Mike Rougeau is leaving Gamespot and shares some departing thoughts on Red Ventures, contractors and Giant Bomb.
Today is my last day at GameSpot and in this field (and industry) in general. Therefore I will tweet some thoughts.
I enjoyed most of my time at GameSpot. But working in media for over a decade has overall been exhausting and soul-crushing and thankless.
Yes there are fun perks. But no amount of press trips, early access, and cool interviews can offset the toxicity of fandoms, the long hours, the marathon conventions, the house of cards that is various seo and social algorithms, and the endless acquisitions, re-orgs, and layoffs
The entire journalism industry is now totally dependent on a series of ever-shifting algorithms re-written weekly behind closed doors by a handful of giant tech companies that do not have anyone's best interest at heart. My entire job for years has been a game of whack-a-mole
What do we have to do to surface at the top of Google results? How do we need to format features so that Facebook serves them in more feeds? The answers change constantly and no one ever actually knows. Everything annoying about the "clickbait" you hate stems directly from this
Freelancing is harder than ever these days thanks to idiotic laws like California's AB5, which was meant to stop Uber and Lyft from exploiting workers, but from which those companies won exemptions because they spent a lot of money and voters are dumb
Meanwhile, every stable job I've ever had in this industry ended or became needlessly miserable because of short-sighted leadership, needless corporate shuffling, or entire teams of humans being traded from one company to another like Pokemon cards
GameSpot under CBS was good--we had issues like any website owned by a giant corporation but it usually felt like we were on a positive trajectory overall. GameSpot under Red Ventures has been not good. We have utterly stagnated since the acquisition last year.
Most of Giant Bomb's founders leaving a while back was big news, but GS losing 15-20 team members in the past eight months was too gradual for anyone to really notice. And that's not counting the initial layoffs. By the way, none of those positions were ever backfilled.
My biggest point of contention over the past year+ hasn't been the all-consuming shift to monetization via commerce (since ads no longer make money), or even the toxic fandoms whose entitlement ballooned during the pandemic. It's the way contractors are treated in this industry
I was once shouted down by an exec in a town hall meeting for suggesting that the practice of "testing" individuals by forcing them to work as full-time contractors for up to two years before considering them for a staff position was maybe not great. And this was PRE Red Ventures
When people are treated like boxes in a spreadsheet instead of, you know, people, watching their co-workers drop like flies, the team shrinking and shrinking while still being expected to remain competitive in a fast-moving industry and continuously grow, well
I write all this because I leave behind many people who I genuinely love at GameSpot, including my direct boss, who hired me four years ago and who remains great, and the team I had under me, who are passionate and smart and work harder than is healthy and deserve much better
GameSpot was easily the best and most stable job in my whole career--until it wasn't. But I have hope that things can improve. Please support journalists and websites that do good work, pay for things when you can, call out bullshit when you see it, and don't be an asshole.
Posting this here since I feel it lines up with the NY Times article. Curious what others think about this.
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