It’s 2009. To many 2008 was a terrible year. A lot of incredibly bad things happened, especially to our economy. It’s definitely a poor time for me to be unemployed, that’s for sure. So a lot of people were looking forward to 2009. We have this weird notion that we can start over at the beginning of the year as if we can put the last month behind us as long as it’s January. Unfortunately for many, 2009 started out with a whimper and a cry. The gaming enthusiast press is dying. Hell, the print media is dying. On January 6th, UGO bought 1Up. Now for those of you who don’t know, UGO is one of the tritest websites that I know of. Here is an example of what they consider video games “journalism”. 1Up on the other hand was a great site which drew many people from around the industry with its honest editorials and podcasts with personality. People went to 1Up and read its magazine EGM not to get numbers and reviews from a website but to get the opinions of dozens of personalities that they trust. Editors and writers like Garnett Lee and Shane Bettenhausen came together to talk to other industry insiders as well as 1Up alum about games and it felt personal. It wasn’t PR trash. It wasn’t trying to get you to buy any certain product, but honest discussion about video games.
When UGO bought 1Up, 80% of the staff at the 1Up offices got laid off. EGM (one of the longest running gaming magazines) got shut down as well. This mass decimation is a huge blow to the gaming enthusiast community. It can be seen as a slow death of the gaming enthusiast press. What else do we have? Blogs? Those are 99% shit. No offense to those that run those sites, but it’s definitely hard to wade through the crap that people throw on there to saturate their RSS feeds. Without a strong site for the community to rally around, the quality of the community falters. Are we limited to using twitter to keep up with these journalists and NeoGAF to keep the community alive? Where will the industry take us once all the leaders are gone?
Perhaps from the ashes of corporate-backed journalism will rise a renaissance of high quality gaming journalism in the form of independent websites and blogs. Perhaps it will be like 1998 again, where all gaming websites were done by fans, or at least the best ones were (except this time we’d have CSS to make web design much easier and more appealing). I hope so. I really hope so.