Fucking travesty. You doing a bit better lately though? Seen a few articles of yours being published (via your tweets?).

hylian_elf wrote:

Fucking travesty. You doing a bit better lately though? Seen a few articles of yours being published (via your tweets?).

it's just how the business is. if you want to get started you need to start somewhere, be it on a blog or whatever. Most of the reviews I do net me the game code (so I can review it!) and £20-£30. That's fine for something like The Medium for somewhere like IGW - I am helping out a site that helps other writers get a byline so they can go elsewhere, and The Medium is only 7-8 hours so overall it was like 9-10hrs work.

Getting the next step up from that either involves getting a few features somewhere (which is a lot easier if you've got early access to a title so you can get pitches sent in a timely fashion) or being lucky and getting asked to review something, or finding a place that just so happens to need coverage of titles at the right time, so you can bed yourself in. I am doing some stuff for The Sixth Axis and GameSkinny these days too - the latter pays pretty poorly but covers a lot of content so there are good opportunities.

People think Games Journalism/reviewing/writing is a lot more glamorous than it is. There's a lot of people out there hustling for very little money. Pandemic has put me in a position where it's my only option currently, and it takes up a lot of my time for little reward. News at NME has been paying well at least. I am considering moving to work for a site I don't really like the look of, just because it will be full time and that will give me some security.

I haven't been able to get my voice heard above others, my pitches are regularly rejected (as are everyone's) and people don't really know who I am as it's an industry full of younger, smarter and savvier people, and I haven't managed to land the regular review gigs that would make life a little easier.

This is probably work thread stuff.

Anyway! Hitman!!!! I love 1 and 2, fucking outstanding stuff! I bought 2 on launch for full price with my precious gamer money. I have so loaded it twice and not played it either time, because I have 3 other games to review (spent 8 hours on one so far, 2 hours on another, the third has an estimated completion time of 30hrs. Net pay expected at the end: £65)

That's why I take the time to share most of my writing here. It doesn't net me a lot of money, so I have to get some other kicks from it.

Sure, go for it. You can email IGW, Sixth Axis or GameSkinny really easily. They're always looking for new writers.

Maybe!

Bottom line is, it's all very easy to look at game reviews and think it's people getting paid gold for them - but good luck trying to break into the industry and make a living at the same time. If you think £20-30 to review a title that can be anywhere from 8hrs to 30hrs long is good pay per hour, you're welcome to try your hand at it! I am very lucky that I have a news role that pays the living wage for its shifts right now, but it won't last. Writing about games isn't a luxury as far as I am concerned.

Yeah I mean the proof is in the fact that I bought Hitman 3 to play in my downtime, but haven't launched the damn thing, because after a full shift of writing games news, followed by a few hours of playing a game that I am reviewing, the last thing I want to do is play another fucking game, especially when my brain is like "man I should really be figuring out how to turn this game I am playing into more money so I am not short on rent in March or April"

Anyway I've painted a lot of minis recently.

hylian_elf wrote:

I didn’t want to be the one to tell Bob to not be so stupid. But yeah.

Ah come on some ones gotta do it ! If I could read a room
Would I be the isle of
Mans premier car salesman ?

Bob wrote:

hylian_elf wrote:

I didn’t want to be the one to tell Bob to not be so stupid. But yeah.

Ah come on some ones gotta do it ! If I could read a room
Would I be the isle of
Mans premier car salesman ?

Aren’t you that by default?

Didn't mean to spark anything with my original comment.

How much people are getting paid obviously varies greatly. Permanent full-timers on bigger sites are of course earning a reasonable wage (although nothing huge).

I'm more concerned with the overall negative tone towards 'games journalists' these days. As with any profession, there are quite a few that aren't particularly discerning or critical, but we don't all deserved to be lumped in together.

I don't really follow Hitman, but if it's getting strong reviews from everywhere that's going to include some people who really know what they're talking about.

In the meantime, I've given up on Cyber Shadow. I just don't see the reward in it.

Bob wrote:

Suffice to say hitman gets a fair bit of an easy ride as it’s a franchise journos have always gotten off on but all those reviews can’t be wrong but chalice might not like it

None of that has been in issue, though. Hitman is a clockwork game that rewards multiple playthroughs, and I would suspect many in the game community who write reviews do that.

Nothing to say Chalice's view is wrong, but we jumped on a mad tangent to how game writers get paid.

I only played the first of these reboot Hitmans and felt like that too. I could see the appeal and that it was well done, but just couldn't be arsed to actually play it.

How severely should a game be penalised for poor animation?

Good animation is nice to have, but if it’s not great and I still enjoyed the rest of the game, I’d certainly give it a pass.

Lol

Hitman's incredibly stiff throwing animation is one of the best parts of the series. Just a fucking comical lob right at some poor cunt's noggin. The series is very... mechanical, very clockwork as H says, I think the artifice is all part of the charm. It frequently mirrors the levels, which are generally divided into Fancy Front End/grubby areas the work is done.

Jon has reviewed it, was chatting about it in the Souls like thread.