Games Criticism Isn’t Dead, But That Doesn’t Mean It Can’t Get Worse

By Grace Benfell | September 25, 2025 | 12:30pm

Video Games Features Games Criticism

Games Criticism Isn’t Dead, But That Doesn’t Mean It Can’t Get Worse

Lots of people yelled at me for writing the piece “Silksong Hastens the Death of the Critic.” As you would expect, few of the people yelling appeared to have read it, and fewer engaged with it in any substantive way. This proved the piece’s central point. Engagement with my analysis was largely limited to woeful misreads and fan posturing. There was glee at an entitled critic being so mad she didn’t get to play Silksong early. Meanwhile, I wasn’t playing or planning to write about it. Nevertheless, there were exceptions. On their site, No Escape, Kaile Hultner did me the honor of reading and engaging with what I had written. However, their response misjudged what I wrote and revealed the inadequacy of our reaction to the decline of professional criticism.

First of all, I think Hultner made a mistake that a lot of commentators on my article made: taking the narrow focus of the piece for a lack of consideration about the broader issue or a total disregard for alternatives. At one point, Hultner discusses the embargo writ large: “But what Benfell doesn’t talk about here is that these early codes often come with restrictive agreements not to discuss certain aspects of the game, usually narrative spoilers, sometimes mechanical ones. It’s tit for tat, skewed in the studios’ favor.” They are right that I don’t discuss it, but that’s because it’s not relevant to my thesis. The piece is not a referendum on the resemblance of games press to PR. It is not an exploration of the flaws and benefits of the embargo model. It is about how this specific instance is a reflection of a broader devaluation of criticism. I don’t think pointing out that the current embargo model is flawed harms (or even addresses) my argument. Additionally, other avenues of culture criticism, like books, grant pre-release copies to critics without the same kinds of restrictions that plague games media. Perhaps that is something we could fight for.

Most Popular

Hultner also claims that I overstate the issue. They quote my article’s thesis, “however small, this represents the deterioration of criticism as a profession, an art, and as a service to the audience,” but they omit “however small” and do not engage with “represents.” Representation does not imply a causal relationship. Setting the dramatic headline aside, I never say that Team Cherry’s policy will shape the future or that other companies will take cues from it. I do argue that it is a symptom of a broader disease.

Hultner concludes their essay with, “Just because [that critical conversation is] not happening this weekend doesn’t mean games media writ large is doomed, even if every other piece of news about the state of media does.” Again, that addresses a claim I did not make. In contrast, the piece puts this particular situation in conversation with the broader and more pernicious issues that affect the space. If you read the words I wrote, you’ll find my argument to be measured and specific.

I didn’t address this in the piece, because I believed it to be self-evident, but launch reviews are valuable. For one, games change a lot over time these days. Playing Baldur’s Gate 3 at launch is a significantly different experience than playing it now. In plain terms, it is worth having a coherent record of that initial experience. To make another point, even when early reviews are terribly written and poorly considered, they have value as a thing to respond to. Bioshock: Infinite caused huge ripples in the broader games crit sphere. The initial response was ecstatic, hagiographic even. A righteous set of independent critics tempered that euphoria through serious engagement with both the game and the criticism that had come before. That conversation was made possible through that initial wave of launch reviews, even if we can agree that most of them were bad.

This reflects the fact that alternative criticism benefits from a mainstream to react with and against. Games journalism was healthier, as an ecosystem, when there were overlapping worlds of discourses, when journalists responded to and quoted bloggers and when bloggers repudiated and pushed against critics. I don’t mean to suggest this never happens now or that this time was a bastion of healthy criticism. But this common space has shrunk.

Hultner and I both came up as bloggers during Waypoint‘s heyday, before its hard pivot to podcasts and its consolidation into “One Vice,” when Austin Walker and Rob Zacny were writing multi-thousand-word reviews and when it was host to a robust ring of freelance criticism and reporting. So many of the independent spaces we both circled, from Into the Spine to Uppercut, were direct or indirect offshoots of that more professional space. Professional critics encouraged and fostered independent and hobbyist criticism.

