterly devalue the way we consume news about this medium.
For much of Kotaku's early life (we're talking roughly 2004-2010ish), it had an intentionally basic site design. Instead of trying to mimic the format of a newspaper or traditional (for the time) website, with little pictures and headlines all over the place, Kotaku was built entirely around a chronological feed of blogs, each post going down the page in order and rewarding readers who sat around mashing F5 with fresh new content every 30-60 minutes. When a new story was published, it slid the top of the page, bumping the last post down. After a day or two, news that normal people might still have been learning about organically had moved off the front page altogether.
(We actually have, for the true Aftermath sicko who hits F5...2-3 times a day, our own version of this).
This is why I was hired! Living in Australia, I was awake during the twilight hours in the US, and so could just keep the machine rolling 24/7 until my American colleagues woke up the next morning. We would publish blog after blog, every 20-30 minutes until the dying of the sun. For those addicted to the news cycle, who felt like they needed to know everything about video games, it must have been incredible: even 20 years ago, Kotaku had hundreds of thousands of devoted, regular readers.
At the time, for those of us running the site and making money off it, this felt perfect. It was everything we could have wanted from the still-kinda-new internet age. Video games media at the time was obsessed with breaking from the past, with treating the medium and its industry more seriously, and so a single website finding space for both the irreverent and the important all on the one page was, even by 2005-06, a huge success.
On a longer timeframe, though, the relentlessness of Kotaku and its competitors' coverage ended up equating the irreverent with the important. When everything was published on the same site in the same format on the same schedule and given roughly the same prominence, how was anyone supposed to know what was truly important? If you scrolled down the page of a 2000s video games blog you'd see a story about 300 layoffs followed by a Tekken trailer followed by a photo of a Mario cake. It created a news landscape where lots of things were happening all the time, but everything looked just as newsworthy and important as everything else.
This firehose approach to coverage helped foster a culture, now decades-old, where everything happening in and around video games is deemed important simply for existing, from the most inane press release to a game's third trailer to a quote from a CEO nobody really needs to be listening to. The fast pace of the site’s updates gave everything a sense of urgency that was like feeding a reader’s addiction to the news cycle, giving them endless ammunition to fight pointless console wars and pore over the most meaningless details.
That's some ruinous shit! Nobody needed to be kept up to date on the barbs thrown by bickering executives; nobody needed to be drip-fed bullet points from a marketing campaign. And it was strange for the subjects of our coverage too; as we've recently discussed, nobody needed to have their personal thoughts on something fed into an international news cycle, while many developers lived in fear of saying anything in public, lest it be seized upon and posted, quite often entirely out of context, just because some blogger thought it sounded like an interesting soundbyte.
By the end of the 2000s the video games media landscape was covering so much “news” on a daily basis you could go mad if you stared directly at it for too long. It meant video games had fallen into a familiar hole; the dawn of cable news had the same disruptive effect on TV, and everyone from Gawker to Buzzfeed were doing the same thing to other types of websites. Even mainstream news outlets have struggled in the modern age to properly contextualise their work when so much of it relies on algorithms and social media sharing.
Looking back, I can't find any one person to blame. Nick Denton had us all working like dogs in the early days of Kotaku--paying bloggers $10 per post in 2006 instead of a salary sure did incentivise us to find any old shit to toss on the website--but our rivals were structured in much the same way. Kotaku's early leadership weren't expressly seeking to devalue news either; we honestly believed at the time that we were showing all the sides of an exploding scene and industry, giving people everything they could want to learn, see or know about video games.
(It should be noted that while by the 2010s nearly every major video game website had moved its staffers into salaried positions, the pay-per-post model still exists today at networks like Gamurs and Valnet, whose own reliance on tips, guides and a non-stop “news” cycle perpetuates many of those 2000’s problems for whole new generations).
The system did what systems do, though, and it's only with the benefit of hindsight that I've been able to look back and really survey the wreckage. I can at least apologise for my part in that system: For every developer or executive quote I lifted into a headline because it would "do numbers", for every benign E3 announcement I treated like it was actually important, for every Reddit or Twitter drama I elevated from personal squabble to international news.
I can only hope that given a fresh start here at Aftermath, and with the perspective of all the work we've done in the past, we can do something better for the future. Something that operates at a slower pace, that gives us as writers the luxury of deciding if something really is worth covering. Something that’s able to properly contextualise an event so readers can better understand if it’s a fun distraction in their day or something major they need to take their time with. We still think there’s space for all kinds of stories on a video game website, but we want just that–space–so we can help readers understand the video game landscape and leave our worst habits where so much of that 2000s games coverage belongs: forgotten.
