People don't click on ads anymore, and that's how static ad image revenue comes in. Video ads however pay out whenever people see them, no clicks required.

I know what you mean.

I'd chime in further, but it would honestly feel like something of an echo chamber. The only thing of value I'd have to add is that Cracked is probably the only site I know that cares to impart meaning into its list format.

The problem I have with your Katawa Shoujo thread is that I've already played through all the routes.

Yet as I've already proven, I've got a few more surprises up my sleeve.

Trying to stay on topic, maybe all the business models are getting mixed up? It seems they're focused so much on making money that they don't have much of an idea about what to do with said money. Obviously, it's a difficult situation.

I realized this years ago in my video uploads I did for demons souls. I had this one video I put I don't know... 30 or so hours or editing into, maybe more. It was almost like a weeks labor for this one video. I had others I put together maybe took 20 minutes. I will give you one guess how high ranked on total views my 30+ hours of effort vid is versus the others. Let's just say my highest viewed video is literally a throw away video I did in like 15 minutes covering a launch day DLC so some people I knew from another forum could see what the DLC offered without having to buy it.

That aside @thatpinguino you are making me feel bad I didn't read your FFX article. That said I didn't because I don't like the game. If it makes you feel better I don't like Kingdom Hearts so I didn't read that one either... well that probably doesn't make you feel better actually...

Also @corruptedevil is right. Adds don't generate views unless you click normally, and people don't get the choice of clicking or not during videos.

You're not wrong about being worried. I think GameSpot saw how Polygon is slowly becoming Kotaku 2 (Ko-two-ku?) and figured it'd be more merciful in the long run to lose those guys and give them a shot somewhere else rather than force them to do abject clickbait-y nonsense for just enough advertising dollars to pay their checks. That's no way to be in this business and enjoy/respect what you do, and you're just diminishing your own reputation (or brand, since you invoked that term) in the process.

Honestly, I think you give me too much credit. I'm proud of some of the blogs I've written on this site, but a lot of it is goofy throwaway stuff I just tend to write for fun. My daily series, comics and LPs especially are just exercises: attempts to prove (to myself, really) that I can maintain some level of satisfactory quality on a consistent basis if need be. I'd say yourself, Dankempster and Gamer_152 are the best community writers we have because it's clear how much work you all put into the format and research and proofreading, and folk like VGK and Arbitrary and Moosey and Sparky have worked such a long time on their style that everything they write is always competent and entertaining reading. I do wish we had the amount of bloggers we used to, but it's starting to pick up again.

The degradation of games writing is a little sad. Along with GameSpot, I think Polygon's decline has been really depressing. When the site got started they had some really high minded, if a little pretentious, ideas. Now they post articles about pornographic sonic fan art and have constructed a garbage, Kotaku-style culture section. Hopefully, the troubles will spur writers on to produce more interesting work which better fits their readers, to try and capture a audience which can sustain their jobs. Perhaps, with this in mind this may have some benefit to the industry, writers having virtual 'tenure' can be as corrosive.

I know how frustrating readership can be, I was part of a (very) short lived writing project on this site a couple of years ago. I think the lack of readers (we struggled to even reach numbers like yours) was really demoralising, and was one of the main reasons we stopped. It's a shame, I really enjoyed writing my contributions.

Great post OP. This is a sentiment I've been seeing more and more in the past few months. I guess it's just the way the winds are blowing, media's changing and I suppose we just have to see how it goes. Not a heck of a lot we can do about it beyond trying to support content we enjoy and consider worthwhile.

I will say that I tend to watch video content instead of read a article someone has wrote. I certainly still read some stuff like this forum post and whatever articles Patrick puts on this site but that pales in comparison to the insane amount of GB video content I've watched over the years. Although in the past all we had was a bunch of text in magazines and I spend a lot of time reading different gaming magazines so it seems like the written word should still be effective. Finding the balance between writing something and video content doesn't seem like a easy task. In the end it's all about the kind of content people produce and if the viewer wants to read/watch it.

