How are gaming journalists doing in 2022?

Many dream of becoming an astronaut, a doctor, a garbage collector or a radish quality inspector. Of course, this is not the case for the editors of this website, we are mainly in the genre of gaming journalism, which many interpret as a simple dream job of just “playing games” most of the time. In our videos and articles, we often support such ideas thanks to our own enthusiasm, and to some extent we ourselves are to blame for this. However, this is quite far from the truth.

A PR organization made up of game industry veterans tried to find out how game editors are really doing. Big game machine. They brought together 160 editors and asked them to fill out a questionnaire about their work, and we can review some of their findings together here in my humble summary.

At the very beginning of this little study, we have data that fills me with pride. As for the platforms covered by the interviewed journalists, the vast majority PC. This confirms the dominance of the best gaming platform, and, perhaps more surprisingly, the second place for Nintendo Switch. At least in our small Czech pond, it is still a platform that we put on the edge of our interest.

We’ve included this image here for practical reasons only, and also as an apology. Feel free to write me in the comments, have you ever wondered how many requests for a review or article such a regular editorial office receives daily? According to the Big Games Machine questionnaire via 65% sites are processed daily from eleven after 50 requests. As the number of newly released games continues to grow, this number is even constantly increasing. To give you an idea of ​​where we are in this table, we received about 20 such email requests from the editors just yesterday. Therefore, we apologize if it sometimes takes us a while to respond to your suggestions.

Many other questions focused on how to encourage, or rather literally talk editors into writing about the game based on email. It is more interesting for PR agencies than for general readers, and we jump straight to question number 11. It focuses on whether the editors plan to write about blockchain peas. More than 70% of them do not plan to do so next year. We are in a similar situation. Don’t worry if one of the big publishers releases such nonsense again. Ubisoft Quartzwe will definitely write about it. We do not yet plan to be a showcase for games whose main mechanic is to sell in-game items.

One of the respondents added a beautiful comment to the question asked: “Blockchain is the solution if your goal is to find a problem. Supporters present it as a panacea for problems that do not exist, and in fact it does not bring any real benefit to the players.

When do we like to receive games for review? The obvious answer is: AS SOON AS POSSIBLE! We understand that this is impossible and we are always looking for some kind of compromise. Research shows that the ideal time for a proper review is three weeks. This is also the time we ourselves prefer for really big and complex games. But for smaller games, much less is enough.

How will we deal with the growing number of gaming influencers? So far, so good. Well, by our standards. 76% of editors believe that influencers and traditional journalists will continue to coexist peacefully. We admit that this opinion can be somewhat colored by the choice of respondents. After all, how many people openly admit on a questionnaire that their area is doomed?

You can read the full results of the study directly on the Big Games Machine.