The Death of Games Journalism – Part 4: The Mobile Menace
Part Four of a multi-part series. Start from the beginning of the series, visit the Parts Index or read Part 3 – Woman Problems
Games media at large has a problem with relating to mobile games. Their problem is they see themselves as forward-facing into the inclusive future of videogames, when it fact, they focus on a narrow segment in their comfort zone. Tech media seems more at ease with the concept, but offers little depth past “holy shit these guys are making a lot of money, this must be the future!” without really delving into why mobile gaming is such a juggernaut. At the same time, the Gaming Press attempted to shift their audience, using statistics made up of largely mobile gamers as the supposed basis for their decision.
Back when the first social/mobile bubble was still being blown, there was a great push on the part of gaming sites to make their ideal gamer “less exclusionary”. The misogyny narrative hadn’t quite formed yet, but the finger-waving about being ‘exclusionary’ was already there in spades. They told us that the mobile and especially social gaming market was the future and we were going to have to stop “clinging to our toys” and deal with gaming becoming this new thing. Perpetual point-misser and bewildered old man Bob Chipman made a cringingly bad video in 2011 about how tablet gaming would kill enthusiast PC gaming stone dead… just before the market started growing again. This was before he converted to the church of McIntosh, but you can see the seeds of the rhetoric there already. He wasn’t alone; self-appointed analysts, the people who slaughter goats to read the entrails in an attempt to divine all what will be profitable, said that the traditional gamer’s days were numbered, and traditional models of game design that were not ‘social games’ would begin to die out.
Fast forward to 2015 and we see a much different picture. The press has put down the social gaming stick and picked up the social justice stick to beat their audience with. There is a palpable disdain for the ‘artless’ mobile market with Forbes Writer Paul Tassi and others having to confess they had to research some of the games featured in superbowl halftime ads. What happened to this “embracing of a new audience“? Well, it seems they still do it when it is convenient. The worst cases of misused statistics I’ve seen are two studies that were spun and cherry-picked to say that the majority of gamers are now older women. Once again, the idea of a homogeneous kind of person who plays games being universally applied is in action.
This is being used as a justification for all kinds of moves away from the “traditional” gamer, even though there is no real data to show that the demographic that actually reads traditional games journalism is shifting. We already have a dedicated mobile gaming press; if sites like Gamasutra, Polygon, and Kotaku wanted to shift to be more ‘accessible’ to this new gamer, they would have done it already. Sites like TouchArcade and Pocket Gamer already exist, and even then, its doubtful players on mobile look past the top of the various store columns and the Android/iOS store rating.
The mobile space has been the big growth area, but not at the expense of other areas like the hopelessly inept seemed to think; as I said in Part 2 of this series, Business 101, gaming is a massive industry that can and should cater to a series of niches. Top-end PC gaming does not shrink or grow at the expense of casual Android gaming, and vice-versa. I’ve already covered that ground a little, but I once again want to delve into the world of demographics.
It’s uncomfortable for some to admit, but over a macro scale, factors like age, gender, location, etc. DO bear out certain trends. They are not the be-all and end-all of someone’s preference, but they do create situations that, on the surface, may look like a marketplace is “exclusionary”. Yes, mobile games are very popular, and the handful of juggernauts that dominate the marketplace have a high number of users… because they advertise themselves as free. I shouldn’t have to explain that the person playing Candy Crush on the train because they have a smartphone isn’t the same person who is going to read your 12-page essay gushing about your friend’s 2D pixel art existential-crisis simulator. This also bleeds into the whole “women in gaming” problem of broad-brushing; because something was created by a woman does not mean it will have mass market female appeal. Games like Candy Crush fall neatly into the same category as Sudoku or crosswords, as they are used as simple time-passers on a device. And that’s okay. Using it to say that games writing needs to reject this imagined idea of the “boy’s club male gamer” isn’t. There a willful ignorance in their reading of statistics with these studies. There are always going to be games that will appeal to men more than women, and vice-versa. The gaming press seems obsessed with the idea that everything should cater to everyone equally all the time and try to recruit player statistics for the entire market, including fundamentally different platforms, to support this fallacy.
I don’t know how many times I have to state this: the person playing puzzle games isn’t the same person playing FPS games, just like the person playing bullet hell games isn’t the same person playing MMOs. The complaint that a game isn’t “accessible” enough to this imaginary audience made up of Candy Crush players fails to take into account basic facts about different demographics. What you are dealing with is a casual audience. The word “casual” has become mocked by many as a pejorative, but I still find it a useful, if somewhat fuzzy, distinction. This issue goes right to the heart of what a “gamer” is, and the concept of a “gaming enthusiast” is the best we have come up with for a useful definition. The distinction between surface-level engagement and a deeper love is one made in every sector. The people most likely to seek out in-depth write-ups about games are those most engaged with gaming. Like I’ve said, we already have a mobile gaming press doing their own thing, pretty far removed from the hand-wringing and audience-insulting of sections of the gaming press.
What it comes down to is that gaming websites simply don’t know who their audience is, and therefore come into conflict. They have misinterpreted what the shift towards mobile has meant, and misinterpreted the “fracturing” of the media that was described by Escapist co-founder Alexander Macris in our interview. They are still obsessed with the idea of “the average person who plays games”, when in fact, the game market and games media has grown so big that it can support multiple styles targeted at multiple demographics without really coming into conflict.
Continued on Page Two
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