I never thought I’d read the forums and have someone talking about my appearance on Triple Click, although I wouldn’t say I pitched people on OW2 being great, but moreso how the game is changing!
But hello, I’m a freelance media critic (I’ve written for Kotaku, Polygon, Vice, etc.) and sometimes-games critic who is taking time out of filing a draft about OW2 changes to clarify a few things. I am not here to persuade people who are intensely skeptical of journalism because as far as you are concerned, there’s nothing anyone could say to make you think it’s not all propaganda.
I will say what I know here though: a lot of people here do not know how games journalism works. It’s a really bonkers subset that is partial opinion pieces, actual reporting, consumer reviews, critical essays and stuff closer to art criticism all thrown into a hopper. Games journalists are not beholden to the companies, but often still have to “play nice” and obey stuff like embargos if they don’t want to have their access to companies revoked. It’s a really annoying part of the business to have your entire subject matter tied up in whether or not a giant corporation feels like being nice to you.
As streaming and Youtube videos have gotten bigger, video game companies have absolutely seen the benefit of skipping over journalists or reviewers and striking up relationships with content creators, who have an even bigger financial stake in being treated nicely by game companies and have no problem being informal marketing for a company they like. In some cases, they even might be formal marketing and do sponsored content.
It absolutely benefits companies to stoke hostility towards games journalists from fans and content creators, because fans being invested in making the company’s brand/products their identity is good for them. Same with content creators, and a lot of it is really exploitative because a lot of times content creators are young, financially unstable and unaware they are self-employed contractors with streaming as a job.
Overwatch invited a lot of content creators to California to get a hands-on with Kiriko earlier in the month, the same content creators who are also being offered to include links to Kiriko t-shirts directly from the Blizzard store with their own unique ID, presumably to track metrics of content creators who direct more fans to the store to buy the shirt.
A lot of these content creators were under NDA about it until a week or two ago, and under NDA until today about their experiences with OW2 build from the last week or so, playing Kiriko. All of this is to prep them for making content for OW2 launch, which is very nice and helpful to the “most engaged” and “most devoted” fans of Overwatch, streamers and Youtubers.
I mention all of this because I want people to understand that a lot of this is business. Journalists are one part of the relationship with corporations, and content creators definitely are a lot of the other part. Their financial stake in OW2 doing “well” is very different; journalists get paid by their outlets to be writers, content creators get paid by their fans or sponsorships. Overwatch 2 failing financially will not hurt journalists and it will potentially hurt content creators who only stream or make videos about OW2. But “failure” as it stands for Blizzard is in millions and billions, not on the level anyone on the ground being a content creator or a journalist has to worry about immediately.
As far as people who are talking about the criticism levied at OW2 by journalists: every single piece of media on the internet (article, Youtube video, Twitch stream, Instagram post) is designed for engagement. Not saying this is bad or good, but it is all designed for that by the very nature of the internet and the platforms these things are on. Editors, not so much journalists, have to worry about SEO and metrics because all of them work for larger media corporations, which I would hope people are worried about. A lot of honest, hardworking people in media are often subject to the whims of suits who don’t actually care about their work, just traffic. Google changing the algorithm (which funnily enough they did the other day) will ding every single gaming outlet across the board in terms of traffic and how well their headlines work.
The headlines coming out about features that Blizzard itself published in a blog post that you are free to read are all pretty specific to the information contained in the blog post, but journalists and editors (editors often write the headlines for both info and “grabbiness” - note this is to catch attention, like literally everything on the internet. It’s not very often to “generate outrage”, unless you get angry reading a very dry 500-word post about hero unlocks. Most people day to day just want to write stories and go home. It’s a job like other jobs. Youtubers, weirdly enough, operate a lot more on clickbait and outrage “clicks” than games journalists these days, but that’s besides the point. The only people who HAVE to worry about “clicks” are often editors or their managers, because it’s something they report to their company’s board, etc. Everyone gets paid their salary regardless. It’s not as motivated as you think, unless someone is writing for a site that directly looks to top SEO, and those places are often easy to spot. PCGamer is not trying to craft maximum outrage headlines, y’all.
I agree with DKF though - many journalists were praising OW in 2016. So much so that a lot of them voted on it being Game of the Year, and such. A ton of people in that industry have clocked a lot of hours in OW. Specifically, one of the journalists in question who had his article’s headline screencapped on Twitter that AVRL was angry about.
He has like, oh god, nearly 3000 hours in Overwatch and has written about the game for several years, and is probably one of the smartest people who understand the game on a deep enough level to like, do coaching/VOD reviews. I know this because, full disclosure (little journalism joke), he’s my friend, lol.
Anyways, I have a story to file and I wrote more in this post than I have left in this article so I should go but I really, really just want people to engage with everything critically and if people really think they know about the nuts and bolts of games journalism, I assure you, that you probably don’t. It’s so much more mundane than you think, and it’s mostly people exactly like you who are paid to write about stuff while people like on these forums yell at them repeatedly on social media.
I’m just a freelancer with a day job, but we all care about this game as much as you do and I personally think it’s going in a direction that I don’t really like, and it’s hard to deal with that after also playing this game for 2,300 hours myself. But that’s my opinion and it’s fine to feel how you want about the changes happening. It’s just a video game, after all.
Be good people, and be nicer to each other.