Should I Stay or Should I Go: How to Stay Afloat in the Games Media
Jeff Green should be the most hireable man in videogame journalism.
The 54 year old got his start working for Ziff Davis’ MacWEEK as a reviews editor, and eventually joined the staff of Computer Gaming World as an associate editor in 1996. Five years later, in 2001, he was named editor-in-chief of CGW and remained in that position after the magazine was rebranded by Microsoft as Games For Windows: The Official Magazine in 2006. It was there where he became ringleader of “GFW Radio,” one of the greatest gaming podcasts of all time. Every week they served up equal doses of ultra-incisive commentary and, uhm, some other stuff too.
But then, in 2008, Games For Windows and its overarching brand 1Up.com were hit with company-wide layoffs. A few months later Jeff Green left Ziff Davis—which was then his home for over 15 years. Since then he’s bounced around a couple jobs in the games industry—he had an ill-fated stint as a developer at EA, before being named the “editor-in-chief” of EA.com in some sort of quasi-marketing position. Most recently he worked at Popcap as a social media manager, and now does consulting work at a company called Hit Detection.
Jeff Green seems mostly happy. He’s making money, he’s providing for his family. But this is still a man who’s always wanted to work in the media, who grew up with the dream of writing a backpage magazine column. He did, for nearly 20 years. Suddenly he’s not anymore. That must be disappointing.
“Obviously I’ve thought a lot about it, and in the last couple years I’ve stopped looking for jobs in the media,” says Green. “Right now [at Hit Detection] I’m working with all former game journalists who worked at Computer Gaming World, it’s like where old games journalists go to die or something. The biggest problem I had when 1Up and CGW shut down was that frankly I was too high up the ladder. If I was an associate editor or a senior editor I would’ve been more hireable. If you look around at the major videogame outlets in 2008—which was a different landscape—the guys at the top weren’t going anywhere. In fact, they still haven’t left. If CGW never shut down, I’m fairly convinced I’d still be there. It was the best job I ever had. Not to denigrate my current job, but that was a perfect fit.”
If Jeff Green was going to stick around he would’ve been forced to take a massive pay cut. For someone in his 40s, with a wife and a kid, living in San Francisco, those sorts of sacrifices aren’t viable. He was pushed out of the media, and he hasn’t been back since. This is not a particularly unique story, and is shared by many of his peers. 1Up’s Shane Bettenhausen now works for Playstation. CGW compatriot and one of the most vital voices in videogames Shawn Elliott is a level designer at Arkane Austin. Hilary Goldstein, a name people most associate with IGN’s mid-2000s heyday, now runs a tiny board game blog and works as a product manager for EA. 10 years ago every major hardware manufacturer in the industry had its own boutique magazine (remember those Official Xbox Magazine demo discs?). How many major, mainstream videogame websites exist anymore? There’s still Gamespot and IGN, but both those sites are long past their cultural moment and rely on ultra-broad content goals in order to keep up with new media demands. Kotaku does lots of great journalism, but publishes non-game-specific pieces removed from their nominal goals as a publication, and its identity tends to get subsumed underneath the larger Gawker brand. There are, of course, places like Unwinnable, Kill Screen and Rock Paper Shotgun—all great websites who stay to true to their identity—but few people are making a living off of those sites.
Simply put, this is a confusing era in games journalism, especially if you’re someone with roots in the media like Jeff Green. At one point in his life Green thought he’d be publishing his magazine until the day he retired. This would be his legacy. It was etched in stone. But then the world changed. Quickly, chaotically, leaving him out in the cold.
“I never wanted to make games, I wanted to write about them, but everybody I knew, every job lead [after 1Up folded] was in development. It wasn’t a great fit for me. I’ve never been great at corporate culture, and I had no idea what I was in for when I got to EA,” says Green. “That was rough for me, I went from the head of a magazine and part of this popular podcast—which I think was a career peak for me—and then I ended up in a job that I felt I didn’t know how to do, working for people way younger than me, and feeling like a moron every day. It was a real comeuppance for me. Like ‘whoa, what the hell happened to me?’”
“We knew we had to do something different when we realized that we were appreciating this more than we were enjoying IGN,” says Greg Miller, one of the core personalities behind Kinda Funny Games. “I had always talked about how I wanted to be at IGN forever and if it ever got to the point where I didn’t want to come in everyday or that I wasn’t having the time of my life it was time to step aside.”
Miller, one of the bigger names in videogame journalism, decided to take matters into his own hands. He had eight great years at IGN, slowly but surely becoming the face of that publication, but then he took probably the biggest risk of his career. He took his social media followers and pooled them with other IGN employees Colin Moriarty, Tim Gettys and Nick Scarpino, and together they went fully independent. They had good jobs, and worked for a massive media company, but they still thought they’d be happier working out of a YouTube channel and a Twitch stream. Welcome to 2015.
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