Why Substack probably isn't going to make a gaming category.
The algo hates us.
Over the past year and change I’ve been running Reconnect, and here on Substack, the Reconnect Recap.
Its my job to find games writers wherever they are on the internet and centralize their work to aide discovery for both reader and writer.
I’ve found over two hundred active blogs, collated tens of thousands of articles, and spend every day curating the highlights.
Despite there being such a vibrant gaming community of writers on the web, Substack has still not instigated a gaming category. Something myself and a few writers, namely
, , and have been very vocal about.It is my current belief that this will never happen (knowing my luck it will happen bout 6s after I publish this article.)
The reason being, is that games writing has never trafficked well on the internet. The algorithm doesn’t know what to do with it.
When I used to write heavily on Medium, I was writing enough to earn a couple of hundred bucks a month off their partner program. I achieved this by writing about multiple genres. I wrote about Analytics (my day job), Mental Health (my curse), Space (my passion), Management (my other curse), and gaming (my love).
Of all the genres I wrote about, not only did Gaming get me less $ per read, it also resulted in less movement. People weren’t moving from one gaming article to another as much as they were for other genres.
There is no doubt that gaming is one of the biggest things on the planet. Moving billions of entertainment dollars every day. But as a subject matter, especially writing, algorithms hate it.
It gets too niche, it gets too personalized, and it doesn’t result in a lot of horizontal movement.
Algorithms love it when you give them an indication that you like something, and that it has a plethora of similar things to send your way. Horizontal movement. This is why substack gets us to recommend other blogs, a way to force horizontal movement, but it requires writers to actually do the recommending, and readers to follow it.
When I wrote about mental health, the algorithm loved it. Because it’s less tangible. People love reading about what’s wrong with them, reading that other people are going through the same thing, and more importantly that the easy cure is just one more video and article away.
My mental health articles would do great numbers, and the payout per read was higher. I could see where the readers had come from and what similar genres they were reading. Not only is there lots of horizontal movement because of how intangible it is as a subject matter, but it's also a genre filled with people writing about it (most are scams obviously).
The same was for my articles in Analytics. Tech is a rich field filled with people who like to read, I’ve been in Analytics since before it was cool. But now that Data Science is the new get rich quick scheme there were tones and tonnes of people writing their own crappy opinions.
Gaming can’t do that.
We’ve seen this happen to the professional arm of games writing. A decade ago a place like IGN could sustain themselves solely on video games content and have an even mix of Reviews, Guides, editorial, and investigative journalism.
Now its had to spread itself to other related entertainments fields, and we just get news and guides only. Because those are the only articles that get enough traffic for it to be worth it.
People want the news now, and it has a very short shelf life. Whilst the guides require a lot of work, but have a really long shelf life. I believe the GTA 5 cheats page on IGN is still one of the highest trafficked pages every month. This is why so many professional games writing sites and magazines are no longer around, they couldn’t keep up with the rat race to the bottom. Only so many sites can write about the same bit of news.
The stuff we love to write, doesn’t traffic. It doesn’t go viral, it doesn’t lead to horizontal movement. It’s also not as saturated with writers as other genres. Sure i’ve found over 200 active games blogs. There’s probably 200 new mental health newsletters going up on Substack every month. Without the population, it makes the algorithms jobs harder.
People are picky. One person wants to come to games writing for Retro games, another games development, another industry analytics. We are all very specific in our tastes, and whilst I personally follow over 90 gaming substacks, I’m the outlier.
Just because one reader likes retro games and narrative design, doesn’t mean the next five people who like retro games will also want to be suggested narrative design blogs. The category has to serve a purpose, and in this modern age, the purpose is always the algorithm.
It’s easier for us to be left under technology until we hit a population count where we begin to homogenize, where there’s 10-20 writers for each niche interest. We’re a long way off of that.
I love games writing, I built Reconnect because I saw the problem facing this art form and I wanted to do what I could do to try and rectify it.
I’m not trying to be overly negative or make people believe less in their writing. The writers I have on Reconnect do it for the love of the art form. They want to write, and sure some want / need to earn some money off of it, that’s a very steep uphill battle. The biggest writers in our ‘category’ i.e Patrick Kleppeck and Jason Schrier had massive followings before they got here.
The upside is, that no one is here to scam people, We don’t have the problem of people writing ill-informed opinions because they see this as a way to get famous quickly and build a large following.
What we have here and on other blogging platforms across the web are some really unique gems. I don’t need ten different blogs to talk about Games that were never released, or ten different blogs dedicated to text adventure games, or narrative design. The few that we have already are amazing, I love their work, and look forward to their posts all the time. Whilst a gaming category would help legitimize us as art form, it wouldn’t change my day to day.
You raise a number of really good points about the fragmentation of the gaming-related readership, some of which were already an issue for videogame magazines when sales were dwindling and we had to focus on certain audiences and topics, knowing full well those choices could turn other readers away, all in the context of a market that, back in the days of the early seventh console generation, was expanding so much on a quantitative level that the idea of full spectrum coverage with an eye for quality contents, as unrealistic as it already was, became untenable for purely logistical reasons.
