Five Essential Video Game Journalists Worth Following Right Now

Real talk — when the trades are shrinking and newsrooms keep getting gutted, someone curating the writers actually doing the work is a W for the rest of us. That's the move Video Games Industry Memo pulled this week, dropping a list of five video game journalists you should actually be following right now — a rare round-up that isn't just vibes, but a personal recommendation from the newsletter writer after they realised they'd never made one for the humans behind the headlines.

The pitch behind the pick

By the writer's own admission, they'd been serving up reading lists for books, podcasts and industry deep-dives — but somehow never one for the people writing the coverage itself. So this week's edition fixed that — five reporters they've watched closely over the past year, with a note on what each covers and why it matters. Games In Italy is sponsoring the issue, but the picks read as genuinely personal, which is honestly the only way these lists ever work.

Who's actually on the list (so far)

Two names showed up in the publicly visible portion of the write-up, and both deserve your follows:

• Chris — Senior Editor for News at Game Developer. Known to the VGIM writer since their brief Pocket Gamer days back in 2015, but the real case for him is the recent run of breaking news — including the surreal report about unionised Bethesda workers staging a giant rat protest against Microsoft layoffs — plus well-sourced features like a recent look at what EA employees actually think of their new Saudi owners. He apparently asks tough questions fairly, which makes him deeply unpopular with jumpy PR pros. That tracks.
• Nicole Carpenter — freelance, formerly of Polygon. Carpenter got inexplicably laid off from Polygon, and basically every outlet in the business scrambled to keep her filing. The range is the headline: she's covered pieces for the New York Times about how video games are being used to reduce violence among prisoners at Rikers Island. That's the kind of freelance swing that makes a writer genuinely dangerous — in the best possible way.

What to actually do with this

We get it — you came here for the stream schedule, not a media studies lecture. But follow the thread for a second: every clip of industry drama, every "insider" leak, every CEO quote that ends up repurposed into a streamer hot take? It started with someone like Chris or Nicole doing the legwork first. Following them means you're getting the actual story before the parasocial content machine turns it into discourse.

So here's the play — drop at least one of them into your feed this week. Read a full piece, not just the headline. And if you're a creator yourself, maybe even tip them. The grind is real, and the chart VGIM referenced about where games media sits right now is not a vibe.

The bigger question worth sitting with: are the rest of us actually willing to pay for this kind of reporting — or do we keep treating it like free content until the people doing it can't afford to keep doing it anymore?