2024: A Year of Questionable Game Journalism

The year 2024 was a mixed bag for gamers. The year had some absolute bangers, while other big names failed to entice players. However, one of the biggest disappointments of the year was the questionable game journalism that was displayed throughout the year. As a game journalist myself, the title has started to become more of a cuss word in the gaming community in recent times, and this year was a prime example of it.

From the questionable coverage of games like Black Myth Wukong to the disconnection with the gamers during the coverage of games like Dragon Age Veilguard or Concord, it wasn’t a great sight. Although it’s often frowned upon to question the very profession you are part of, I felt that this year needed to be addressed so that some of these things don’t repeat next year.

1. A Lack of Proper Fact Checking

So, let’s start with the biggest point of contention this year: the coverage of Black Myth Wukong. As a game, Wukong reached the 2nd highest peak player count on Steam and was undoubtedly my game of the year, making it to my top 10 all-time list. However, the entire coverage of Black Myth Wukong, from before its release to its review and beyond, showcased highly questionable coverage from many well-known game journalists.

It all started when rumors surfaced that the developers behind Wukong — GameScience, had a history of sexism and misogyny. That’s a massive claim to pin on an up-and-coming game studio, so everyone was expecting strong evidence to back it up.

Surprisingly, the evidence that was used to conclude this allegation was based on a few anonymous interviews and one highly mistranslated post on Weibo from Feng Ji, one of the co-founders of GameScience. Keeping the anonymous interviews aside, which also only referred to “possible sexism” in GameScience based on innuendos, the drastic mistranslation of a post from GameScience co-founder shouldn’t have happened. But that’s not where it stops, as this highly contested information was later used by many other publications and game journalists in their review of Black Myth Wukong.

As a journalist, our first and foremost job should be to review a game based on its actual gameplay. Why? Because gamers read our reviews to know whether the game is good enough to buy and invest their time or not. Now, there are obvious external affairs that sometimes become important to highlight, and a history of sexism and misogyny is one of them.

But in that case, there cannot possibly be a mistake in fact-checking, especially as the degree of such allegations may ruin the reputation of an entire game studio and their new game.

Furthermore, using the same unfounded information in other reviews, also speculating that the game “may not have any female characters” as they were missing in the demo or the first two chapters is highly projective and should not be acceptable in our profession.

2. A Severe Disconnection with the Gamers

The disconnection with gamers has been increasing each year when it comes to game journalism, which is exactly the reason why our titles have more so become a cuss word in the community. This is mainly due to a severe detachment to what the actual gamers like and dislike.

A clear example is Dragon Age Veilguard, which was dubbed the game of the year by many game journalists, only for the game to perform terribly when it came to actual sales. Normally, I do not criticize anyone based on their choice of games because everyone has different tastes, and I do not even criticize those who like Veilguard.

I can see how some people actually enjoyed the game, but in no way can I ever get my head around Dragon Age Veilguard getting Game of the Year shouts. Why? First, the game has terrible writing. A Dragon Age game having terrible dialogues and storytelling should be considered underwhelming for that very fact. Now I would understand if other game journalists disagreed with me on the storytelling or dialogues, but they agreed instead!

Almost every review I have read talks about the underwhelming dialogues, some even recommending to not play the game for the story. And these very reviews are also calling the game a Game of the Year contender, not based on what Dragon Age should be strong at, but based on the combat and exploration.

However, even though the combat and exploration in Dragon Age Veilguard is good, it does nothing out of the ordinary we haven’t seen over the years. The good combat even felt wasted due to the terribly designed enemies and bosses and the exploration has an overabundance of puzzles with not more than one moment of extra thought required to solve them. With a year stacked with some of the most gorgeous and action-oriented open-world games, like Dragon’s Dogma 2, how Dragon Age Veilguard is getting a shoutout for Game of the Year from other game journalists simply eludes me.

3. The Era of Safe Reviews

Safe reviews have become a trend for many game journalists, who fail to identify how a game would be received by the community on release and rate them safely without calling out the shortcomings. The ‘7/10’ or ‘3.5/5’ have become a meme in the community as they are used to blanket any game with a big enough IP but lacking any good content. Prime examples of this in 2024 were the coverage of Concord, Skull and Bones, and Star Wars: Outlaws.

All three of these titles are from big names with big IPs. The only thing these three share, however, is that barely anyone decided to play them.

Concord, Skull and Bones, and Star Wars: Outlaws have 697, 2.6k, and 2.4k peak player counts on Steam, respectively, becoming the biggest failures of 2024. Gamers clearly rejected all three of these games, but their review would have made you feel otherwise. All three of these games were rated Average or Above Average, which was nowhere near the reality after their release. The biggest issue I have with these reviews is that some of them appear to be afraid of actually calling something objectively bad, which they are in common sense.

For example, the character designs in Concord were dreadful, devoid of any creativity or characteristics, and almost none of the reviews mention it. A hero shooter having terribly designed characters while adding nothing new to the game that we haven’t already seen should be added to every review when it is this apparent. There is a reason no one wanted to play this game on release.

The same thing applies to the drab exploration and enemy AI of Skull and Bones and Outlaws. And this is not a matter of different tastes because we saw the same journalists doing a 180 in coverage after the community backlash. Either they had a ‘change of heart’ or were too afraid/unsure of whether to call out big IPs on their reviews, which cannot be acceptable in our profession.

Looking Forward to 2025

The next year is set to be one of the best years for gaming. A huge number of big-name titles are releasing, and hopefully, we can do a better job reviewing them. I had to write this piece to get this off my chest as I was getting sick of getting game journalists like me getting laughed at in the community due to the above-mentioned shenanigans.

I still think that most game journalists simply love playing games and share their opinion on them at their best possible capacity, and many of the game reviews this year would also showcase that. However, most of the good work gets sidelined when incidents like the ones mentioned above occur, giving the entire profession a bad name.

I can only hope that next year will be better for game journalism, and there will surely be enough opportunities to make it better. Our gaming coverage at Beebom has always followed the moral code of fearless but fair coverage, making sure to review games based on their gameplay without any outside interference.

My colleagues and I always strive for 100% factual accuracy while understanding the pulse of gamers and exploring the niche the game is targeted towards. We keep our personal biases out the door when reviewing, responding to our community, and having healthy discussions with actual gamers about their opinions.

Tell us what you think about game journalism in general this year and whether you have found any issues with my coverage of games as well. We are not perfect as well, so I always look forward to your feedback to improve our gaming coverage.