Broadly speaking, I think an unbiased videogame hobbyist, here meant as someone who is willing to engage with write-ups related to this medium regardless of their precise contexts in terms of hardware, software, genre, region or period and, inside each of those, of how niche (or mainstream) their subject ends up being, doesn’t really exist in meaningful numbers, outside of a very small group of eclectic readers, possibly involved in studying this medium from an academic standpoint, and, even then, their interest can vary dramatically depending on each piece's tone and underlying intent. Most people, instead, for a variety of legitimate and understandable reasons often related to the allocation of free time, money and passion, tend to focus on a number of genres, platforms, art styles, settings or even developers, platforms or hardware generations and, even then, there's a majority that tend to be mostly invested in releases that are part of the current zeitgeist, since they're actually interested in being involved in an ongoing, lively debate just as much as in the games themselves (in a sense, this could also be seen as a gamification of the community itself).
Ironically, even those interested in game studies sometimes tend to focus on the ludological or narratological themes while debating, or outright denying, the legitimacy of the other approach, but that's its own issue. Even then, each of those contexts, as niche as they may seem, are actually their own little worlds, sometimes with hints of infighting or hostility that can split up already small potential audiences, which make things even more complicated.
Let’s consider videogame RPGs, since I mostly write about them: those interested in Western and Japanese RPGs are sometimes at odds, often as much for a sport team-like rivalry as they are for real or perceived game design or art style differences, in some instances even being unwilling to recognize historical cross-regional influences and crosspollination in terms of gameplay, narrative, art direction, cinematics and so on even when the authors themselves admit them, while also being uninterested in exploring those contexts' underlying diversity, meaning a writer could turn afoul of some readers just by comparing titles from different regions. This kind of approach is one of the chief reasons for the recurring debates about promoting strict genre definitions, which are often crafted to keep out a number of titles and series, rather than to properly portray and problematize the videogame RPG space's complex and diverse history, evolution and internal variety.
Even inside the Western\CRPG fanbase or the JRPG one, there are often people focused on certain subgenres or time periods, with little interest in other contexts and, as in many other genres, there's also the more recent split between those who actively seek indie games and those who are mostly interested in AAA titles, which often leaves so-called AA productions in a strange situation. Again, there are people who are in love with a small number of series rather than being interested in RPGs as a whole and, depending on how large a fanbase can be, part of it can end up being uninterested in your writing if you're covering an entry that isn't popular, or that's too divisive, or so on.
To make some incredibly broad examples, a CRPG fan interested in Gold Box-era titles isn't necessarily interested in articles about Infinity Engine-era games, and a The Elder Scroll fan may ignore both, including those on earlier titles in his own favorite series, while someone invested in old school blobbers like Sir Tech’s Wizardry series may end up giving a chance to contemporary Japanese so-called dungeon-RPGs while disparaging some Western RPGs’ current narrative slant, and that’s not even considering the animosity sometimes evoked by discussing turn based and real-time-with-pause systems, or how subgenres like old school roguelikes, textual MUDs or, on the popular side, hack & slash titles, can have their own audiences that sometimes have little to no interest in reading contents about other kinds of RPGs, and how part of some of those groups could well end up denying most titles outside of their backyard are RPGs in the first place.
At the same time, in the JRPG space, fans of turn based titles can end up denying citizenship to Japanese action RPGs series, some of which, like Dragon Slayer and its Xanadu and Sorcerian spinoffs, Ys, Xak and many others were actually born right when turn based combat systems were also starting to making inroads in the Japanese gaming scene in the mid ‘80s, while others are only interested in titles from earlier generations for a variety of design and aesthetic reasons not necessarily related to nostalgia. Others still are mostly invested in tactical JRPGs and, even inside that niche, those engaging Fire Emblem (a series that, itself, includes fans with a variety of different preferences) are often a different audience from those interested in more customization-heavy titles à la Tactics Ogre or FFT or, again, from those willing to give a chance to more esoteric products like, say, the Disgaea or Yggdra franchises or games like Natural Doctrine. Even writing about a single franchise doesn’t necessarily mean having its whole fanbase as an audience, as even a series with a large following like, say, Final Fantasy has a number of sub-audiences related to age, artistic, narrative and gameplay differences, which means your write-up about the structure of Final Fantasy VI’s second half may fall flat with both those who got to know the series with Final Fantasy X and someone mostly engaged with Final Fantasy XIV’s online contents, which, in turn, could also be uninterested in their respective favorite entries.
So, to bring this humungous wall of text to some sort of closure, you're absolutely right about videogame writing being chiefly a work of passion and, for those of us who do focus on very niche subjects, sometimes the only audience you can take for granted is your own self. Still, if just one more person ends up getting invested in a title they didn’t consider before, discovering its narrative and game design traits, the historical context of its development and, even more importantly, the people who worked on it, I feel it was well worth the effort. If not, at least you did your part in sharing the love.
As a software developer, the least Substack could do is create the category. I know they have a backlog of items, but it wouldn't take much to add it. But of course I'm assuming they will want to have a bit of marketing around it and an announcement. And like you said, there's certainly an algorithm in place that tries to connect stacks and recommend stacks and so on that may have to be adjusted. I just think from an organizational perspective, own own category/bucket of Video Games would be really nice.