[COLUMN] So You Want to Write About Games… | by Nick Calandra (Patreon)

I often get asked about how to get involved in games media. I feel a lot of people who read or watch games coverage have a glorified view of what the job really is, and often don’t understand why people who write about games for a living can often be quite jaded and cynical about their chosen profession.

A lot of people want to write or make content about games, but there’s some cold hard truths I think you should know about before they decide to take the plunge. This isn’t to dissuade you from chasing your dream, but to give you some context for what you’re probably getting into.

Search Engine Optimization

More often than not, if you’re wanting to make an actual decent living writing about games, or really anything in online media, you need to be proficient with SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.

This is the game that every corporate gaming outlet plays, and is the backbone of pretty much any website. SEO is what drives the most traffic to gaming websites through the use of guides and pieces that answer simple questions, like “What platforms is Bloodborne on?”, or “Is Bloodborne ever coming to PC?” (sorry, I had to do it).

For every original piece of content a website hosts, there’s hundreds if not thousands of SEO articles in the background collecting daily traffic that keep those websites afloat. The problem is that with every website competing for the same traffic, the only way this strategy works is at scale, and thus corporate entities pay poor rates for writers to essentially be SEO machines, pumping out dozens of these posts a day.

Not to mention, if you put all your eggs in the SEO basket like so many of these networks do, you’re putting yourself completely at the whim of Google and their ever-changing algorithm and rules around SEO farming. If Google decides your network is just gaming the system, as many do, then you’re essentially screwed at that point and your ad revenue streams will dry up faster than California’s water supply.

Now if you just need to make money, then writing SEO for any media outlet is a solid way to do so. If you’re really good at it, you can make a solid living and knowing SEO is a highly sought after skill for pretty much the entire online media industry, including YouTube channels like ours.

But I imagine a lot of people want to write about games because they’re passionate about them and feel they have something worthwhile to publish for the world to read, and once you start writing SEO and making good money from it, it’s often hard to move out of it because you’re essential to the sustainability of that website’s traffic.

The nefarious part of the SEO game, from my time working in corporate media, is it serves nobody but the people paying your paycheck. If you’re looking to make a name for yourself and build an audience of your own so that you can do the kind of work you really want to do, unfortunately SEO means you’re relegated behind the scenes, and that makes it easy for corporate owners to take advantage of you both in terms of pay and ridiculous workloads.

In reality, SEO writers should probably be the highest paid writers of any outlet they work at, because without them, all of these corporate sites would fall apart within weeks because they don’t invest in putting faces to the work that’s being published.

SEO is part of the infinite growth game that corporate media outlets play, and it’s a zero-sum game with targets that constantly shift at the whims of algorithms, shareholders that don’t understand seasonal traffic, or in the case of games media specifically, years where there’s not as many games that mainstream audiences generally care about.

Infinite Growth

It used to be the goal of many to work at outlets like Game Informer, IGN, GameSpot. That was the dream for me at least. Game Informer inspired me to get into games media in the first place. I loved getting the magazine as a kid, reading the previews of upcoming games, getting the latest reviews and opinion pieces from some of my favorite gaming writers.

But times have changed. These days having a job at a corporate gaming outlet is more of a stepping stone for many to eventually go independent. Kinda Funny, RKG, Last Stand Media, Noclip, Minnmax, Defector… the list goes on of people that had name recognition that worked at bigger outlets that are now independent and flourishing.

I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t worked under corporate media, so there’s not a day I regret doing so despite all the frustration. I wouldn’t have met Yahtzee, I wouldn’t have had the resources to put together the incredible team we have here at Second Wind, and, ironically, I learned pretty much every rule in the book for what not to do when running a media outlet.

I’ll forever be thankful to Menashe Kestenbaum, the founder of Enthusiast Gaming, for giving me the opportunity to take over The Escapist and rebuild that brand from scratch. Second Wind wouldn’t exist if all that didn’t happen, but I also knew from the onset that if I wanted a sustainable future in games media, I either had to convince a corporate company to change how they did things, or be prepared to eventually go independent, by force or choice.

So we spent almost five years at The Escapist running ourselves as if we were independent. We managed our own budgets, did our own sponsorship sales, built a team that worked cohesively and efficiently together and thus when the hammer finally fell on us, we were ready for it. I spent a lot of time making sure the team that worked at The Escapist understood the business of media.

A lot of people go into media just publishing their work, engaging with Twitter and going on with their day, but to truly be successful in online media, you need to be more than just someone that makes “content.” You need to understand what it takes to make an ad dollar, you need to understand how to engage with your audience, and you need to have a diverse set of skills.

To be in online media today, you can’t just be a writer. Well, that’s exaggerating a bit, you can just be a writer if you’re really, really good at it, but even at a corporate media outlet, that doesn’t mean you’re secure. My recommendation would be to be a writer, but also understand SEO, but also spend some time doing voice work so you’re comfortable with being on a podcast, maybe learn some basic video editing skills, or learn to stream a little bit - anything that helps you build an audience and let’s people get to know you as a writer, presenter, or even in my case back on The Escapist, a manager.

