Why Playboy Isn't for Men Anymore.
(youtu.be)
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It was always the tamest of the "dirty" mags, and did have some pretty good articles from time to time. First penis I ever saw was from the pages of Playgirl, and it belonged to Long Dong Silver. There was an education. (It was being passed around the neighbourhood while the oldsters were laughing their butts off.)
And hell, face it, with the advent of internet porn, who the hell needs magazines any more? Unless you're camping or have an outhouse or something, I guess. But still, the days of brown-paper-wrapped dirty mags is passe.
SJWs are regularly introduced into dying industries in order to theoretically prop them up with a guaranteed revenue stream of NPC who are supposed to shop where they're told. Theoretically, that will work to some degree with the largest brands, but most of the time it won't work for many companies because no one was already interested in the industry's good or service. This, effectively, is what happened to Game Magazines and Journalism back in 2012, this is the kind of thing that eventually led to GamerGate because it had been several years of a struggling niche media industry losing money, and deciding to correct that with partisanship, until they launched a fucking purge when people called them out on their bullshit.
Gaming magazines, at the time, had been locked into their positions through access journalism and would be willing to push whatever needed to be said to promote a game through early development. They became necessary for those Day 1 sales. They also tried to manage lots of gaming reviews, and their readership was loyal to who could consistently generate accurate reviews. But magazines only could go with so much space and so many pages. As gaming websites like Gamespot opened up and had a more accessible reviews and a database to go with it. Once the internet allowed for more video reviews thanks to less severe bandwidth restrictions, the gaming magazines were on the way out.
Play Magazine was one of the first gaming magazines that had explicitly said they were abandoning doing reviews because they wanted to focus on developing games because of their potential, rather than complaining about the games failures. I can't completely object to that strategy because they were already very focused on aesthetics of a game inside their magazine. They didn't focus on words as much as they focused on beautiful screenshots, which amounted to well produced ads.
Magazines like IGN and others focused on making excuses and apologetics for gaming companies, and this led to their credibility getting worse and worse. Combined with the fact that Demos had been effectively non-existent for years, it meant that internet video reviews were all the more imperative. So gaming companies switched much harder to online posting.
Then, YouTube ended it's 10 minute limit on videos, and allowed for better quality. Expensive game recording hardware & software became more accessible, and people started posting a fuckton more walkthroughs. The exclusivity of the Walkthrough had long been a key part of gaming journalism and strategy guides where people would pay a lot of good, real, money to get the facts on how to beat levels and games, along with getting full maps. But now these online walkthroughs were functioning both as advertising, demo, review, and walkthrough/guide.
This didn't alleviate the problems of accuracy within access journalism, and after Jeff Gherstmann got fired from Gamespot for not bowing to the corporate pressure to the publishers of Kane & Lynch, he founded Giant Bomb which produced "Quick Looks" which originally started as 10 minute videos introducing basic gameplay, and quickly expanded to 45 minute videos that weren't walkthroughs, but weren't exactly short either.
That is the basic breaking point when the most well supported gaming magazines and publications like Nintendo Power clearly seemed like they were going to die out entirely. Gaming magazines simply didn't make any sense any more as a mass market appeal. Frankly, Play Magazine was right to offer only aesthetically pleasing content, because reviews and demos (despite the best efforts of gaming journalism and developers to destroy it) ended up all going to YouTube content creators.
That's when the idea of highly politically partisan Buzzfeed style blogging for shadowy venture capital investment was declared to be a good idea. Nobody trusted the corporate gaming press, but did trust individual reviewers that had specific biases that could be accounted for. If you didn't agree with the reviewer, you could still see exactly how the game worked. Instead of trying to partner with these content creators and expanding their business to include them, they decided that content creators needed to die. There was already exclusivity agreements with publishers and slander coming from the gaming press about YouTubers. The press got to keep exclusive access, but YouTubers just focused harder on putting out Day 1 video walkthroughs/reviews. There was enough of them, that it didn't matter that IGN put it's review out a few hours earlier.
When all the ZQ stuff broke loose, it not only confirmed people's concerns about the corporate press, but it also promised the press the opportunity to create a balkanized environment where they could keep their loyalist customers attached to the partisanship of their outlets. They also wanted to take this opportunity to both gatekeep and purge journalism and viewership from the online video reviewers. This is August 28th 2014: when every Social Justice activist in the corporate gaming media published the "Gamers Are Dead" articles en masse to effect a media blitz on against their own audience, and how their own audiences had been self-identifying as directed by corporate vocabulary.
The thing that still scares them about GamerGate is that it didn't work. It was supposed to lock people in place as an audience and allow them to keep control of the industry. But instead a lot of the audience was driven away, and it never came back. Worse, it dissuaded people from Leftist political causes (hence why we are here), and it never even stopped Gaming companies from transitioning to moving access journalism to YouTubers who would make long-form content for their games which regular journalism & blogs couldn't support. Instead, Gawker, one of the most powerful blogosphere sites, died a rather traumatic and prolonged death. IGN, Polygon, and Kotaku are still holding on, but only due venture capital and partisan readers. They've been in dire straits for 6 straight years and there's no real chance of recovery.
Social Justice activists don't kill everything they touch. Everything they touch is already dying.
Playboy is already dead. So is every institution that is infested with SJWs. Now guess how big the collapse is going to be.
I'll say this for strategy guides, they've yet to be replaced when it comes to comprehensive level maps. That's something you don't get from GameFAQs or a Let's Play is that top down overview of the whole damn level to figure out where the hell you are in those games that don't give you an in-game map to work with. Hell I was playing the Secret of Mana remake recently and because of the visual overhaul I couldn't figure out where I needed to go. So I grabbed the 25 year old strategy guide for the game off my shelf and had it figured out in ten seconds.
I have an entire bookcase dedicated to old strategy guides.