Legendary video game journalist Dan “Shoe” Hsu, former editor-in-chief at EGM and content director at the 1up Network, and current head-honcho over the gaming section of VentureBeat, talked extensively about the state of the video game journalism ring and where he sees sites like IGN going...and it's certainly not on the up-and-up.
GamesIndustry.biz has done an extensive rundown and look at the state of video game journalism and who better to interview about the industry than Dan ”Shoe” Hsu? He talks about a number of interesting facets regarding the growth, expansion and diversification of the video game journalism bracket as well as how juggernauts such as IGN have been faring, especially given that their parent company has auctioned off the mega-network. Hsu stated that...
If you've noticed over the years, IGN has grown but they've also shrunk, in terms of their staff size. It feels like every year there's somebody getting laid off there, or groups of people getting laid off.Again, media is a very tough business; it's hard to monetize all the content you create. So IGN for example, someone might come in, look at the bottom line, and say 'You're spending x dollars with y heads to create all this content, but we feel we could cut a little bit here and there.'My gut would tell me that a company like IGN would probably have to get smaller in the future and not bigger.
A lot of IGN's content has been steadily out-sourced to various media personalities while other forms of content has been streamlined to focus only on the hard-hitting or popularized news, which is a bit of the opposite take from a site like Kotaku. In the latter's case, they which pump out any and everything about any and everything, even if the connection to gaming is as tenuous as the President's plan to bring back jobs to America.
Given IGN's financial predicament with Newscorp, it'll be interesting to see how they come out of the sale and what the new heads will do, if they decide to do anything at all. You can check out the rest of Hsu's interesting interview about the state of video game journalism over at GamesIndustry.biz.
