We’ve (sadly) covered a lot of games media stories that involve writers being laid off, sites being shuffled around and sometimes even whole companies shutting down. For Inside Baseball week, I figured it might be a good time to check in with some of the few people left still making a living in video games journalism.
I spoke with a number of writers and voices who are a) drawing a full-time salary writing or talking about video games, and b) are working at what I’d call a “major” site, the big ones with historical brands that are still in a position to be paying people decent wages. These folks are the lucky few survivors, those in jobs that a decade ago were relatively common but which today–thanks to the aforementioned layoffs and closures, not to mention other contractions like a growing reliance on freelance and guides– are increasingly scarce.
I asked a number of questions about their past, present and, perhaps most pressing, their immediate future, with their answers to each below. To protect their identities and jobs their names have been changed, and outlets omitted where requested. By way of introduction, I spoke with:
Kate, who moved from various esports sites to a bigger site before landing a full-time job with one of the biggest sites, first on an esports vertical then on the main site itself, where they’ve worked as a culture and games writer.
Frank, who has been in the games journalism and online/social media business in one way or another for around nine years now, sometimes as a freelancer, other times–like now–as a full-time member of staff.
Bruce has been writing about games for over a decade now, originally as a volunteer on a fansite, then as a paid-per-post freelancer before making the jump to one of the biggest games sites, initially as a freelancer then a full-time member of staff.
Robert started their career with a personal blog and some freelance work, before moving to a major games site around a decade ago to cover weekends. They later became a full-time writer at the same site.
Beatrice has been working full-time for a few years now at a prominent, generalist site that has a video game beat.
Hank has worked in video game journalism for around ten years now, originally as a volunteer writer for a tiny site before moving onto paid freelance stuff and, finally, a position as a full-time staffer at a major video games website. I know that’s almost an identical career path to someone else above, but that used to be how people got jobs in this business!
The parts of the craft I spent my early years at the site trying to hone...all became liabilities under an increasingly broken regime run by dickheads.
Luke: In the time you’ve been working permanently at a site, has your job changed at all?
Kate: Overall, my career at my current site has been pretty stable and changes to my job have been communicated and make sense.
Frank: Yes, due to restructuring and layoffs. My job has always been way more nebulous regardless, but even then, yes, that nebulousness has itself changed. That being said, I have made a career of being a jack-of-all-trades kind of employee, trying to diversify my skillset as broadly as possible. That aside, there is a lot of instability with my role in terms of expectations and responsibilities that I have raised concerns regarding to powers that be on numerous occasions.
Bruce: I do more, but mainly because I got more confident and better at writing. I also have ended up doing more because there are fewer people around. And because the people above us in charge demand more content with a smaller staff. I probably work harder these days than ever before.
Robert: My job has gone from trying to think up cool shit and writing stuff that people would read, to navigating increasingly boneheaded and idiotic mandates from the business side made by people with no idea how to make or run a good website. The parts of the craft I spent my early years at the site trying to hone--voice-y headlines, creative packaging, funny images, speed, rigor, and quality--all became liabilities under an increasingly broken regime run by dickheads.
It did not help that during this time the way digital media functions online fundamentally shifted, and at the exact same moment the industry was facing a sea change the people steering our ship were aiming at icebergs. There was no investment, leadership, or freedom to explore alternate ways of engaging with and monetizing a passionate and loyal readership outside of assaulting their eyeballs and mobile battery life with ever more programmatic spam.
Beatrice: My responsibilities have not changed thankfully. I’m still required to write a blog every day, although now with the tariff situation, my EIC has mandated that we chase down any and all leads about how this situation is impacting my beat.
Hank: My job has changed, but it’s more in the ways of adding new responsibilities as I’ve gotten more experience and learned new skills.
...over the past few years, I've lost any real sense of pride in my work...
Luke: Do you think the site's objectives or output have changed? And if so, why?
Kate: It feels like the site has become more focused on producing a consistent stream of content over fostering the time to produce more thoughtful and in-depth pieces at a slower pace. Recently, our post quota was raised again. I get that there's an economic aspect to it, and news posts and guides keep the lights on. But over the past few years, I've lost any real sense of pride in my work. I think we're all familiar with the YouTube content creators who turn on a camera and simply talk off the top of their heads and publish it before moving onto the next piece of slop, and it really feels like we're being pushed towards that. Obviously my colleagues are still doing phenomenal work and I have a lot of respect for what they do, and I can only speak from my POV, but I feel like my work is increasingly becoming slop because I gotta meet quota.
