Boy do I have thoughts on this article...and not very good ones. Some obvious points in there, but man does it come off with some nasty gatekeeping vibes for games criticism. https://kotaku.com/the-cyberpunk-2077-review-drama-1845860765

Gonna read it again, and once more after that before commenting, but yea. It’s the kinda stuff in here that many outside the mainstream media has quietly complained about for years...

Let's put aside the review scores for a minute, and I'm gonna break down this piece bit by bit, because I really do not like this. I'd do an article on this, but I know how people will react, so I'll take the heat directly if there is any.

Did publications really have "authority"? Because the mags I read were mostly hype pieces for games filled with previews, ads and yes, reviews that NEVER included coverage of crunch or anything of the sort. I have stacks of these at home, I bet I can't find one instance of it.

So the only authority they had is basically what John wrote here, you couldn't get that info anywhere else.

Then to go and say once EVERYONE could pick up and write about games, it becomes diluted and the authority is lost? That's horseshit, nothing changed in that regard.

And not to mention, without the internet there was no checks and balances on gaming publications. The public could only write in and they could select what readers messages they showed in the magazine...now they can lend us their feedback in real-time, good or bad.

Some sites still just focus on games and the escapism aspect of it. Some sites evolved to focus more on the socio-political aspects of games. You have YouTubers doing huge critical breakdowns of games. There's something for everyone now. There's not one "right" way to do this.

And a lot of times when sites don't do what other games journalists, or critics, expect you to do, they're the first ones to start the harassing and the dogpiling. I've seen it plenty. Readers will dictate your authority, not yourselves.

A lot of times when people that have been doing this a long time write about topics like this, it just comes off as "we're the only legitimate voices in games" because we say so, or because we have the biggest audiences, or because we get all the access.

Right, so we're just going to overlook VG247, VGC, Gameinformer, IGN, GamesRadar etc all gave the game a good score, and those aren't reasonable or sensible? Only the sites you pick and choose from? This just reads odd and like a snipe to me. Maybe I'm just reading into it.

Later in the article he once again nods at "particular reputable websites" and based on the ones listed in this piece, I feel like I know exactly who he's referring to. It reads as gatekeeping, as only the sites he and friends dictate as "reputable".

And he brings up that mailing list that was outed and showed all the gossip amongst a bunch of well-known writers and brushes it off like it's nothing? I mean, c'mon.

I read the email chains just like everyone else, now the gossip is just done openly in the public on Twitter...

I read this three times and I just don't feel like I got anything out of it besides the obvious. The vast majority of readers are nice, and don't even comment. It's a minority of really angry people that cause a lot of this discourse and we keep giving air to it, legitimizing it.

Instead of moderating our communities and fostering healthy discourse, it's fed into with reactionary articles, Twitter quote-tweets to point out how awful people are, and in-fighting about who's a "legitimate" source.

Have you even read the comment sections on your own websites, mainstream pubs? If you cleaned half of that up a lot of this would go away because you remove their platform. But you like seeing those huge comment numbers because pageviews, so...

It's a never ending cycle, and then it all comes back around when articles like this come out, only painting a select few publications as "legitimate". It's extremely frustrating and has been as long as I've been doing this.

Articles like this also cause a lot of shit for writers and website owners that aren't in that "circle" because stuff like this helps to remove the legitimacy of any website trying to do good and break-in because they're not a known name.

There's definitely some bad-apple sites and writers out there, but the VAST majority of people covering games just want to cover their favorite hobby and build communities, and there's nothing wrong with that. We can have both real journalism, and hobbyist bloggers.