1619: Reflections on Working in the Games Press

As I’ve noted a few times recently, my time with the games press is shortly coming to an end and, short of an amazing offer coming my way that I’d be a complete idiot to turn down, I’m not going to be pursuing further work in that enormously competitive industry. It’s fairly unlikely I’ll be pitching many freelance pieces, either, although I may find the time to do a few in between other things.

Since this is largely, then, the end of my career in the games press, I feel it’s probably an appropriate time to reflect back on my time doing it and what, if anything, I’ve gained from it.

Let me preface this by saying that working in the games press was something of a lifelong dream for me, ever since I grew up with both my father and brother working for Atari magazines. My brother John, when he left home, began working on various magazines over the years and built a career for himself that eventually culminated in high-profile positions at 1up and Gamespot as well as the launch of his own site, the sadly defunct What They Play. His career was an inspiration to me that I hoped, one day, to be lucky enough to follow in the footsteps of. Because, frankly, there’s a significant amount of luck involved in getting anywhere in the games biz… much as there’s a significant amount of luck involved in not suddenly finding yourself without a place of work.

I contributed a number of pieces to various publications over the years as I proceeded through school and on to university. I wrote reviews and articles for the same Atari magazine my father and brother did; I wrote reviews and walkthroughs for UK games magazine PC Zone (may it rest in peace); I wrote tips books and guides for The Official UK Nintendo Magazine, in the years before… well, let’s just say we don’t see eye to eye. But I didn’t seriously pursue a full-time career in the business — it didn’t seem like something feasible, and in the meantime I was at university studying and trying to work out what I was going to do with my life. (I opted for teaching, which turned out to be a Bad Choice from a mental health perspective.)

Whizz forward a number of years and I’m in a bad place. My wife has left me and I’m staring down the oblivion of my life as I knew it. But there was a small glimmer of hope — I was writing for a small site named Kombo. Kombo didn’t pay particularly well — certainly not enough to live on — but it was something. I was writing professionally, gaining some important and helpful experience and getting great feedback. It was a start.

Eventually, Kombo folded and, through various combinations of circumstances, I found myself working for GamePro, a site and magazine that my brother had been in charge of previously, but had since moved on to pastures new. My work for GamePro was initially sporadic and occasional, but over time it grew to a proper part-time gig and eventually a full-time position on a wage I could actually live on.

I had to make a choice partway through my time with GamePro, though. I had an interview with a software company in London, who actually offered me the job. At the same time, GamePro offered me the full-time position. The wages were similar, but the software company required me to move to London (expensive, plus not exactly friendly to my then-burgeoning relationship with Andie, with whom I now own a house) whereas the GamePro gig allowed me to work from home.

It seemed like a simple choice. I turned down the software company and told GamePro I’d continue working for them full-time. Eventually, I got to a position financially where it was practical for me to leave home again and start living with Andie.

All appeared to be going well for a while, until the collapse of GamePro one December. It was a quiet death; I came down to start work one morning, checked my email and discovered a message thread already in progress with everyone seemingly panicking about what was going on. The site was closing, it seemed, and so was the magazine. Everyone was being laid off. There was nothing we could do.

Thankfully, a former colleague at GamePro was working for a business-facing site that focused on mobile and social games, and she offered me regular work for a very generous pay package indeed. Mobile and social are two of the most objectionable parts of the video games industry for numerous reasons, but work was work and the pay was great for what I had to do, so I sucked it up and continued, happy that I had the opportunity to write and still leave myself time to pursue other interests.

But it didn’t last.

I realised something was wrong with the site when all my colleagues suddenly announced their departure within a day or two of one another. The new management who had taken on the site were… not great, to say the least, and it was looking very likely that the generous pay packet I’d become accustomed to every month was soon to shrink to literally less than a tenth of its size.

I jumped ship. Fortunately, around the same time this was all happening, a former colleague from GamePro got in touch about USgamer and, well, you know the rest. Now, almost exactly a year after the site officially launched, I’m staring down unemployment, again through no fault of my own, but due to a shift in the way the site is doing business.

I’ve worked hard for every outlet I’ve had the privilege to work for professionally. I’ve graciously accepted feedback to improve my work — a particular shout-out to Mr Jason Wilson (formerly of GamePro, now of VentureBeat) here, whose copy-editing skills helped me refine my craft in a way no other editor had done in the past — and made an effort to improve and challenge myself as and when I can.

And yet even with a work ethic like that, there’s no guarantee of a stable job. Each time a site folded or restructured and left me without a position, I’ve effectively had to start again from scratch, often with a big gap of unemployment leaving an unsightly hole on my CV in the meantime.

For me, this isn’t an acceptable or desirable way to live. I cannot, in good conscience, look for another job in the games press knowing the inherent instability and volatility of the business, particularly now I’m a homeowner and having no money has even more severe consequences than in the past. My dream is crumbling into dust, but it’s been crumbling that way for a while now; what I really wanted to do, it turns out, was to write for magazines, but that hasn’t been an especially viable option for many years now, thanks to the Internet and the way in which we consume media these days.

More importantly, the way in which outlets make money — you know, with which to pay their staff — has changed. Readers on the Web expect their content for free — attempting to get people to pay money for text is a losing battle. As such, there just isn’t the same amount of cashflow coming in as when a magazine is pulling in money from every sale from the newsstands. It also leads to “clickbait” articles, whether these are top 10 lists designed to encourage readers to read, agree and/or disagree, or provocative, inflammatory op-eds about whatever social justice issue is on the Tumblr sociologists’ radar this week. Overall quality of content suffers as a result, and good quality writing about specific subjects goes all but ignored, leaving the games press a shadow of what it could be, and all outlets looking like slightly reskinned versions of each other.

And then there’s the growth of video to consider, too, but that’s probably a matter to discuss another day.

In other words, then, a career in the games press is simply not a viable option for me any more. Eternal respect and well-wishes to my peers out there who can make it work — whether on a salaried or freelance basis — but I simply can’t do it any more with my current life situation. It’s sad, but oddly I’m less cut up about the death of my dream than I thought I would be; it’s become increasingly apparent over the course of the last four years that the games press I’ve been working in is not the same games press that I wanted so desperately to be a part of for so long. That games press is long-dead, replaced by something very different that I’m not entirely sure is sustainable in its current form.

But it’s not my problem any more. I wash my hands of it all. I’ll continue to write about games on my own time, for the love of it, and if I can make a bit of money off it, so much the better. But career-wise? I’m looking elsewhere. And I’m not looking back.