I'm going to be brutally honest in that I was one of those folks who didn't care to read written articles (besides the occasional review), listen to audio only content and watched video content only. Being a member and active user on Giant Bomb over the past 4 years has changed that for me. I look forward to audio and written content here now. It's because I've gained a connection with the personalities of the staff. I don't think I was in the minority of people that wanted video content over written or audio. You're right, times are changing for game critics and a visual personality is important. Now that video content is much easier to stream to your devices because network bandwidth has increased and sites like YouTube exist, that is going to be the media that people want moving forward. Hopefully more people find sites and communities like Giant Bomb to change their tastes into what sort of media they want.

Isn't this just really a case of the common denominator of human psyche? I agree with everything you're saying, and I miss the long articles about the industry as a whole. To an extent, I feel Patrick does this from time-to-time.

But if you think about it, your average person on the internet, a site or story "might" have their interest for 10 minutes at most. So a long 2,000 word article, compared to a top ten ten list, doesn't give a few things--to go back to the psyche thing--that I feel people want these days: 1) instant gratification, ie, reading a top 10 on Buzzfeed takes very little effort and time, and 2) the ability to spout their opinion immediately over said list.

I think internet business, in this case CBS, just wants whatever is going to generate the number of viewers quickly for those ad dollars, and that's sad, but the current state of affairs I'm afraid. :(

What I'm surprised about is that none of the sites letting people go really ever had writer round table videos or anything of the like on a regular basis. If you know you have great writers with little video exposure, why not round them up together and get them to shoot the shit together about the games they've played every week. It'll allow for them to rack up the experience and hopefully build enough confidence to appear on video to do features and what not.

The only exception to this I could think of was Gametrailers, but even then they let some of their writing staff go as well. Giant Bomb doesn't count because its focus has always been getting the guys who write in front of a camera. I guess I'm saying that I'm not a fan of letting talented people go without giving them a fair shot or training.

People should never have clicked on ads anyway. Besides something like Jeep Wrangler advertising on MSN.com and taking you to the real website to customize and order a vehicle, 99.99% of Web ads were scams, viruses, phishing, redirect loops, or false advertising. Even if you were truly interested in a controversial new steroid alternative that makes your body look like a flesh eating virus, clicking such a link will just take you to a site with twenty thumbnails of "who is Bieber dating" "how much did Sandra Bullock make last year" and in turn clicking on one of those will just take you to another page of twenty gossip thumbnails. I clicked on a free iPod link back in the day just for the heck of it and it just was a 404 error.

I think the reason people are able to spend thousands of dollars advertising a product that doesn't really exist is because Internet advertising is a money laundering scheme. Or at least meant to generate clicks enough to trick a real advertising company into thinking your little upstart is popular and reaching "the kids".

As far as YouTube celebrities are concerned, I think it's a fad that'll go away. The only room to evolve one of those shows is to upgrade to a real TV star. Like that Lisa Nova chick who went onto Mad TV in like it's last season. But being funny for a five second youtube clip isn't enough to build a stand up career out of. Did that Nickelodeon Fred movie do all that well? Enough that that kid will be famous for life? Employed for life? Where's chocolate rain kid now?

I think a lot of those Let's Play people are loss leading, wasting their 20's making videos or apps that only reach 1000-5000 views in a terribly saturated market, hoping to be the next "discovery" that leads to a 5 million view channel and a career in their 30's. Eventually enough people will release it's not gonna happen for them and the fad will die.

Maybe if someone adapted their site to be more Kindle Reading mode/Safari read mode friendly more people would read their editorials, but those turn off the light modes usually remove advertising jpegs as well.

It seems, then, that we must rework our understanding of the Internet completely.

I'm not so sure this is a bad thing. The game journalism industry has moved away from a few large companies selecting some individuals and that's what the audience gets. Now the game journalists themselves are forced to appeal to the masses through their personality and style. We are seeing the gaming community divide into an industry side and an academic side. As with most things academic, they take a long time to write and formulate and typically appeal to much fewer people than the mass market side of things. We see this with literature, science, and other fields of art. I see this movement as a transition period. Long form writing (perhaps writing at all) about video games is coming to an end for the industry and those people will migrate to an academic setting.

