From critic to employee. He's living the dream.
It tends to be more like one dream blinked out of existence and time came to start a new dream...
True, a majority of critics have dreams of making their own games (as I'm sure virtually all game fans do,) but the idea that game critics are using the job as a stepping stone to game making is overstated. The dream of being able to write about games is real.I know I dreamed for years of writing for EGM or IGN64 one day, and most all of the writers in that business had similar interests of finding cool games and telling people similar to themselves about them, or saving fans a few bucks by ripping apart a shitty game.
That's a real dream. But as an occupation? It can really suck. Some comfortable livings have been made off of writing about games, but the people you know by name as game critics are not being paid on their name value. That's why, especially now with Youtube and Twitch where there's a chance to actually capitalize on name value and generate real money (though we'll see if that's a bubble or a valid business,) many are leaving major sites or spending no time working for major sites when their own brand can take off in the video space. As a writer, it only takes two or three years before you've maxed out your job ranking at a professional online site, and your choices are limited to progress your career: you can either become a manager (which means telling people how to write about games more than actually writing about them,) you could become a high-profile features writer doing top--shelf work (which A doesn't necessarily pay better and B puts you on the chopping block whenever cuts come down, as your awesome weekly or monthly article likely won't measure up in traffic against other daily content, especially once it's been pullquoted/copy-pasted to death and ignored by all the "too long didnt read" kids out there) or go off on your own and start your own site or video channel. Actually, there's also a fourth choice, which is sit there and continue doing what you've always done for as long as you find it interesting, and hope a few trips and fan meetups and nice fan letters keep the juices flowing. (All the while, mind you, you see a market around you changing in ways that rarely benefit the games you like to write about and the article types you excel at.)
So, do you continue playing with choices as a game critic, or do you just bail on the occupation and do something else while you're still young?
You can actually make enough money working on the development side to actually raise a family or have a solid career as you enter your 30's.
Yep. That's why when I see people talk about critics moving over to development and that being sketchy or indicating compromise (not that Neuromancer did that, just in general,) I get the concern and I encourage the watchdogs to stay vigilant, but I think these people would look for smoke elsewhere if they ever really got to know working game critics.
