As a freelance writer for a certain popular gaming publication at the beginning of the year, we had a really interesting time. We certainly learned a lot, but the biggest thing we walked away with was a desire to do things differently. Without jumping into the middle of anything, it seemed apparent that the general sequence for working at gaming publication would go something like this:
You start as freelance, with articles making you roughly $18.00 USD after tax, and you are expected to produce around 25 of these articles a month to meet something resembling a minimum wage. You choose from an existing roster of proposed articles from editors (generally lists), or if you have enough time you can submit your own ideas. If you do either well enough, for long enough, you can take on articles that deal with gaming itself rather than lists of trending releases and products timed for promotional purposes.
(If you make enough lists, some publications might even let you voice an opinion, even if it’s wrong!)
On the surface, the gig isn’t totally terrible. The pay isn’t great, and we wouldn’t call it journalism, but there are places you could be making less, and it is exciting if you can hang. In simpler times, maybe people could make it work in an honest way, but the truth is we won’t be surprised when AI replaces the writing staff at these publications as the demand for rhetoric increases. Asking someone to put together images, words, and an unholy amount of SEO/backlink work for such a shitty amount of money isn’t just crazy, it’s a straight line to automation. It’s cheaper, easier, and they don’t have to take questions from people like ourselves.
We won’t even go into the amount of formatting involved, but ultimately it takes between 2-3 hours to put something publishable together, and remember, you’re getting less than $20.00 USD. You’re getting something like $6.25 USD an hour if you break it down, which is less than the federal minimum wage, but it hardly matters. What’s funny is you will see experts or pundits on Youtube making similar points, complaining about the shape of the industry, but with drastically inflated numbers – when you hear how much they think you’re making, you realize that they’re at the very least inexperienced with the actual grind of working for one of these publications.
(The Company Man does a good job explaining the effects of this massive company.)
Another big kicker was that, like many these gaming or gaming-adjacent publications, the one we worked for was owned by Viacom. They’re one of a handful of corporate conglomerates that lurk in the shadows with massive pocketbooks any time you’re looking for AAA-gaming reviews, news, etc., and their subsidiaries include things like Paramount and Nickelodeon. While the team of people we worked with were actually quite excellent, conglomerate ownerships like this rarely create a healthy arc for artists in any medium, and it goes double for people like us that try to talk about said art and celebrate it. They can’t stop you from creating something, but they can very easily stifle the channels of communication if they think your product or idea competes with theirs.
In the end, none of this should be terribly surprising in a world driven mad by money – there are hundreds, if not thousands of videos, essays, and books available that unmask this unfortunate truth, but we figured we’d put this out article out given we’ve got some experience with the machine itself. We don’t say that in some kind of nerdier-than-thou way, we say it because we want you to know that what we’re talking about here today is strictly from personal experience, and not consuming/regurgitating an opinion.
We have a lot of plans to continue to cover gaming in various levels of depth and we’re really excited about it. That being said, if you’re so curious that you might read a short book about it, we highly recommend checking out Jason Schreir’s general body of written work, starting with Blood, Sweat, and Pixels. Schreier’s post-Kotaku work at Bloomberg, in addition to his published books, is a level of detail and empathy we can only aspire to at this point, but hey, we’re working on it.
Alright, time to see how Death Stranding: Director’s Cut feels on the Xbox Series X. Wish us luck.
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