If you want a future in games media, use the corporate outlets as a stepping stone, because the only thing that matters to the people that own these outlets is infinite growth. It doesn’t matter how good the content is, it doesn’t matter how talented your team is, and it doesn’t matter how much people enjoy your work. In the end, if you’re costing the company more money than what they think you’re bringing in, you’re out.

Giving Up Your Escape

Video games, for a lot of people, are an escape from the daily routine. For a couple hours a day, people play games to just turn their brains off for a bit, escape to fantasy worlds, and have some fun. When you decide to write or make content about games for a profession, you’re making the decision to monetize your hobby and once you do that, it’s a complete change in thinking about how you view your entertainment.

You’re no longer just sitting down to enjoy a video game. You’re more often than not sitting down to play a video game so that you can think about how you can turn your experience into a piece of content. Whatever form that might take, whether that’s a video essay, an article, a guide, a news article, or a Tweet.

It’s the best and worst part about working in games media. You get to check out all kinds of different experiences, share your love of the medium with the audience you develop, and get to think about and discuss games in a whole different and deeper way than you normally would.

The flip side of that is that once you become a critic, it’s hard to turn that part of your brain off and just enjoy something without having all that other stuff on your mind. When you’re playing a game for work, you’re expected to be able to draw something up about it, and trust me, that can get stressful relatively quickly if you’re trying to come up with something unique and interesting that every other outlet hasn’t already drawn up on their own.

Toss in things like review embargoes and now you’re on the clock to get that opinion in quickly, or risk it not bringing any traffic in at all because people have already moved onto the next thing.

Monetizing your hobby means sharing your ideas and thoughts with the whole internet to converse with you about, and as we all know that also has its challenges. Having to constantly share your opinions about the games you're playing can often make you cynical quickly as people are quick to jump down your throat for opinions they disagree with.

You’ll be asked to defend your opinions in a hundred different ways, you’ll be labeled a shill just for saying you enjoyed a game that the internet has deemed unworthy; to share your opinions on the internet means you need to be ready to take the heat when a lot of people disagree with you all at once, no matter the reason.

To work in this space, you need to be able to separate yourself from the work you put out, and be careful to not get too defensive, which is something I still get caught up in even after 15 years of doing this thing, otherwise people will use that against you too.

It takes a good long while to build up the mental shield and fortitude to be able to put yourself out there and be OK with people disagreeing with your take, even to the point of being quite nasty about it. Social media, YouTube, or the very website you work on can be a very hostile environment sometimes, and being able to filter that when you’re both on and off the clock is a skill that’s a necessity to make it in this space and not be consumed by it.

That all ties back into monetizing your hobby. If you just want to enjoy playing games without having to be “online” all the time, sharing your thoughts with an audience and engaging with that audience to stay relevant, then you may want to think twice about monetizing your hobby and keeping it just for you.

Harsh Truths

I said at the beginning of this column that I truly love my job. I love discovering new games, sharing those games, discussing them, and building work around them. I wouldn’t still be doing this 15 years later if I didn’t absolutely love it.

I’ve gotten to travel the world covering games, have met hundreds of awesome people, told all kinds of people’s stories and of course, helped build an amazing community on The Escapist and now Second Wind, and of course met all the people that followed me out the door when The Escapist was ripped out from under all of us.

Video games, and games media have defined my entire adult life and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But, I would be lying to you if I didn’t say that working in games media has also been incredibly stressful, frustrating and filled with a lot of despair of not knowing if I or my team would have jobs the next day for the entire team I worked in corporate games media.

I’ve provided some harsh truths here about what it’s like working in games media, and I’m careful to recommend pursuing this as a career to people because the corporate games media landscape is falling apart and everyone working in it knows it, and if you’re going to get your start, it’s most likely at one of those places.

Chase your dreams. I did and I don’t regret it for a second. But make sure to be careful that you know what you’re getting into and keep your expectations in check. Better yet, don’t go into games media thinking you’ll make a career out of it. My best advice, as someone that followed that dream, made mistakes, but also had privileges other people might not have access to, is to not go into games media with the intent of making it a career.

Pitch your ideas to outlets, make some money on the side where you can, but focus primarily on finding your unique voice, building a personal brand for yourself, and finding an audience that you can connect with.

And think about the long term, too.

Being consistent, focusing on quality over quantity, not chasing trends, and making real connections with people instead of just using them to get a step ahead. Those are all things you can do to build a sturdy foundation.

If you start there, you’ll have a foundation for you to build from, and to fall back on when your bosses one day decide you're useless because they don’t even know what you do day to day.

Oh, and don’t become another ragebait YouTuber who puts their big dumb face on their big red text thumbnails.