You still had Nintendo Power and Sega Visions during the console wars but gamers, for the best part, stuck to their own communities and if that was a computer system you had lots of smaller communities with hobbyist magazines and online billboards to try and find out about news and events from.

Once games were earning rock and roll bucks they tried adopting the music scene model to dispensing news and glamorising it with people who looked down on the role and had disdain for their audience.

Yes - basically, once gaming had full-time journalists, the decline was inevitable.