Khee Hoon Chan Breaks Down The Death March Of The Games Media | Winter Spectacular 2024
It feels almost vulgar, sometimes, to be ruminative about video games when it has been one of the most brutal years for the industry. Layoffs, for instance, are so rampant that Kotaku appeared to have stopped updating its article that was meant to chronicle every layoff that has taken place in 2024 since March (the article did point out that at least a staggering 8,800 developers lost their jobs only 89 days into the year). This is not inclusive of the games media layoffs that have taken place, a development that most publications (bar the intrepid worker-owned Aftermath, thankfully) are wary of discussing. Then there’s the slow, unceasing death spiral of journalism itself, with publications and editorial teams constantly being undermined by upper management’s desire to drive an ever-increasing amount of traffic to their website—at any cost.
Add the general atmosphere of antagonism directed against the folks who make games, and the people who report on them, and I’ve just about summed up the state of affairs in this space.
A few months ago, a close relative of mine passed away, an uncle who was like a father to me. This news coincided with the worst of several waves of harassment directed at me due to a report I’ve written about a particular studio. Back then there was little reprieve from the barrage of bad news, with whatever shell of a career I’ve etched out over the past few years as a freelance writer becoming an albatross that has kept me intensely miserable. For eight years I was freelancing as a journalist, on top of juggling several jobs, and today I’m almost broke, with little to show for the years I’ve worked in this industry. Some segments of the internet, I bet, would celebrate this news if they knew.
But for better or worse, writing is all I know to pay the bills with, even if work is rarely forthcoming. The sordid truth is that most of the time, I wasn’t even writing about games out of some poorly defined love for the digital viscera that makes up the medium (quick, bookmark this for the next discourse about games journalists not liking games).
Instead, what I love is finding out more about the people who make games, the players who enjoy them, and how these experiences influence—and in turn, are influenced by—our reality. There’s Studio Oleomingus, an Indian studio that makes games about post-colonialist fiction. There’s also Rasheed Abueideh, a Palestinian developer, who is raising funds for his game, Dreams on a Pillow, about the 1948 Nakba—a project of immense importance given an increasing chorus of Zionist voices that sought to reframe and justify the violence that took place in Palestine that year. And at other times, I would delve into the intricacies of classics both decades and merely months old. These are the sort of games and developers I wish to report on, even as the industry increasingly devours and spits out the very people who continue to make this space worthy of writing about.
As work dries up among the ever-growing pool of freelance writers, any opportunity feels like a mirage. When a rare staff writer position opens up, a horde of ravenous writers leaps at the job, with only one candidate clinching the desired role. Websites are shuttered in a blink of an eye, and sometimes revived in name with management hiring a new editorial team (probably at a lower cost), alongside a fleet of AI-powered bots. Management repeats that AI will not replace human workers, but there are now more writers and journalists than available roles. Budgets are perpetually shrinking. Emails are largely left unanswered. Lofty promises about AI haven't produced the endless stream of traffic-generating, high-quality content promised by tech-bros, but you’d hardly know that looking at the reality of people still trying to turn writing into a career. In this landscape, how will journalism—even beyond games, the internet and culture—continue to be held up by writers without a sustainable basic income?
To be honest, I really don’t have an answer to this. To write despite these odds is an act of lunacy. But to succeed despite these odds is a triumph. If you’re somehow still writing and reporting from the fringes of this industry, still determined to persist despite the seemingly doomed trajectory of this craft, I admire your tenacity. The day the AI bubble implodes on itself, when there’s nothing more to feed the machine with, will be the day we still get to see your words, even when no one else is writing. Still penning, still reporting, still scraping by.
