33 years of game journalism, gone in an instant.
We all woke up to really sad news on Twitter (I refuse to call it X) on August 2 that, effective immediately, Game Informer magazine and online no longer existed.
As late-stage capitalism continues to lay waste to everything of value that doesn’t rake in cash for stock value, GI was just the latest casualty of a depressing streak of losses. GameStop, the meme-stock fueled parent company, immediately shut down the GI site so writers can’t even use articles as portfolio pieces. And they nuked the twitter account for the magazine one staffers tried to at least post their bylines one last time and offer something better than an AI-generated “sorry but we’re shutting down” soulless whimper of a goodbye:
If I sound mad, it’s because I am. I’ve lived enough decades on this planet now to have said goodbye to many trends, services, and cultural icons. GI was about the only remaining print magazine with gaming news and features. My household has gotten copies in an almost unbroken line since the early 2000s. I still picked up every issue when it arrived and read it eagerly, savoring the fan art sprinkled through the letters and jumping to the back for game previews and reviews of recent releases.
I don’t have anything else to say except that I’m so sad this is yet another ending of yet another Good Thing™ driven by profit-seeking; lacking profit, companies turn to petty acts of revenge against the staff they’re laying off.
Shareholders > workers
For the past 18 months, the games industry in general has been a bloodbath of cutthroat layoffs. Games release, make millions, and then the studio announces hundreds of layoffs. Nearly 200,000 workers in the tech sector in the United States (more than just game studios, obviously) have lost their jobs since January 2023.
I have barely played Destiny 2, a game that’s been a major part of my gaming life for a decade, after Bungie fired 17% of their staff in late July, just a few days before Game Informer’s death. Bungie released probably the best campaign in all of Destiny history on June 4. Guess those employees (narrative design, sound and audio design, art, player support, community support, and more) don’t deserve to share in the success? I installed Warframe and started playing that instead. (Obligatory “Fuck Pete Parsons” (bungie CEO) who has spent $2 million dollars buying cars over the past 2 years. Glad he got his bonus! /s)
CEOs are responding to the higher costs of borrowing by firing workers rather than cutting stock value or shareholder profit. You could argue that some of these layoffs are the result of over-hiring during the pandemic, especially as some tech giants hired talent to prevent their competitors from accessing that same talent pool. Workers, as always, are just pawns in the game — and the kings and queens on the board never care how many pawns are lost as long as they win the game.
And don’t forget the “promise” of AI: Half of CEOs are planning to replace jobs with AI.
I’m just disgusted, honestly. I understand the economic arguments. Yes, I really do understand that companies sometimes have to downsize staff to stay financially solvent. GameStop isn’t exactly winning its market sector.
But Marx wasn’t wrong when he posited that labor and capital are always in a war over control of profits. Who deserves to get paid more, the shareholders who “own” bits of the company through their investment, or the people who put in the hours every day to make the thing that people buy or consume? As someone who finds value in the insights of a Critical perspective, I like to examine power structures and how they operate. It’s very, very hard to actually dislodge the ultra-wealthy and ultra-powerful. First step is acknowledging that this is the game we’re all being forced to play.
The US lacks basic worker protections in many states; “small” layoffs of less than 50 or 100 can also slip under the legal threshold of more protective states like California where you’ll see companies (like Google) doing multiple rounds of small layoffs to avoid kicking off the regulations. Most states are ‘right to work’ meaning the company owes you nothing (nor do you owe it any loyalty), and certainly not a dignified end to your position, should the time come.
Without union protections and a Department of Labor with teeth to enforce labor regulations (and we need Congress to pass new ones), it’s always going to be easier for companies to screw workers to increase profit by lowering the cost of “human capital.” Even the ubiquitous “Human Resources” moniker is simply a reminder that people are assets, nothing more. No human flourishing here! All hail the dollar!
There’s clearly a rebalancing of the power here, with employers taking back the bit of advantage that workers enjoyed in 2021-22. Nope, can’t have that! Wages will be pushed back down, and profits will rise.
The general “I hope they land on their feet” that I read when layoffs are announced rings hollow. So many media, journalism, and even “boring” industry jobs are just …. gone. Where does a writer go when their company simply decides to pack it in? Do they go work at Wendy’s? Serious question, here. The US social net doesn’t much exist for worker retraining. Companies just fire people with a “well, fuck them” attitude and wash their hands of it.
Anyway.
Pour one out for Game Informer; it was a great magazine doing good work to keep people informed about a major entertainment industry. I feel their loss in my feeds; new games come out but there are no GI reviews to read anymore.
Perhaps it’s inevitable that outlets producing content for human eyeballs are dying in our hyper-online world. Recent estimates suggest 42% of all web traffic is just bots. Bots reading, bots clicking, bots posting AI-generated comments. It’s making the Dead Internet Theory ever more real: soon, the internet will be nothing more than a wasteland of AI posts being read by AI agents.
I’d like to hope that we humans will wake up and realize we can build better structures and systems: models of money-making which honor the worker more than paying the shareholder. We can walk back to laws that Reagan’s administration destroyed or weakened; we can set up policies that make it hard for companies to strip-mine profits out of a company while firing the people who made them that money in the first place.
I’d like to think that writing itself is an act of defiance, a crucial act in a busy and overstimulated age. As social media hacks our brains, some people will resist and buy a book instead. Or buy games from indie studios. Or find as many local business alternatives to big box outlets as they can afford. Or simply foster community with people around them, because to escape a shitty capitalist wasteland, we’re going to need friends.
Every word 100% written by me.
just:words 
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