The end of Kotaku?
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It was mentioning somewhere that they have 7 writers. So each journo needs to make 7 guides per week. Is not that unreasonable if we are talking about games they've already played but if you expect them to play the game and write it is not something they can easily do.
50 for 7 of them will be pretty rough, all things considered. If they have to divide the labor evenly, that's 7 or 8 guides per person. So they'll have to be like micro focused guides. Like how to find things, or how to get specific items. Or even lots of "Protip: Shoot at the Cyberdemon until it dies" sort of thing.
I could write 7 full guides a week if my job was literally "play videogames all day and write about it".
It is a little harder than you think. I had an extremely short lived job making guides for brady games back in the late 90s.
Getting far enough into a game to understand what is and is not needed, then writing a guide to get to X area, or to find item Y is not that tough. It's just pen and paper, or have an open txt file and write down what you'll need to do every so often.
But it means putting about 15 hours into a game at the very least. And you'd have to do that at least 3 or 4 times on other games. If you work an 8 hour shift, that's 2 days on one game. If they want your stuff by friday at closing time, that's only enough to really sink into about 3 games at best.
So it is a bit of a high number, considering the staff left there to do them.
Not they deserve any of your sympathy for any of the above. They're in their exact position, because they put themselves there.
Oh I was imagining salaried and playing in off-hours as well. Eat sleep shower play write repeat 168 hours a week outside of grocery shopping and funerals. Though I admit that's not so "fun" when it's your actual job.
This would require playing the games, which would ruin their skimming reddit for current 'hot thing' nuggets, funny screenshots, and edgelord comments to write filler articles about.
Kotaku writers are the type of people who would see playing video games as actual labor, and even more so if those are games they wouldn't pick for themselves. The "life is strange" crowd would see playing Helldivers as doing hard time.