Major early contributors to the field included magazines like Electronic Games and Famitsu, which set the stage for more comprehensive consumer-focused coverage.
Throughout its history, video game journalism has grappled with ethical concerns, especially around conflicts of interest due to advertising pressures and publisher relationships.
[3] The late 1970s also marked the first coverage of video games in Japan, with columns appearing in personal computer and manga magazines.
[4] The earliest journals exclusively covering video games emerged in late 1981, but early column-based coverage continued to flourish in North America and Japan with prominent examples like video game designer Yuji Horii's early 1980s column in Weekly Shōnen Jump[5] and Rawson Stovall's nationally syndicated column, "The Vid Kid" running weekly ran from 1982 to 1992.
Efforts by Horwitz and Shubert, backed by a strong library of built up web content eventually allowed IG Online to be acquired by Sendai Publishing and Ziff Davis Media, the publishers of then-leading United States print publication Electronic Gaming Monthly who transformed the publication into a separate print property in February 1996.
At first ignored by most major game publishers, it was not until the communities developed an influential and dedicated readership, and increasingly produced professional (or near-professional) writing that the sites gained the attention of these larger companies.
Independent video game websites are generally non-profit, with any revenue going back towards hosting costs and, occasionally, paying its writers.
While most independent sites take the form of blogs, the 'user-submitted' model, where readers write stories that are moderated by an editorial team, is also popular.
[33][34] According to a 2014 article by Mike Rose in Gamasutra: "The publicity someone like TotalBiscuit ... can bring you compared to mainstay consumer websites like IGN, GameSpot and Game Informer is becoming increasingly significant.
[38] Reviews by 'official' platform-specific magazines such as Nintendo Power typically have direct financial ties to their respective platform holders.
[40] In 2007, Jeff Gerstmann was fired from GameSpot after posting a review on Kane & Lynch: Dead Men that was deemed too negative by its publisher, which also advertised heavily on the website.
[36][41][43] In the controversy that followed, dubbed "Doritogate" (after a video of Geoff Keighley emerged of him sitting in front of bottles of Mountain Dew, bags of Doritos and an ad banner for Halo 4), the threat of legal action—the result of broad libel laws in the UK—caused Eurogamer to self-censor.
[44] Eurogamer's editor-in-chief Tom Bramwell censored the article, and Florence consequently retired from video games journalism.
In one of the more recognized examples, members of Obsidian Entertainment were to have gotten bonuses from Bethesda Softworks for their work on Fallout: New Vegas if they obtained a Metacritic score of 85 or better out of 100.
[54][56] Video game reviewers are aware of their impact on the Metacritic score and subsequent effect on bonus payment schemes.
Such embargoes are intended to prevent tarnishing the game's reputation prior to release and affecting pre-release and first-day sales.
In agreements with publishers, media outlets will get advance copies of the game to prepare their review to have ready for this date.
[59] Additionally, modern lengthier games can offer more than 20 hours of content, and the amount of time journalists have to review these advance copies prior to the embargo date is limited.
It has become a concern of these journalists that they are knowingly publishing reviews that cover only a fraction of the game's content, but waiting any longer beyond the embargo date will harm viewership of their site.
Kotaku has self-reported on the downsides of reporting unrevealed information and dealing with subsequent video game publisher backlash as a result.
In November 2015, the site reported they had been "blacklisted" by Bethesda and Ubisoft for at least a year; they no longer got review copies, nor received press information from the publishers, nor can interact with any of their company's representatives.
[68] This is primarily due to feelings of nostalgia to video games people have grown up with, which, according to professor Clay Routledge, may be more powerful than similar nostalgic emotions caused by other artforms, such as music.