Frank: Totally, yes. I don’t even need to talk about behind the scenes stuff for that. You can see our current video programming, and look at what we were doing this time not even six months ago to see that this is an EMPHATIC yes. What we are doing now is a combo of plans that were in motion before some recent layoffs, and then those new plans having to adapt to a reduced workforce.
That being said, I don’t think the actual site–our written, editorial content–has changed at all, thankfully. That department has been (relatively) unharmed in the years I’ve been here, and honestly, has only become more robust seemingly.
Bruce: Yes. For sure. Where I work, we used to be laser focused on writing cool shit and speaking truth to power while covering the news and publishing reviews. Today, we still do some of that, but not nearly as much. The people in charge want more guides. More deals posts. More evergreen content. And they don't want to scare away advertisers. It's frustrating to be told a headline is too spicy or that a story is too "business-y" simply because it dares to say a corporation sucks or unions are good.
Robert: There is no site objective at this point, and probably hasn't been for years. There are a few people who log on to write each day, a person who edits them, and some rich assholes who try their best to kick sand in the gears. The output that's left is shaped by a combination of incentives, trying to write about what's happening that day, what we think people will want to know about, and increasingly cynical plays to try and grab whoever happens to be scrolling by when a hyperlink pops up on Facebook, Reddit, or Google. All the while trying to avoid getting yelled at by management.
No matter how bad it gets there's a sense that if we can stabilize the numbers--uniques, page views, sessions per visit--then we might be able survive long enough to make it to the other side. Of what? I have no idea. But it's hard to see a world where there aren't at least some number of people keeping a written record of gaming culture.
Beatrice: Thankfully no. My site has never been one to prioritize traffic or clicks with its writers. There’s never been an editorial imperative to chase trends. That doesn’t mean we get to ignore trending topics, but it’s more like, how can we make what we’re currently working on fit the moment. It has always been “do the best, informative work to service our readers” in line with our mandate as a more generalist website, and I’m incredibly grateful for that.
Hank: I don’t think that from an editorial standpoint our objectives have changed since I started. We’ve definitely expanded into what we call “commerce,” which includes deals and merch, but that team operates on their own for the most part. We’ve seen a big push into social media as well, but again, it’s more of an expansion rather than a change. DLC rather than a patch!
Where I work feels like one of the most stable places you could work at in the games industry, and still I think people are worried.
Luke: Games media has been hit with layoffs, site closures and buyouts over the last few years. As one of the few remaining sites to employ people full-time, what's the mood like at your publication right now in terms of its future and headcount?
Kate: We’ve been lucky enough that we haven't been hit with any major layoffs - not 0, but no major sweeps. But the industry is clearly burning down around us, along with the rest of the world, so the mood is definitely grim. Many of us feel like there's a guillotine over us that will, at some point, fall. We don't know when or who will get hit, but it feels inevitable.
I will say I do feel like my boss, and my boss' boss, fundamentally give a shit and are decent people. I'm disabled, and I know I can take time off as I need and I won't have to hustle to meet quota regardless. But I feel like there's someone above my boss' boss who will not hesitate to cut the team if it'll make a line go up. It's happened to other parts of our network and I don't feel particularly immune.
Frank: I would say that it’s certainly worse having suffered some layoffs, but even if we hadn’t in the last few years, I think we’d still be on pretty tenterhooks being surrounded by it. It’s like something that keeps circling around you and then tightens around your neck when you go through it. Even if it never eventually tightened, that pressure is still there.
So then to actually be strangled by it a couple times; yeah, everyone I’ve spoken to about it at work says that, like me, they think about it and are concerned by it all the time. More layoffs, site closure, you name it. Vibes are just never really good, which makes it really hard to do the work.
Bruce: It's very bizarre. A small group of people huddled around a fire in a barren, icy wasteland filled with corpses and monsters. The fire is smaller. The thin wooden walls around us are crumbling. But we still have fun and do cool shit. Yet, and I think the others would agree, we know that eventually something is going to happen. Perhaps we will be saved. Perhaps a big monster will break the walls down and end everything. Or maybe the fire will go out and we all will take one last look at each other and drift away into the wasteland around us, spotting old campsites and bodies as we exit. Honestly, I'm just ready for something to happen. Because lingering around in a perpetual state of "Maybe we all die, maybe this keeps going for five more years" as everyone else suffers is getting old. Really fucking old.
