Abriael_GN
RSI Employee of the Year
Hard disagree. If you have a bunch of people speaking on background separately, but all corroborating each other, they're probably giving you good information. It's important to be skeptical of individuals who might have a personal vendetta, but if all of your sources are telling you the same thing, there's no reason you should toss it just because they don't want the attribution.
Or, and I want you to sit down and consider this for a moment, it could be because... people don't like reading bad things about themselves.
Your selective skepticism is really hard to reconcile. Everyone who says something bad has an ax to grind, but everyone who denies doing anything wrong must be telling the truth. That doesn't feel like responsible journalism to me.
How they teach you to do this in the real journalism world is to print both the accusation and the denial. Get both sides of the story. It doesn't seem like you get that, you only want the happy story.
How many dedicated gaming outlets out there in 2021 actually pay their writers a decent middle class salary to write about games full time? You can probably count them on your fingers at this point. They're kind of all the wrong outlet. If you're okay making $40K a year or whatever maybe there are some more opportunities for local papers or special interest magazines or whatever but there's not exactly a ton of great opportunities anymore.
If that's true, then you must realize how abnormal that is. If you started 20 years ago, that would mean we came up around the same time. I wrote for one of the biggest gaming publications in the world and almost NOBODY that I worked with is still working as a gaming journalist today. They're all working in publishing or PR or development, or just some corpo writing gig outside of gaming entirely. Hardly anyone stays in gaming journalism.
I had that for a time too, but the whole industry shook up in the early 2010s. Editors changed, trends changed, the way people consume media just changed.
If you're still hanging on in legacy media or whatever fine maybe, but the fact is the VAST majority of web media is fed to people by one algorithm or another, not by people navigating directly to their favorite tastemakers.
Same here. But "looking elsewhere" meant "taking a tech industry job making more than twice as much."
At the end of the day, it's a job either way. I liked doing it but I was only willing to sacrifice so much for my art. I didn't like where the job was going so I got a better job, fuck it.
I still freelance here and there when the mood hits me, mind you, and I might write a book at some point, but I'll never depend on it for my income again, it's not worth it.
You should probably stop talking out of obsolete experiences and trying to preach to someone who has direct and current experience in order to disingenuously defend something dishonest and disingenuous. The fact that you didn't manage to do something and make a good living out of it doesn't mean it's not possible or even particularly difficult.
Developers are starting to push back against this writer because they know how dishonest he is, since they know quite a lot better than anyone who doesn't do their job how things are. Broussard said it best. He's an ambulance-chasing hack.
"people don't like reading bad things about themselves" is a laughable excuse, considering that developers say negative things about themselves and the industry all the time, one just needs to listen to a few GDC speeches. The difference is that those have the purpose of learning from mistakes and improving. This has the sole purpose of making money by throwing people under the bus.
Incidentally, you can disagree as much as you want. If you go look for people who have been fired or quit a company, you'll *always* find plenty who have plenty of negative things to say, most of them because it's never their fault, it's always the boss, the colleagues, the environment, or something else external to themselves. Giving them credence when they aren't even willing to stand behind what they say means either not caring about the possibility of misleading one's readers, or being completely ignorant of how any work environment works (or both).
You can write a story like this about *any* company that has former employees. All you need to do is to dig out the malcontents that always exist and not have scruples about hurting people for your personal benefit.
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