Jeff saw this a long time ago, which is why his commercial venture is geared toward podcasts, video, and personalities. Those that want to stay with writing about games can probably have a very rich career in academia. Carolyn would probably be an awesome professor and she'd probably love it.

@bobby_the_great said:

Sure this is an example of lowest common denominator psychology, but we are human beings with the ability to choose. We can choose to not click on the buzz feed lists and click bait and if enough people do that they will go away. The same is true of well written articles. I know that I tend to gravitate towards quick video stuff like everyone else, but if we don't like the way the industry and the internet is going then we, as readers, can choose to change our habits. It we treat our internet usage as the content dictator that it is then we can dictate that more written content should be created.

@karkarov: I didn't mean to guilt people. I just have used my blogs to test the common knowledge on stuff like click bait and what people want to read. I have dabbled in the dark art of declaring the best X ever before and that stupid blog I wrote as a joke in 3 hours is my most commented piece of work. Unfortunately my anecdotal evidence suggests that the common knowledge on internet writing is correct.

@mento: I think you are selling yourself short. That Berzerk piece you wrote was one of the more insightful gaming articles I have read in a while.

It's change and it's natural to worry the heck about it. I'm not producing much in game criticism or even youtubing but whenever I set down to write I wish I could do it in voice instead because that's where my writing has gone to, that's what makes sense, that's what you can multitask with and that is important these days. People don't read any longer but they listen to anything you provide for them to listen to. We're seeing the future, we're quite possibly already on a site of the future.

I do however worry about the few remaining.. hahaha who am I kidding, no old game magazines are still around, it's just new thrashy pulp with at most a name from the olden days, bottom's up! :(

@subyman: But in a burgeoning industry with plenty of new people getting into games all the time, why would the think pieces have to go all the way into academia? I mean ESPN can run multi-page articles on the front page and Grantland does the same thing. There are people who will read long TV reviews. Why would games writing have to splinter off? I know that what I do is more academic than most, but I have always thought that interesting arguments will drive readership at some point. I wouldn't want the entertainment to splinter away from the academic and then end up with an incestuous academic environment of professors writing for professors at the expense of ordinary readers.

@thatpinguino: Sure Rolling Stone does long articles, but who gets more views? TMZ. That is the way of things and that is where large companies are moving toward. In this particular case, CBS diversified. Giant bomb caters to an older crowd while GS will probably turn into buzz feed. That was likely the plan all a long. There is no place for people with a decade+ of experience on a top ten website.

As for academia, I would actually love to see this split happen. Then we could get access to articles that 100% interested the author without viewship metrics being a part of the decision at all. There are hundreds of scientific journals and literary compilations that circulate the academic crowd. The layman never ever sees this stuff and they likely wouldn't want to, but it would be there for me and you. Does PopSci run an article titled: "Dosimeter readings in a mercury rich low pressure system from a radioactive cobalt source."? Nah, no one would read it, but the people deeply interested in the field would and there is a place for that article. Commercial it is not.

That example is exaggerated, but my main point is that the things you want will still be around. They won't, however, be on the big game sites. There will be a transition period, but in the end I think it will be best for the people that like very well informed pieces. Instead of the GS crew stressing about their work with businessmen guiding their topics, they will be free to talk about whatever they want.

Hopefully the main gaming sites still do several long form articles every year to expose people to important topics (such as articles that Times and GQ sometimes run), but the bulk of the higher level discussions will make place off of their pages.

Will they, though? There's a difference between a long-form feature story and an annotated literary critic or sociological study or whatever. The former fits in neither the academic field nor the growing Buzzfeed field.

I'm always an advocate for written press, but if an industry can't or won't create and promote that content, there's no need to keep it hanging. Is it sad their putting all their eggs in video? Yeah. Especially from someone who needs something to read while he's working. This isn't the death of traditional games journalism per se, but the money is in the streams, it seems.