Robert: I'm too burnt out to imagine a future outside of our website maybe getting sold, and new management deciding to smartly invest in a few easy growth areas. Or maybe while it crashes the economy the Trump admin will decide to also break up Google and Facebook's duopoly on online advertising, single-handedly reviving the value of having a free website with millions of readers. Or maybe the economy continues to tank and the last vestiges of institutional online games media that had been slowly declining for a decade gets hit by a meteor instead. Like, all of this might feel quaint once we're in the throes of another major recession, and not one where everyone's hanging home playing Animal Crossing and Elden Ring.
Beatrice: As strange and guilt inducing as it is to say: we’re good! My website truly does feel like it’s “one of the good ones” where we prioritize good journalism and empower our journalists to do good work they’re passionate about, and that’s been enough for whatever corporate overlords.
Hank: Where I work feels like one of the most stable places you could work at in the games industry, and still I think people are worried. 2025 was supposed to be huge for us with things like GTA 6, Superman, and the Nintendo Switch 2, but now thanks to tariffs and everything else, the video game landscape for 2025 feels a lot less bright. Luckily more and more games workers are unionizing, both on the media side and the development side, which is heartening, because that’s really the only way to protect yourself and your coworkers when you work at a corporate-owned site (or corporate-owned anything, really). Unions are only going to become more important as the games industry shifts towards this relatively bleak future we find ourselves in.
Despite working at a decent company that takes good care of me, every day I live in fear that my bosses will decide what I do does not provide enough value for them to keep me.
Luke: On a more personal basis, what's your current mood in terms of your job and career? Do you think there's scope to make a career out of games media in the years and decades to come?
Kate: My mood is pretty bleak. Like I said earlier, I've lost a lot of pride in my work. I feel like I personally peaked in about 2021 and I've been phoning it in throughout COVID and its aftermath. It's hard to get excited about video games when the world is on fire and looking through social media is an endless firehouse of human suffering.
I intend to stay here for as long as they will have me. I'm the breadwinner -- my partner works, but doesn't make enough to cover our bills alone. I do feel very lucky and blessed to have this job, and I know a lot of people would kill for the opportunity. That almost makes it worse; it feels ungrateful and shitty to be so pessimistic and doomer-ish about a dream job.
But at the same time, the industry seems to be moving towards mass-produced slop, quickly made YouTube videos, and streamers making guesses on the industry as they play through a game. I have no interest in competing with that.
I've found my work in the crosshairs because I cover subjects that have become a front in the culture wars. I can't look up reception to my work anymore, as it's a mental health trigger. Sometimes, I have the opportunity to sink time and effort and passion into something like an explainer, only to find a Nazi made a three hour video critiquing it and by extension, me. I'm very lucky in that this vitriol is directed towards my outlet and not me for whatever reason, but it feels like I'm rolling dice and praying I never end up being a person of interest to these people.
There was a point I considered moving more into the "public" side of the job, but I've strongly pulled back on all of that because I don't want to add to my risk factor of being targeted, harassed, and/or doxxed.
If and when I lose my job, I intend to leave the industry and look into something more practical like medical transcription. I love games, I love writing about games, but I feel like I don't get much paid time to just... decompress and think about games. I always have to be writing, pitching, producing. It's a tolerable bargain, considering the perks, but I don't know if I'll still be here in a year, five years, etc.
Frank: Setting aside myself wrestling with the thought of maybe exiting games media, like everyone contemplates at some point eventually, that feeling ebbing and flowing, if we’re talking about my own personal ability, I am relatively confident that I could, eventually, find my footing. But that comes back to the jack-of-all-trades path I have taken. I can be slot in a lot of different places.
I also know my opportunities come from an immense space of privilege, too. My skin color, gender, and even name rocks no boats, the waters becoming more turbulent by the day. In addition, I have several support systems that would buy me time to work on carving a path in the industry. That is a rare privilege very few others in games media have, I know. I do not think I would have gotten where I am today without it, to be honest.
So tl;dr, yes I do, but only really because I have the resources to invest time into that project.
The whole world is gonna explode too, so I’m not necessarily sure if the industry will even be a thing in “decades to come” lol.
Bruce: I hope so. I really do. We need a strong games media. But I'm not dumb. I got eyes. I see what's happening. There are so few of us left, people with full-time jobs in games media, that I know most of those people. That's not good. And things are getting worse. So I'm hopeful that reader-supported sites can keep some of us employed. But as for the rest of us... I have no idea. Scary shit.
Robert: There was a point around 2022 where it felt like I was going to hit escape velocity and either land a more mainstream gig covering games for a more stable media business, or would have built enough of a reputation that I would be in pole position for whatever few deckchairs remained on the digital games media Titanic. There are lots of people more talented than I, but many of them have already washed out or don't have the same bandwidth for dumb shit I do.
