I know we’ve covered some pretty big-picture stuff here so far on Hater Week, but for this gripe in particular I wanted to talk about something a bit more personal. Namely, how much I hate what my job–a video game journalist, critic, whatever you want to call it–has become in the year 2026.
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This is a companion piece to ‘I Am Quietly Optimistic About The Future Of Video Games Journalism’
For almost as long as there have been video games, there have been people who have wanted to write about them, and people who have wanted to read the stuff they write. It’s an artform andan industry, there’s plenty of room for criticism and coverage, just like there is with everything else you can write about on this planet. So for the first few decades of video games journalism, things kept a pretty consistent shape: traditional publishers owned magazines, and those magazines employed people to write about video games. Money was made from both advertising and people buying the magazines, and from the 1970s through to the 2000s that was a nice little business!
Then the internet came along and ruined everything. It also fixed a bunch of stuff. It’s complicated. By making the stable of games writers more diverse, and allowing for a greater level of introspection of its own coverage, games journalism and criticism really came of age through the 2000s and into the 2010s, shedding healthy portions of a previous reliance on access journalism and taking the journalism side of the job title much more seriously.
Of course it also fucked a bunch of things up. By making news and criticism free, it helped devalue the work that went into creating them, and by shifting the business incentives from ‘making a good magazine’ to ‘maximising the clicks for this one story’ it resulted in some absolutely dogshit, clickbait stuff.
All things considered though, the first decade of my time spent in games media (2006-2016), was a positive one. Sure, I miss the more expensive trips we used to get in the pre-Great Recession days, when flights to TGS and GamesCom and E3 were routine, and ownership drama was never too far away (regardless of the publication you worked at), but for the most part writing about video games was still a nice little business. Millions of people wanted to read video game media, we were able to give them what they wanted while attracting advertisers, it was working, if not perfectly, then OK.
The last decade, though, has seen the entire thing go to shit. I know games media is hardly alone in this regard, but as tech companies swallowed up the ad market and destroyed search results, and earnings-obsessed market weirdos took over publishing companies and became fixated on the latest Silicon Valley snake oil sales pitch, what used to be a pretty cool job where you were paid to write about video games has become a degrading and/or temporary pursuit.
So many websites that once seemed part of the furniture are either gone, gutted or are on life support. An entire generation of editorial leadership has been kicked into the bin. New jobs are almost non-existent, and when they do pop up, they’re usually for exploitative content farms. Generally speaking this is resulting in worse video game journalism across the board: Experienced leaders are no longer around to guide a new generation of writers who aren’t being hired, and everyone left at the surviving sites is overworked, underpaid and wondering when, not if, the axe will fall on them like it has so many of their colleagues over the past few years.
Personally speaking, it’s also been pretty shit! I left my traditional games media job in 2023 because I figured–among other issues–I was eventually going to be laid off or see the site get shut down anyway. And while I’ll forever be proud of the work we’ve been able to do here at Aftermath, that decision has had its consequences.
My job used to involve writing about video games. My job now is writing about video games andrunning a small business, which means I am also designing CTA systems, maintaining a website, doing customer service, managing complex customer account platforms, planning marketing campaigns and so much other tedious bullshit that a normal business would have had experts around to do, but which we now have to do ourselves. I don’t know how to do this stuff!
We write about fewer games because we just don’t have the time to play them, we live in fear of being sued into oblivion (we have lawyers, but still!) and, maybe worst of all, we’re all living with constant anxiety and uncertainty. We’re trying to run a subscription media company during some of the worst economic times in living memory, and so I spend a lot of time begging for money on the internet, in ways that I know are necessary for the business but can also feel slightly degrading (I’m sorry if it ever feels like I’m spamming the sales pitches!).
And the pay sucks! My Aftermath pay last year was 60% of what it was in my last year at Kotaku, meaning that I’m having to work a second and sometimes even thirdjob just to pay my bills. I’m doing the same job, but doing even more work, for much less money, all because…why, exactly? There are stillmillions of people out there wanting to read video games media, that hasn’t changed. We just had a generation of sickos step in and destroy the economic bridge between the writer and the audience.
I’m not out here fishing for sympathy, or trying to say I’m particularly hard done by. There’s a very good chance that if you’re reading this you’re a games industry or games media worker who has found themselves in similar situations, whether you’ve been laid off by a psychotic CEO, are exhausted picking up the load for departed colleagues or spend your days wondering when the axe is going to fall on you. These are bad times everywhere you look in and around video games, and I’m not trying to say I, or we, are any more special or impacted than anyone else.
As someone running a site for stories, one that is spending the week focusing on things we hate, I just wanted to add one more resentful (and personal) story to the pile.
It’s Hater Week here on Aftermath. This week we’re letting the hate flow through us by examining what it means to be a hater (and… a lover?), venting about some of our biggest pet peeves in games and life, and giving others a space to do the same.
