Just out of curiosity about the gaming journalism you are talking about, what gaming era did you grow up in? For instance, for me it was the mid 90s to early 2000s, the days of the demo cds, etc. Somehow the whole watching other people play games movement missed me, not saying that's good or bad, maybe its just an artifact of my own life and has little to do with my generation in general.

I grew up with magazines (and demo CDs) before the Internet. I worked for a while in the game industry, so I've always kept up with it.

I just don't have time to play another 100+ hour RPG or slog my way through a FromSoftware game, but I do want to keep tabs on what is being done. Sampling 5 or 6 hours of the 100 hours of gameplay for games I know I am unlikely to purchase was a compromise. Then it became a habit. I now definitely spend more time watching people play new release games than watching Netflix, etc.

And this habit has resulted in me buying and enjoying games I never would have found otherwise.

Your mention of demo CDs just made me extremely nostalgic for the days where I played Star Wars: Rebel Assault, loaded from a CD-ROM in a single-speed Mitsumi drive. The loading times were probably atrocious but the graphics were cool…

I’m into it from like an eSports perspective, but I will say that streamed gameplay is a pretty good preview indicator for games that don’t have demos. Streamers can be biased, but there are fundamental things they cannot fake, like say how pleasant the UX is.

Demos are limited in that often they’re a short snippet of game and may not be indicative of the whole thing.

>Good creators/influencers make it abundantly clear when they are taking a sponsorship

The issues aren't sponsorships which are always obvious, it's that content creators are by the very nature of their business model completely audience captured. They don't review things that aren't going to get them clicks on their channels, and if they do they're unlikely to give a truly controversial opinion that conflicts with the views of their audience or sours the relationships with a publisher.

That is the real value of journalism, gaming or otherwise. There's a firewall between the audience and the writer and there's institutional power that gives writers independence. Content creators are, the overwhelming amount of the time, just an amplified version of their median audience member which is why companies love them much more than journalists, and it also means there's zero signal in what they say.

I think you may be underestimating the degree to which reviewers were captured by the publishers. It was a pretty big meme back in the day, where AAA titles pretty much always got a 7 or more. The incentive back in the days of magazines was early access to games. If your magazine didn't have the newest blockbuster on the cover along with an in-depth review then your magazine wouldn't sell. That meant that you had to have a relationship with the publisher, a relationship that would get chilly if you didn't consistently give the publisher good reviews.

I remember when Kotaku started (long before they were bought out) and they were lauded as being immune to this interference. Same with Giant Bomb, which has now changed hands many times.

I'm not saying the current system is perfect - I'm just saying that my own preference has completely changed. I stopped reading game reviews probably a decade ago and now I have a small selection of creators who have proven themselves to me. They didn't do so by trying to be a YouTube equivalent of game journalism (ala TotalBiscuit or Zero Punctuation) but simply by playing thousands of games. The review is incidental, their primary focus is on playing the game.

The days of listening to the opinion of someone who played the game for 5 hours in a rush to meet a deadline are gone for me. The days of someone shoe-horning reviews into gameplay/sound/ui/audio breakdowns are gone for me. For almost any game I care about there is someone who is just playing it, and I watch them play it, and decide for myself.

Exactly, I remember so many of the mags being hot garbage, and the industry itself would gladly blacklist a journalist that said anything bad about them.

The thing with lets-players and different youtubers is there are a bunch of small time ones that like a particular genre and play things around that. If you don't like the ones you're seeing, search around and you'll typically find a number of different people playing the game and putting up on YT.