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There's no "controversy" over The Witcher 4, it's just gotten picked up in what is now a cottage industry of YouTube-based outrage content farming by people who have zero actual investment in or understanding of the things they cover multiple times a day, every day

Somehow this has become the way to make a sustainable living producing gaming content online, but if you're interested in writing thoughtful analysis and critique, the kind that takes literacy and hard work, well don't quit your day job

Reactionary weirdos latch onto anything that gets them views. When that gets enough attention, the remoras at shit-tier game outlets make it a controversy so THEY can benefit from the outrage against the reactionaries, which also SPREADS the reactionary views. It’s engagement bait all the way down.

I don't want to erase the work my friends and former colleagues are doing in this space. There IS good games content out there but I'm frustrated by how difficult it is for the good stuff to actually drive the discussion or change the narrative, to refocus away from the unending drumbeat of rage

Outrage is one of the easiest ways to drive engagement. You'll find it on any platform that rewards engagement. Rewarding engagement is basically a short road to a toxic, negative platform. It's not just the social networks though -news networks have learned this too and it is self selecting.

The thing is, having watched this evolve: It's not (for all of them) that they don't know how or what to cover, it's that what they're doing - making rage takes - IS their coverage/content, not the games. They're not really "covering" media, they're making competing content.

Yeah, that's what I mean, it's its own cottage industry, its own content type, and that's what they specialize in

Their aim is to be what the audience is consuming INSTEAD of playing games, watching movies/shows, etc - they're basically making "reaction content" but without even needing to WATCH ALONG; they do 45 minutes *inventing* imaginary versions of "woke games!!!" to shout at, it's pathetic

We’re living through the era of dudes getting upset if a female fictional video game character doesn’t give them a boner.

The never ending need for more content slop to secure an ever dwindling share of the attention economy Ya know games journalists used to work in zany offices and only had to crank out 16 pages of content every month and they got health insurance for that?

It's a matter of time before "slop" becomes word of the year...

I miss your reviews man. They were always top shelf. And so worth reading. As opposed to some SEO drivel.

Thank you pal. I do miss doing them but the opportunities were becoming rarer and rarer and they were getting encroached by bullshit rules about maximizing SEO potential. Like the first two paragraphs almost had to be garbage by the time I left PCGN