I kinda regret getting into gaming related media at this point. When i started lurking Gaf in 2012(or 2013?) after many years of not visiting gaming related sites, the gaming aspect went into everyone trying to monetize their content, stupid internet personalities and shit that no one cared about in the early 2000s being some taboo practice. It's only gotten worse since then. The fuck happened?
Now everyone is surprised half of those personalities are fucking creepers after helping them build up this whole ecosystem.
The one thing I've enjoyed about the "professionals" (as opposed to the amateur neo-nazi's like PewDiePie and JonTron and H3H3*) in this is basically how Giant Bomb continues to circle in the opposite direction. Who deliberately were never trying to do this, but became that ("money-making internet gaming personalities") to the point that CBS bought them for an illegal amount of money and basically tried to have them teach all of GameSpot and much of the rest of CBSi how to do what they did. (And resulted in half of GameSpot seemingly realizing, oh, that's not possible here and leaving.)
And if you watch "how to build a bomb" or any of their early content, there was no real plan, they just did stuff they wanted to do with friends. (Hell, their content continues to be this, including Drew and Jason and Jeff's whole entirely random video of their jerryrigged up system and how they have to make a real one to do 4K while avoiding the cost of paying for actual hardware.) And had the lone insight effectively about Quick Looks (Let's Plays) which resulted from Jeff never feeling the video reviews they did at GameSpot actually let you experience what the game was like as much as playing through some of it with a friend or two while commenting about it.
And they actually sell premium subscriptions, so you can watch them play video games with other people. Often drunks who aren't good drunks. Because it's a website, "presumably about video games."
And then you see the self-seriousness of the Polygon trailer. Which actually is what a lot of people like NeoGAF.com want, and is all over Polygon's content and always has been despite the claims they've improved. To justify gaming as meaningful as they say in the trailer. As something worth spending your time on, not producing or even playing them for "fun", but "covering" them, writing about, having "conversations" about them and their status. They're producing content
for themselves in the opposite manner that someone like dunkey is producing
for himself.
To relate this to the "creeper" factor, they've never really unlatched themselves from the endless content cycle like the Giant Bomb guys did probably because they were burnt out about it after a decade. So they need to constantly hire in younger people who spend all day refreshing sites and twitter to regurgitate it for their site. And young people make mistakes, especially with no oversight, and especially in their personal lives. Same for the rest of the Vox conglomerate and many of these other companies that keep having this problem pop up. All the "adults" moved into the corporate roles required to make these companies actually work (Vox has like 500 employees) or effectively left after getting rich and the people below them are hiring the people coming up through journalistic minor leagues of garbage with no actual knowledge of what they're writing about.
To use the companies most famous and highest paid editor, Ezra Klein's career started at 21 as a blogger and was hired by the Washington Post because "I was blown away by how good he was—how much the kid wrote—on so many subjects"; nothing regarding actual quality of content or knowledge, just that he produced quantities of it. He had and has literally zero background in any of this except what he's picked up in the 12 years since, he was a low level poli sci undergrad rejected by his student paper for not being able to write. And he's now in charge of hiring more and more content producers which involves lots of plucking the same type of people off the minor leagues who regularly get themselves in trouble for twitter or facebook stupidity. The notion that sister subsidiary Polygon probably operates the same way is the least shocking thing you could tell me about it. Its insularity of industry and personality has probably protected it from much worse over the last three years.
spoiler (click to show/hide)
And and and and, most of the lamentations in that thread about "i never expected it from him!" is related to said person enjoying the Car Boys series, which is some of the most Giant Bomb like content that Polygon has ever produced.
*Amateur in their career background, not their support of genocide against non-Aryan races.
