There are lots of new groups who are easily targeted and manipulated (and the kind of stuff being talked about in this furore is hilarious when you consider many magazines are openly asking for money to review mobile games, because there are so many to review, and reviewing is so crucial to exposure, that they know developers will pay). I think it’s important to consider beyond the hardcore – who almost certainly act as you describe when reading journalism – and consider people who are more casually dipping into, or returning to, games.

But nonetheless, the balance of power in society is fascinating, and the dominance by corporate power is by no means a sure thing.

I am happy to pay for a subscription to, say, Ars Technica, because the content is always good, and the subscription brings me some convenient functionality. I do so because I’d like to support them. But I still get the same content as someone not paying a subscription. It clearly works for Ars Technica, but it can only really work for the pinnacle. Or if you’re really good at leveraging it.

You can’t just put up a pay-wall though. You can’t make the evidence that requires someone to believe in the quality of your publications hard to get at. That makes the whole situation very difficult, but I think increasingly we are able to instil a sense of “If you like it, and you can afford it, contribute”. The more scaleable something like that is, the better, and I reckon it will become more and more the norm.

The thing about pay-for journalism is more relevant in news, where certain professionals and businesses rely on accurate information, and as such are willing to pay for good analysis and careful reporting. But sure, games journalism has always had this problem to some extent, and will continue to have this problem. Like you say, no-one is going to pay for quality games journalism in the same way as news journalism, but then as long as you know of a reliable source or have friends who play games too to get advice from, the effect is mitigated somewhat.

Yeah, it’s a problem endemic to all journalism that the increasing corporate nature of media and the emphasis over quantity of output over quality of output makes it ever more susceptible to PR. I’m fairly sure that nobody has died as a result of gaming journalism’s overreliance on gaming PR. The same cannot be said of national newspapers.

(The money thing is a big issue. Professional Angry Internet Man Stuart Campbell made this point somewhere on his blog — that Amiga Power, at its peak, was bringing in something like 4-5 times as much money from the people who bought it as it was advertising. Today those numbers are more than likely reversed. And if someone did start a pay-for journalism site, would anyone actually pay for it? Everything else being free online does rather hurt the perception of gaming journalism’s value, unfortunately.)

While people say that sure, games are just games, and if the worst thing that happens is that people buy a bad game then eh, for news I’d argue it’s a much bigger problem, and for an industry on its knees financially, the corruptability of news media is a problem. I think that journalism will survive and is surviving, but the expensive and challenging role of impartial analysis and detailed reporting will shift to other sources that people are willing to give money to. News will become ever freer, but as ever, if you want something actually good you’ll still have to pay for it. Meanwhile, press releases retyped by literally enslaved journalism graduates will be freely available everywhere.