for tai

It's a chicken egg situation a tad for me. Games turned more mainstream, which led to most journalists no longer being gamers that wanted to write about games. Instead, they were there (generally) as a introductory step to another journalist job. Hard games were already slowly going out of style after the arcade-and rental stores no longer pushed for harder games to up profits or to increase game length, instead they were just there to appease a fanbase that existed because of those decisions. We already saw a little shift of this in the PS2 era where more and more difficult games, while loved, were slowly also getting the shaft critically or they started to hide their true colors behind a difficulty-mode (see DMC, NG, GoW). Though we're beating a dead horse, I think the God Hand review really hit this home. It's no secret that review-scores highly influence sales, to the point that Capcom openly stated that they would no longer use sales as a metric for success but their metacritic scores instead, as it has basically become the same thing.

So while the casualization of the market due to it going more mainstream (disregarding how and why that happened, as that's another can of worms), I agree, was the cause. The journalists are the ones that keep that result in-tact for a lot too.

Few years ago I met one of the more prolific reviewers in Europe at a party, and he admitted to my face that he plays most games for a few hours to get a basic idea and then just writes the rest based off of trailers. And that apparently that's how most do it. Made me sick to my stomach. Guy reviewed a few games that I played and his reviews were fine, albeit a bit 'generic', but just goes to show that most of what you're reading is just BS for quick clicks.

It is annoying though, regarding journalists and reviewers, that it is such a hard niche to nail. A good gaming journalist doesn't have to be a good reviewer, but he does have to be a good journalist, writer and a fan of the hobby. Just as a reviewer needs to be and a good analyist, but also a good gamer. Currently, it's more 'either or' in that regard, with most journalists being either just a journalist, or just a gamer (mostly the former). For example, take Stinger. I'm a trained writer, but I'm no journalist in any way, and I love the hobby. Which is why most of my journalistic pieces are absolutely ass haha.