Industry bit rot

Today some beloved colleagues at GameSpot were made redundant. Billion dollar companies buying and selling business units on the other side of the world leads to wonderful people who are world class at their jobs losing them because they’re too far away from HQ.

It’s horrible to see good people lose any job. What feels especially hard right now is that the Australian media landscape just doesn’t offer many homes for journalists who specialise in games, creative tech, or the digital cultural domain.

I’ve talked about this before, and I’m sure I’ll talk about it again.

The audience is out there. A generation that sees games and esports and the digital world as parallel and in fact more valuable than many traditional arts, sports and cultural spaces. But media leadership keeps serving an old paradigm and keeps refusing to serve this audience.

So this audience gets served by global outlets or super niche players or just through the user generated content space.

But local voices matter. Even when they report on global stories, local voices matter.

I now have a team of seven writers working alongside me at Byteside. A lot of them took this news badly today. They’re searching for a future and the avenues for opportunity keep shrinking.

I’m doing what I can to widen the path a little. But right now it’s hard to even use the word ‘industry’ when there’s so few seats at the table.

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