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Still, gaming journalism has long been dominated by more niche publications. For more than a decade, outlets such as Kotaku, IGN, and Destructoid have published comments, reviews, and research papers focused on games and the gaming industry.
That is changing now. With consumers interested in video games like never before, the mainstream media is finally investing in game journalism that speaks to a wider audience.
The Washington Post, Bloomberg and Wired have announced investments in gaming coverage in recent months. These publications and others seek to capitalize on this booming industry with the same rigor they have shown in reporting on Hollywood and Silicon Valley. The plan is to research the business and culture of the gaming industry with stories that appeal to gamers and non-players alike.
Money in games
Launcher, which began publishing last October, was at least a three-year project in development. Hume, who joined the Post as a national sports editor in 2014, said its initial launch was for a gaming vertical focused on esports.
“But it was pretty apparent that games and the gaming industry as a whole were very solid with a number of stories that we could sink into,” Hume said. “The audience around him was even larger, significantly larger than esports.”
Wired Games, announced last month, is not Wired magazine’s first foray into video game coverage. But editor-in-chief Nicholas Thompson said he noticed fewer resources had been devoted to the issue when he returned to Wired in 2017.
“I don’t know why they stopped him,” Thompson said. “There would be an occasional story, but not much. It was something that I thought, ‘Well, given how important it is to our culture, our society, it would be great to do more.’
“I saw what kind of a passionate following he had and how he was just a natural indigenous member of the gaming community, how well he knew that and how much respect he had for him,” said Bloomberg senior executive editor of global technology Brad Stone said of Schreier. “It really complemented our coverage.”
What stories to tell
On Launcher, Mikhail Klimentov and Gene Park have also reported extensively on Epic’s legal dispute over Apple’s App Store pricing model.
“We’re not doing game reviews,” Thompson said. “There are a lot of trade publications that do a fantastic job at that and our job is to try to find bigger stories about what games mean and what is happening in games that will matter to the rest of society.”
“I don’t know if 15 people will watch or 15 million,” Thompson said. “We have super smart people who love games and are really hot personalities. We’ll see how it works.”
“Right now, we are still walking at this stage of our existence, but I think that as we grow we will continue to participate more,” Hume said. “We have ongoing conversations with various gaming sites. So far, it has been a very accommodating community, a lot of people interested in collective success rather than crazy competition.”
Serving two audiences
Hume said his team writes about video games “in a little more explanatory way” for the Post’s general audience so they understand why it’s “very relevant to their life.” But he still wants Launcher to appeal to “dedicated hardcore gamers who want to know all about their favorite games,” which means the writing has to cater to that audience as well.
“When we cover esports, we never stop to explain what esports is unless we really have to,” Hume said. “You don’t write an article about what baseball is, like, ‘Baseball is a game with nine people.’
Stone said he sees Bloomberg’s general audience and people who want to read about gaming stories as one.
“People interested in business are the same people after work or maybe secretly in the hours they should be working, whether it’s turning on the television and streaming a show or movie or playing a video game,” Stone said.
The expansion of games to the broader world of entertainment can be seen through Polygon’s history. The site launched in 2012 as a gaming-specific media brand under Vox Media, but its scope of coverage has since expanded.
“Polygon is an entertainment publication for young people,” said editor-in-chief Chris Plante. “More and more, we realized that our audience expects us to be on the same page as them. If you’re not feeding them all these different kinds of content that they interact with, they just fade away.”
Plante told CNN Business that this surge in gaming coverage is a “moment” he has been waiting for, not just as a gamer but also as an editor in the industry where he advises and works with other journalists focused on games.
“My deepest fear in the past was: Where the hell are game journalists going after my job? For decades, it was marketing,” Plante said. “Now what I’m looking at and what the rules are are these prestigious publications that have money and resources and take the next step on the ladder. So we have old media standards coming into the space. But the most important thing is that we also have enthusiastic publications like Polygon, Eurogamer and Kotaku. ”
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