I have been writing since I was 7 years old on a green screen word processor. I'm not prominent on this site, but I have written several blogs, most of which get featured in the community spotlight- although i've never been on the front page that I can recall. I like to write about stuff that I think about, and I don't like to critique things as it feels to formulaic and constrictive for my style of writing. I also enjoy reading other long term members blogs whenever I see them.

People do read my work, but rarely ever comment. It's annoying because I'd really like to know how I'm doing, but I get little to no feedback. I think my most popular blog was when I was breaking down my thoughts on the MMO Rift. I was pretty proud of it at the time, but I always look back on my work and feel disappointed about something.

None the less, people liked that blog.

Click bait articles are (apparently) easy, and supposedly they get the most views, but people also read about things they actually want to know. I think the problem with game writing is that on these sites they don't actually know how to write an article or editorial that people actually want to read. Patrick does not post a lot of big stories per week, but when he posts his more thoughtful editorials and articles on the site I am most likely to read it. It's usually about something I have the most interest in.

The problem for me is I don't like the stuff that most people like. I don't look for top ten lists. I am not even sure who these people are that are looking for these- or if it's just that they saw an ad and clicked on it. I look for thoughtful well informed opinions on games. Editorials that ask why a game didn't work out. Post Mortems. Biographies of prolific developers. So on and so forth.

The real problem lies with the fact that you can't get a large enough amount of people to read the same kinds of articles. This means you have to make more of them. With click bait articles they can (apparently- and it does seem true as I find myself sometimes doing it too) practically guarantee more people will click on it. You'll probably also drive me away if there's a bunch of them that are poorly thought out and actually more detrimental because of how false they are with little to no actual merit.

Get people riled up before they even click your article and they click on it just to comment (not even to read it). So what's the point in putting effort into it?

Game Informer put up a job listing after Dan and Jason left. It seemed cool and worth a shot, but then I realized how terrifying it'd be to work in the industry. Even at a stable place like GI.

Just too much change right now. We'll see if things are more standardized in ten years.

Just to clear up a misconception I'm seeing in this thread and a lot of other places, most internet ads nowadays don't work on "clicks." They work on "impressions", which is the measure of how many times the ad has been seen, regardless if they are clicked on or not.

Long form writing is dying in all entertainment media. There were people calling the downfall of civilisation when the UK guardian newspaper moved away from broadsheet.

People don't want to read long articles regardless of how much they enjoy the topic.

I feel like a main factor to the popularity of the video content is the accessibility. More and more nowadays people want to be as passive as they can with their content, and that stretches out to our news as well. Having either short bursts of written information or video content gives us what we want in an easier way. How many times have you went to a review of a game or movie you weren't entirely interested in and just glanced at the score without reading the text, or just skimmed through an article for excerpts of information to just get the jist of it? I know I've done that plenty of times.

It's mainly a product of the day and age where we want our info as fast as possible without any perceived bullshit in the way. Now I'll sit and read my through a long form write up, but only if wholly interested in what it's about. I also think another important factor is giving a face or voice to those names who write opinion pieces and articles. There's a human element there that's not readily available in writing.

Anyways, I'm sure there's a much more nuanced perspective about all of this, and I can see others have articulated their opinions on the subject much better than I could ever do, so I'll just leave it at that.

I appreciate the compliment, though I wouldn't call my silly blog things "professional quality". I justify the time I spend on these things as being exercises to keep my writing skills sharp, though there are usually enough comments for me to feel like SOMEONE got something out of them.

As for games press, it's sad but unsurprising that things have gone this way. It's almost funny how well Giant Bomb managed to ride the wave of more video and personality focused coverage, though I admit I sometimes miss the long-form writing stuff.

