Writing about the end (or at least likely severe decline) of SteamSpy in the wake of privacy changes at Steam, Owen Good offers an interesting insight into games journalism,
. . publicly available data means we can’t dismiss their complaints as the usual negativity from obsessive commenters and social media users.
WTF. Talk about feeding the notion that games journalists style themselves as an elite who are above the fray of their knuckle-dragging audience. This is why gamers largely ignore game reviews and games journalism, and are right to do so. If there are a large number of complaints about a game and your only reaction is to think “oh, those usually negative obsessive nutcases again…I guess I’ll just go back to my latte,” then you don’t deserve to be taken seriously.
Look at LawBreakers, which was effectively mothballed last week. It didn’t stink in the reviews, but the reviews were just looking holistically at what LawBreakers was as a game. Placed in an environment with other games and their player bases, though, it hardly stood out. Those figures showed that people just weren’t going for it.
Look, I get that SteamSpy was very useful. But what Good is describing here isn’t just using SteamSpy as one of a number of tools, but rather as a crutch used by journalists who are so dismissive of their audience that they are fundamentally out of touch with them.