YoIn 2006, I was laid off from my job at EB Games. It was, in retrospect, a well-deserved layoff. One Sunday, I set up a camera and filmed myself jumping over a stack of boxes and hip-bumping a stranger. I then uploaded that highly pixelated video of an emo teenager with bangs, a black shirt, and pants to YouTube. Ah, the innocence of youth.
My area manager saw the video about eight months later. I was fired on the spot. (Today, of course, this would probably be some sort of trending topic on TikTok.)
Ten years later I landed a job at the gaming and culture website Kotaku Australia and its sister sites, Lifehacker and Gizmodo. Those brands launched my career.
Those brands are now gone. On Monday, Nine’s Pedestrian Group, which licensed all three titles from American owners, announced it would be closing all three, as well as Vice and Refinery29. Forty jobs have been cut.
This is another month of terror for Australian journalismwith 200 redundancies at Nine, 150 at Seven West Media and a radical restructuring at NewsCorp. No redundancies are good, but the closure of Kotaku, Gizmodo and Lifehacker marks a particularly tragic day for Australia’s tech journalism scene – one that will have long-lasting effects.
For gaming journalism in this country, this looks like the end. This is the event of an asteroid hitting Earth. Now there’s a huge, smoking crater where gaming journalism once was.
Many major Australian publications employ journalists specialising in technology news, as well as cultural topics such as art, books, music, entertainment and sport. As far as I know, none employ a journalist specialising in video games.
It’s not that there isn’t an appetite for this type of content: Bond University’s bi-annual Australia Plays Report shows that 81% of Australians play some form of video game. The average age is 35. Most gamers are aged between 18 and 40, and 48% are women. Australians spent $4.4 billion on video games in 2023.
And video games have crept into other entertainment mediums. The Super Mario Bros movie? A huge hit. The Last of Us? Everyone was talking about it. Netflix and Apple have both put time and energy into developing gaming services. Or have you read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow? You probably have, and video games are at the heart of their story. Don’t forget YouTube and Twitch, which were practically built on gaming content and are thriving.
By these standards, video games are one of the most important cultural products of our time. And yet journalism has not had the support or funding to keep up.
Games journalism is not limited to news and reviews about the latest and greatest. It cuts across all streams of culture and business reporting. These include stories about lifestyle and parenting; deeply researched explorations of the mental and physical health aspects of playing video games; the science behind gaming addiction and screen time; the business of game development studios and the cultural and social issues they face.
Journalists and reporters, the famous saying goes, write the first draft of history. In Australia, games journalism is so poorly supported that very little is written. Independent websites and blogs do admirable work and we are lucky to still have GamesHub, but there is not much else. We are leaving some marks in the sand. The tide is coming in.
How can we reverse this situation?
The quick fix would be for Australia’s mainstream media to recognise the opportunity they have here. Kotaku Australia’s closure could be Australian gaming journalism’s worst day ever – the death knell for a scene. Or, literally, any The masthead could help something new rise from the ashes. The talent is there. I’ve seen the readership figures and there are some too. Someone has to take advantage of the opportunity.
Finally, we’ve seen a lot of attention paid to the game development industry by state and federal governments over the past five years. The Australian government’s Digital Games Tax Offset provides a huge tax break for developers, and many states have similar schemes. There’s Victoria’s VicScreen, which has often led the way, investing for decades in local development and resulting in global hits like Untitled Goose Game and Cult of the Lamb. These agencies could also support independent games journalism, as long as it’s not at the expense of funding game developers.
Then there’s you. The most powerful force is the reader, who directly funds this effort. Websites owned by journalists are all the rage. For example, AftermathFounded by former Kotaku journalists in the US, it has built up a loyal subscriber base who are eager to write about video games. If the public wants gaming journalism, then these direct reader relationships could offer a way out. Would it work in Australia? Possibly!
I didn’t get fired this week (I left Kotaku and its sister sites in 2017), but closures hurt. When I lost my job at EB Games, back in 2006, I felt like my dream job was gone, that there couldn’t be anything better. But then someone took a chance on me. I want to see the same thing happen in games journalism.