Once upon a time, I thought I would give being a professional games critic a shot--I had no other employment at the time, and writing reviews/think pieces while looking for work seemed like a good idea (this was back in 2010/2011, I reckon). I got on at PopMatters and really enjoyed writing, but the pay was nonexistent (PopMatters being one of those places that promises exposure--which I got, I wound up on Critical Distance a few times, and did some work I'm still quite pleased with--and review copies of games, but not much else), so it wasn't really a way to make a living. I sent off resumes to sites like Rock Paper Shotgun when they looked for new writers, but obviously that didn't pan out, and pitched several articles to Kill Screen when they got started, but eventually I realized that most game sites were either 1. too small to pay money, and therefore impossible to make a career out of, or 2. hiring proven industry folk, which obviously makes sense when you only hire a few people every couple years.

Eventually I landed a paying job and got too tired to write for free anymore, or at least too tired to write for free on a site that was ostensibly making money off my free labor, so I left PopMatters and worked on other stuff that, while not making me any money, was at least not making anyone else money either. I like writing for an audience (which is why I decided to take advantage of the super-nice blog interface here recently), but the idea of making a go at life as a games critic (freelance or otherwise) seems pretty much impossible these days unless you've managed to already build a large audience---and that means doing mostly video and audio content these days, which is (for me, anyway) a hell of a lot more complicated.

@jesna: I'm afraid that the lessening demand for traditional reviews is going to get translated into less job opportunities for writers of any kind. For example, I have no interest in writing traditional reviews, but I haven't seen many editorial positions that don't come with a expectation of reviews. It seems like think-piece or op-ed writer person is not a position that game sites tend to have. What's worse, I think that if writing keeps eroding, that position will never get fully developed in a gaming context. I mean other established industries like sports and tv have people dedicated to just think pieces, but game sites are cutting writing positions of all sorts so why would they hire a new type of writer when they think the written form is part of the problem (and it seems they might be right).

@milkman: Thanks for clearing that up. So a highly viewed piece of content of any type would generate revenue simply from the views then? I assume there are pricing differences between banner ads and video ads that complicate the issue.

@csl316: Given that 7 talented and experienced writers just got let go I would assume that the fight for 2 GI spots will end up with a game industry vet winning.

@thatpinguino: Yep, they certainly have the qualifications.

The problem is that a whole generation of people grew up reading videogame magazines and thought if they coupled their love of games with a BA in English or Journalism they would have the opportunity to make a living at this. The reality is that the ratio of game journos to actual people I would actively seek out to read their thoughts on games is so overwhelmingly lop-sided it's unreal. I could probably count them on one (maybe two) hands. More and more I get my games coverage from podcasts and livestreams. So, if you're wanting to get into this business you damn well better be good/entertaining on camera or at least get your point across in a spoken format. Chances are you don't have either the depth of knowledge required or the writing chops to just be a faceless entity, periodically spewing text from the void.

That's a welcome change for me. I've never been interested in reading in-depth critical analysis of games. I have always been inclined to skim reviews to see whether opinion is good/meh/bad and then, if i'm unusually curious, read a little more to find out why.

It's not like game criticism is some hallowed noble profession that society will be weakened for its absence. There are lots and lots of things games journalists can do, and are actively doing, to maintain their audience.

@hippie_genocide: How would you even find out about a good, new writer then? It seems like the only way to do it is to get hired or promoted by an established site or person.

I wonder if the lack of demand for video games journalism is what leads to the "colorful" pieces that show up and get everyone in a tiddy. The only way to write about video games and to have people actually pay attention to it might be to combine games with other issues.

@thatpinguino: endorsed via social media by one of those handful of people I trust

Honestly, I've occasionally I've looked back on a decade+ ago of the game sites that still stand from those days (Gamespot, for instance) and I have my doubts about whether or not the sort of long-form, "serious" writing ever truly existed in video games, or if that's just a very recent experiment. When I wrote my blog about Summoner about a week ago, I took a look around to see how the game was covered back in its day, and the Gamespot review was a bare-bones, eight paragraph review of almost nothing.

This sort of gets at what I was trying to explain, but I think it goes deeper than that. Most of the games press prior to the last handful of years didn't really consist of much. I watched X-Play a lot in my teen years, I remember how Gamespot was the go-to place for my dad when it came to seeking out games to play, and even though gaming magazines then were cool to read, it's not like they had much content either. But a lot of kids like us growing up wanted to be the people in those magazines, and in those shows. I think that's what we're seeing now.

