one of the few publications that seemed to do actual work. what a shame.
Indeed. Its sad to see a reputable name go before something far less reputable, like Kotaku for example.
I guess it must be true, hate clicks and outrage do generate more revenue than real, genuine gaming articles written with pretty good journalistic integrity.
eh, kotaku has some solid articles and reporting as well. gaming journalism in general is incestuous shit but most of the anti-kotaku sentiment comes from goonergate shit
The hilarious thing about you getting downvotes immediately is Kotaku led the reporting on this news this morning. Link is in the posted article, y’all.
Nah, Kotaku had a shit reputation for years before gamergate got shat into existence. Their reporting was sloppy and often wrong, most of them sucked at the games they were reviewing, they spammed out vapid clickbait articles about nothing to farm ad rev. The only reason people respect them now is because they were positioned opposite gamergate, as if two things can’t both suck.
a reputable name
?
they were wholly owned by gamestop. their magazine was a lever to drive gamestop subscriptions and upsells. y’all worried about kotaku crack me up, if there were real ethics in game journalism a supposedly independent publication reviewing the products wouldn’t be owned by the largest vendor of the products.
Is it actual work to just say what the publishers tell you to say and give everything a 7?
If you actually read their interviews and reviews you will see that it is way more in-depth than any YouTube essays or twitch streams. It sucks that those things attract more people because I get way more informed at an objective level with GI articles and similar podcasts.
Eh… they were beholden to the games industry as much as any publication, and perhaps more due to their ownership.
yeah i meant work as in interesting content rather than journalism. never referred to GI for reviews but they had fun content.
that’s fair. I suspect their relationship with gamestop, which had it’s own mini-e3 for a while, led to a ton of great content discovery that many journalists didn’t get access to back in the day.
Times change, but this magazine was great for a long time.
Fuck. It was one of the few remaining good videogame-related publications. They will be sorely missed.
Where to go from here?
I remember absolutely being a fanboy in the 90s. It was so much better than it’s rivals like EGM and GamePro.
But around 2005, either I aged out of it or the magazine got worse. Then I remember GameStop giving it for free at some point. I just remember it being a shell of a shell of a magazine, as the rest of the gaming industry moved to gaming blogs.
The Gamestop deal would have been 2002-ish. I actually hadn’t heard of the magazine before we started pushing it in the store. With Game Informer’s features mirroring our store marketing, it was the first time I realized how incestuous the industry was (easy to see the signs of it now when looking back at even older mags). The bizarre amount of coverage it had on the PS2 game State of Emergency was one example from the time. It’s wild to me to hear it being called reputable here and elsewhere today when it had such a fundamental conflict of interest for the vast majority of its run.
You’re totally right.
I was in middle school when I had fond memories of gaming mags, and that’s probably when I was the most infatuated by the publications.
And by high school (2000s) it was getting weird and slowly dropping off.
At some point was the whole Kotaku gamergate BS and completely checked out of gaming news because it wasn’t just weird, but then it got real racist/sexist.
I’m kind of in the same boat as you. My mainstay for the longest time was RockPaperShotgun, probably from 2008–2016 or thereabouts. Once the old guard left the quality of the site drastically changed, and it became significant shallower in terms of reviews. Not really sure where to get the same kind of journalism these days.
Well, I guess this is an early sign to say RIP to GameStop too.
When a business is closing many of its stores and shutting down a subsidiary that has been around for 30+ years with a pretty reputable name (instead of selling it, for example), thats usually a sign that the business is going to go bye bye in the near future.
GameStop has sucked for a very long time and I’m astounded that so many people holding out hope for a meme stock to GO TO THE MOOOON again think it’s going to last.
Support local stores, death to GameStop
I’m not really holding out hope for anything, and I don’t own Gamestop stock.
I just don’t think that Game Informer closing down is the death knell of Gamestop.