Hultner does raise this relationship, but only to position independent sites and hobbyists as nobler than professionals. Hultner writes, “Beyond the realm of mainstream games media sites (and most of the smaller content mills) there exists a vast and fairly deep pool of writers and critics who do this shit for the love of the game.” I know this. Anyone reading No Escape knows this, too. I co-edit an independent website that writes about indie games nobody has heard of (The Imaginary Engine Review, for the record). Only one of our “freelance” contributors has had anything resembling a career at a mainstream outlet. Who exactly is Hultner talking to?

Additionally, Hultner’s glowing treatment of indie crit lacks critical rigor. Frankly, a lot of independent criticism is bad (a lot of professional crit too, but for very different reasons). When you aren’t edited, when your work is siloed into specific niches and can’t sit alongside broader artistic contexts, when you aren’t obligated to respond to other writers, your writing will suffer. Of course, hobbyists are real critics and writers. Many overcome those obstacles to do truly great work. Many of the critics that I most respect have never had anything resembling a professional career. But if you scroll on platforms like Goodreads, Letterboxd, or Backloggd, most of what you will read are quippy jokes or regurgitated takes. Most engagement with hobbyist writing means wading through plenty of thoughtlessness. I don’t begrudge this. People are allowed to write bad things. They need to, if they are ever going to get good. But I think it is false to position hobbyist criticism (whether on blogs, indie websites, or social media platforms) as a healthy model that produces an environment of great criticism. It isn’t, and it doesn’t.

Furthermore, hobbyists have pressures and time constraints of their own. Part of Hultner’s argument is that independent critics have more space to think, uninhibited by the (admittedly real) constraints that can hamper professionals. They elaborate, “they take their time to think about the media they’re examining—far more time than any outlet would ever agree to give a freelancer.” This is a claim I fundamentally disagree with, because I remember being a blogger.

Back in 2019, I was working a full-time marketing job, trying to blog occasionally. A piece I wrote on Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice emerged over months, as I struggled to find time and energy to write, stringing out sessions over weekends. It was, admittedly, the kind of thing that would have been hard to pitch. It was a retrospective evaluation longer than 1,000 words that gestated over a long period. But I had to fight for every moment I spent on it. It was hard, not easy, for me to have the space I needed to get through writing. This work did result in something meaningful. I wrote something about which I felt very passionate, which prompted engaged discussion from friends and strangers. It was among my first Critical Distance features. The process, and the frustration, were rewarded. But ultimately, the source of that reward was arbitrary luck, knowing a few of the right people at the right time. I could have agonized over that piece in exactly the same way and have had nothing to show for it.

I am convinced, not in any objective way but through some sense of statistics and personal experience, that this happens all the time. Hobbyists burn out on a lack of audience engagement or have to fight for every minute they can spend writing about (or even just playing) games or find other hobbies that better respect their hard-won time and energy. These cycles of exhaustion most adversely affect marginalized writers, who have less time, less money, and less fucks to give than everyone else. These pressures are only getting harder to overcome.

Virginia Woolf was right: you need a room to write. To put pen to page, you need space, something to write with, and someone who will read it. None of these things are a guarantee for any of us now, for reasons that range from mundane to horrific. Of course, it is not wrong to be forgotten or to cut your losses and find other places for your creative energy (Lord knows I feel foolish for staying around so long), but surely it is bad for those things to be almost an inevitability, for the structures in which we live to enforce them.

Criticism will not die. As long as there is art, people will find ways to respond to it. But the common space of criticism can get worse. It can get harder to read and respond to good critics. It can get harder for critics to have a lifetime body of work. It can get harder for hobbyists to find time and space to write. Those are not small stakes. Though these discussions are cyclical and the problems self-perpetuating, it is worth marking these losses and calling them what they are.

Grace Benfell is a queer woman, critic, and aspiring fan fiction author. She writes on her blog Grace in the Machine and can be found @gracemachine on BlueSky.