Patrick basically grew up wanting to do this sort of thing, and there's tons of other people like him that grew up with this as their goal. But I don't think there was ever really a place for stuff like that to begin with. Though Polygon has done good long-form pieces in the past, it's not like they're trying to revive the glory days of gaming journalism; it never existed in the first place. The explosion of a gaming media created a glut of young kids that wanted to grow up to be those people, but now I think we're seeing, not that the games media is shrinking, but that it was never really all that big to begin with. Even with the recent Gamespot layoffs, how big is that place compared to a decade ago? I would wager a comparable size, if not still bigger in total.

Video has stolen a lot of focus from traditional games coverage, there's no doubting that. But I think people overestimate the extent to which video has killed the health of the old forms of games coverage. To a certain extent I think the audience that's into YouTube channels and Twitch.tv streamers and the audience that's into reading written reviews by "professionals" are just fundamentally different audiences that were never going to overlap all that much to begin with. I don't think traditional games media is shrinking; I think it's staying the same as it always was, and things like YouTube and Twitch just happen to be bigger.

@marokai: I certainly agree with your sentiment about people growing up with games media trying to break into an industry that seemed huge, but actually isn't. I also agree that many of the written game reviews and previews that fueled the industry for years are basically useless beyond their in the moment function. I definitely think that video content is cutting into written work in a big way. While the lets's play audience and the traditional gaming audience might not be the same group, it seems like gaming sites are shutting down traditional coverage in order to chase that new, potentially large audience. The difference isn't in the size of the sites, it is in how they are distributing employees that worries me.

I know it's a bummer but I don't feel this is something to be sad about long term for the industry.

Don't like good people losing jobs but this is how the world turns.

What seems to happening to me is just specialization.

In the future there will be a limited, specialized number of websites that deal in text. Because there are only a small number of us who will subscribe to a service like that.

The rest of game coverage will happen through video, with personalities being the seller. Are you knowledgeable? Funny? Weird?

To me this is a positive. It is individuals who win here because viewers decide who gets the job. Probably you will always have an ign or something similar that just has a wider, more general audience too.

It's true that yes, cults of personality axe out people who are great writers but poor speakers, but, again, I think there will always be a small place for them.

To be honest, and really not trying to be mean, there are a lot of writers in the industry who aren't great, and frankly we don't lose much losing them. They were hired to deal with massive amounts of content, not because they are strong writers or have interesting perspectives - which they might! - but, yeah.

What about people with valuable viewpoints that go against popular sentiment? (I had another example of somebody hurt by this change, but I just lost it.)

As someone who always feels I am the valuable (ok maybe not) viewpoint that goes against popular sentiment, I know what you mean.

To be honest though, I don't think there are many of these people working at big sites today. I think more of them are Majority Opinions.

I think that YT *could* have the potential to bring more varied opinions because individuals who agree/are interested will follow them. It's kind of like music, maybe? There are lots of tiny indie bands with a few thousand followers today vs how it was in the 50s, when you could only listen to who the major labels told you were good.

Definitely could be some people lost this way, but I don't think the system alienates them more than our current one.

I'm also going to take this time to apologize to you about getting so mad about that Deadpool page over the weekend. Sorry duder, blew a gasket, you didn't deserve my dickery. I feel ashamed.

In short, if Gamespot or anyone else was expecting me to read a preview of Assassin's Creed Unity, and built their whole economic structure around "them clicks", they can kindly go fuck themselves.

There are certainly people in the industry who were grandfathered into positions simply by knowing a person and being available at the right time, but it feels like there should be some way to inject fresh blood. I mean the major sites really don't have too many young bloods out there that are shaking things up. Video might create an opportunity for that shakeup. I'm just afraid that this injection of video people will also be a short sighted move towards people who can churn out personality based videos rather than previews and reviews of 5 years ago.

