The Slow Decay of Games Journalism: Why Quality Coverage Is Vanishing
The Aftermath piece — part of their ongoing "Hater Week" series — is essentially one longtime games journalist processing their own grief in real time.
dropped a brutal banger of a confessional this week — a working games journalist straight-up laying into what the beat has become in 2026, and honestly? It's the most honest thing I've read about games media in months. The piece runs through how ad-tech gutted the search results, how ownership flips turned once-solid outlets into content farms, and how an entire generation of editorial leadership just... vanished. Meanwhile, across the wire, Saudi Arabia's PIF is days away from closing its $55 billion takeover of EA — the biggest leveraged buyout in business history — and you can already feel the layoffs, the crunch, and the uglier monetization creeping in around the edges. Two stories, one vibe: the people who actually write about games are getting squeezed from every direction while the money gets bigger than ever.
The Hater Week Hot Take
They walk us through the pre-internet golden era when magazines actually sold copies, through the 2000s and 2010s when blogs and dedicated sites finally gave the medium serious criticism, and into the current decade where — in their words — the entire thing has gone to shit. Tech companies ate the ad market. Earnings-obsessed market weirdos took over the publishers. Websites that felt like permanent furniture are gone, gutted, or on life support. New jobs barely exist, and the ones that do? Exploitative content farms. The survivor sites are overworked, underpaid, waiting for the axe.
You don't have to be a journalist to feel this — we all read the same bylines rotating between outlets like nomads, and we all notice when the "review" reads like it was rewritten from a press kit. It's parasocial in reverse: we used to trust these voices, and now we're watching them get churned through the grinder.
The EA Deal Is The Stress Test
Here's where it gets grim for our corner of the internet. Per Video Games Industry Memo, PIF's acquisition of EA — $55B, 93.4% alongside Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, $20B in debt financing from J.P. Morgan — just cleared its last European regulatory hurdle. If you've ever watched the kind of leveraged plays that move gold, oil, and metals futures, this is that energy — except now the underlying asset is the studio behind Madden and EA Sports FC. Bloomberg's Jason Schreier flagged back in September 2025 that EA could turn to "mass layoffs, more aggressive monetisation, and other big cost-cutting measures" to service that mountain of debt. Investor Nick Button-Brown warned that profits will likely get funneled toward repaying debt instead of reinvesting in actual games.
When the publisher side starts gutting budgets, the press side catches the shrapnel — fewer previews, less freelance budget, fewer trips to cover the TGS, GamesCom, and E3 circuit that used to be routine. And the streamlined Sports-first strategy Memo lays out — with EA Sports FC, Madden NFL, and College Football leading the charge — means fewer weird little games getting coverage, which means fewer weird little creators getting discovered through them. That's our pipeline drying up in real time.
What We're Watching
For now, keep your eyes on a few things — whether EA's restructuring lands before or after PIF's official close, how surviving outlets pivot their games coverage to chase whatever the algorithm's thirsting for this quarter, and whether anyone in the unionization wave that's been bubbling through games media actually gets traction before the next round of cuts hits. The people covering the culture shouldn't have to be martyrs for the culture — and right now, that's the W/L community we're all living in.