I was quickly disabused of that notion after repeated rejections from what had felt like increasingly slam dunks. At this point the only alternative is running a subscription operation that caters to a niche audience, and even those hills feel mostly mined at this point. At the end of the day you have to be really, really good at delivering things people feel like they can't miss and that is way harder, in many ways, than running a high quality publication at scale. I give myself 1-3 years before I'm working in PR or Home Depot. The post office was going to be a fallback but it doesn't seem like that will exist by then either.
Beatrice: Despite working at a decent company that takes good care of me, every day I live in fear that my bosses will decide what I do does not provide enough value for them to keep me. I increasingly feel like the polar bear stranded on the thin piece of ice – when my one place eventually leaves me behind, I will have no other place to go. There is no demand for gaming journalists at places that will pay them a living wage, they just do not exist anymore. So if I do lose my job where I am, I’ll have to leave the industry.
I don’t think I can become one of those journalists who pivots to having their own paid subscription newsletter. I think the journalists who have done that and can be sustained by that are incredibly lucky, but that avenue is really only available to a very specific kind of journalist, and that success is exceedingly hard to replicate. To that end, I just continue to do the work I do in hopes of looking up in another five years to see that the field has weathered this particularly nasty storm and is in a better place. Until that happens (and there’s a willfully optimistic part of me that hopes it does) I continue to do the work only I can do in hopes that’ll be enough to justify letting me keep my job.
Hank: I’m pretty confident in my own career, but I’m lucky. I already work at a major website, and I’m also a straight white man, which is a privilege that I’m very aware of, especially in the games industry, where it’s very hard to be anything other than that. I think I have enough of a foothold now that I should be able to keep this thing going, but it’s hard to recommend that someone graduating college enter this space. The number of jobs are dwindling, and it doesn’t look like there will be more soon. I wish that weren’t the case, and I hope it changes soon, but with the current administration, things are going to get worse before they get better.
—
For what it’s worth, much of what’s been said above mirrors my own personal experience. During my time at Kotaku (I started in 2006) it was, once upon a time, a reasonably secure and well-paying job that yeah, while encouraging some degree of traffic-baiting bullshit, was also a website that gave me the peace and space to do the kind of work I wanted to do and felt was important to readers. By the time I left in 2023, it may as well have been a different website; intrusive ownership had stripped the site of much of its voice, and dwindling resources meant more and more work was being pushed on an increasingly smaller and inexperienced team.
The responses here give voice to a vibe that’s been around for a while now: that even for those individuals lucky enough to still be in a stable job, this is an industry in crisis, one where things aren’t just bad for the scores of writers being laid off and cast into the uncertainty of freelance work, or smaller websites being shuffled around owners or shut down altogether. Things are bad for almost everyone, because even those lucky enough to work at the biggest sites, with audiences in the millions and the security of a full-time salary, can see what’s happening around them, and what could soon be happening to them.
Because the same forces that have closed all the other sites are a rising tide that, as many have said above, could well be coming for them next. The free internet as we’ve known it for the last 20 years is collapsing as the ad market evaporates and corporate media ownership becomes increasingly unhinged in response. As belts tighten and profits dwindle across all media–not just video games–that rising tide could begin claiming more and more sites that even ten years ago would have seemed immortal.
Is there a way out of this? I dunno, man. I want to end this piece with some kind of optimism, a plan for the future, but as has been said above, even the stuff we’re trying here at Aftermath isn’t a proper solution. Paid media as it exists today is a limited market, and it can’t support everybody out there who is currently writing about video games for a living.
The problems facing the industry, and the source of everyone’s fears and discomfort here, are wider than any of us can hope to tackle directly. These are systemic issues, born of late stage capitalism, the callousness of an executive class, the destructive greed of Google and Meta. It doesn’t matter how many millions, or even tens of millions of people are reading a website if the means of financially supporting that writing are evaporating.
Which is a huge bummer to end this on, but then, as you’re reading this it’s still today, not tomorrow. These sites still exist, these writers and voices are still doing great work, and if there’s anything you as an individual person on the internet can do to support them, it’s to enjoy their stuff, give their site your click and share anything you’re into while you’re at it.
Inside Baseball Week is our annual week of stories about the lesser-known parts of game development, the ins and outs of games journalism, and a peek behind the curtain at Aftermath. It's part of our second, even more ambitious subscription drive, which you can learn more about here. If you like what you see, please consider subscribing!