Game journalism/criticism/whatever you want to call it is in a very weird place right now. There are those convinced that video is the way of the future, but not every educated voice interested in getting into journalism/criticism has the means, desire, or comfort to be on camera or make videos. As simple as some Youtube personalities make it seem, churning out multiple videos a day, a lot of those same personalities are not exactly journalistic or critical in nature (you might call them the Youtube Screamers). PewDiePie may attract a large audience that nets him millions of dollars in ad revenue, but he's not exactly known for bringing intelligent critique to the table. He is an entertainer, as are most that could be categorized alongside him (Markiplier, JonTron, etc.).

And when it comes to long-form writing, particularly game critique, what amounts to game criticism in this day and age is still largely geared toward being buyer's guides. The reviews are really only relevant at the time of their publication, and even then, only to those that are on the fence regarding a game. Very few professional game critics truly write reviews from a critical angle that can hold up over time. These sorts of reviews, of course, would take more work and would likely be published after the release date has come and gone regardless of embargoes, so I can see why the larger sites don't pursue this angle. But as a person that typically doesn't read buyer's guides or trust reviews that function skewed ten-point score scales, I'm much more interested in reading honestly critical reviews that hold up over time and not reviews with intellectual discourse that begins and ends with "the voice acting sucks and it doesn't play like Call of Duty."

Review sites like GameSpot and IGN in particular have historically been review mills. They farm out every game that they can get their hands on for buyer's guide-style reviews and never really give the writers the time to put effort into producing better, more intellectually critical reviews. This in turn can end up rewarding the more intellectually lazy while putting those that strive for a more critical outlook at a disadvantage. I suspect that GameSpot won't change much in this regard, even with the layoffs, as such work can still be farmed out to hungry freelancers willing to churn out a thousand words on why the latest Madden is worth buying. This is also the reasons why a lot of the more critical games writing out there is found in blog posts, or smaller, volunteer-driven websites that are less focused on ad revenue, content volume, and pure profitability. Simply put, the largest contributors to the games press doesn't do enough t encourage or reward those writers that put in the effort to be more thoughtful in their writing, which in turn creates the perception that because the big sites aren't doing it, then it's not worth doing.

You mean this is still a problem? Where do you keep that Alicia "just.....goddamn it" face reaction shot you seem to like?

@hailinel: Grantland has done a few critical reviews on games that you might like. I would try to fill that niche myself, but I don't have the time to play new games in a timely fashion and get a strongly written review out the door while the game is still relevant. I could do that with older titles if that would be useful. I honestly don't even know if large game sites have an audience that would read a long critical review that doesn't have a score attached. I mean it seems like there is more profit to be had from refilling the system wars pinata than in providing cultural commentary.

I´ll be brutally honest with you .... no written article has ever stayed on my mind because frankly I dont hink they are good , also add that that they still do the silly thing of putting quotes from the same article in big letters somewere in the article ... what gives? Why they waste my time in rethreading the same words I just read? But on the contrary at least I will allways have in mind (just as an example) goosegoose´s magnificent video playthroughs/ critical deconstruction etc of Half Life 2 games , no written article about videogames has gotten that good , also add that Im a very adiovisual inclined kind of person , I needz them pretty drawings D:

Or the types of articles that I wish for are never done about videogames , I want deconstrution of the games , why x or z alters the games message etc , you know the good stuff about the games , not another "hu this have a girl in bikini so is sexistt" or "drama on z studio" , I dont care about the people making the games I care about the games themselves , not if they are or arent ok in ultrafeministic eyes etc.

Now I do like Patrick style and many of GB users styles of writting ..... sorry If I didnt cliked on yours , to be frank I also not in a mood for reading about FFX atm :( so sorry. Also beforw I finish altho I do go clicking on Patrick´s worth reading links , most of them are horribly written and plain terrible ( For example Leigh Alexander ...man those articles are terribly written and long and winded and the format... horrible).

So I do prefer videos , is just more my thing , and when it comes to written articles I really need to be in the mood to read one.

I am suddenly reminded of: