Democracy dies in Dark Souls

Who am I? Why bother with this newsletter?

Who am I? What’s this newsletter’s deal?

Introducing Updater, the official name for Shannon’s Substack that will replace the old placeholder name.

Here’s a bit about me and why you should read me. I started working in journalism when I was 15 years old.¹ The idea of writing up the news and delivering it to people was quite appealing to me. I got my start waking up at four A.M., commuting over to Wall Street from my home in Queens, standing by bushels of papers and hand-delivering them to commuters, often with my story on the front page as the front page feature.

While I was at a local newspaper outlet, I got to profile Andrew Yang, when I ran into him at an entrepreneur dinner in New York, years before he ran for U.S. president. I profiled the student leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement in early 2014. I strove to tell true stories through narrative nonfiction. I was compelled by human story, first and foremost, and I wanted to go beyond the five sentence briefs I was trained on, to tell longform, compelling narratives about the interesting people around me.

Journalism is not a field you can easily break into. The first five years I worked in it, I was in high school, then college, and I was mostly unpaid. Sources, unable to tell my exact age, felt weird being interviewed by who could possibly be a child. Yang told me, while I was 19, that I should return to college and finish up my degree.

If you prefer to make a one-time donation to my journalism, my Venmo is @shannonliao.

So I did. I decided to study business and marketing management so I could learn how the financial and legal world runs. I took a stint of non-journalism jobs to try out other fields.

But upon graduation from college, I applied to hundreds of jobs, and The Verge was the only journalism application I sent in. I got the job. I had the experience and I wanted to learn more about tech.

I’ve been incredibly lucky and I followed up my two years at The Verge with two more at CNN, after they poached me to cover tech and business for what used to be their CNN Money brand. One of the first weeks when I started in 30 Hudson Yards, CNN editors sat around and asked me if I liked playing video games and if they could fly me to Los Angeles to cover them as my beat. I wholeheartedly agreed and I never looked back.

That was 2019 and I’ve been covering video games full-time ever since. When CNN’s passion for gaming waned after the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X launched, I started working for The Washington Post instead, the last bastion of legacy media that was all-in on video games.

I couldn’t have predicted that the face of video games at The Post, Gene Park himself, would be unfortunately out sick from cancer and fighting for his life. Nor could I have foreseen that hitting our metrics, our goals and our internal publishing goals would not be enough to keep our vertical from being axed after two years. All I can say is that I was lucky to have done such great work with such smart colleagues and be nominated for best writing on the internet. 

Enter Updater.

This strange interlude in my life since I’ve been laid off from The Washington Post in March has been a chance to explore the stories I’ve always wanted to write, and to be beholden to nothing but those ideas. I’ve been going to industry events all the same, taking source calls, writing the ambitious longform features that I’ve spent the past few years building towards. 

The gaming industry has (famously) not been the most welcoming to media. It has for the most part welcomed me with open arms, because coverage from outlets like CNN and The Washington Post has been uncommon and scarce. Now that I’m a free agent, however, publishers are slower to grant access, and the overall metabolism of the kind of news I’m able to break has slowed. For instance, Nintendo is sending me a review code for Zelda on the day of launch, when in previous years, it would have granted me code during the review embargo period. Video game publishers are quick to grant interviews if it’s for a New York Times article, but they are more likely to ignore me if I’m writing for a lesser known outlet, such as a local newspaper. They have been relatively friendly to this newsletter, though I’ve received a comment from Activision Blizzard public relations expressing doubt about the reach of this newsletter and whether it is worthwhile to talk to me, if I am not commanding the millions of pageviews I used to at my past jobs.

This is where, as a reader and subscriber, you come in. I know there’s a case to be made for writing this sort of investigative gaming news that traditionally has been overlooked. You help make the case when you read, share, like, comment and otherwise engage with this work. Twitter has also begun throttling links to Substacks, making it an unfriendly environment to writers. You can also add me on shannonliao.bsky.social, if you’re on Blue Sky, the invite-only Twitter alternative.

Right now, I have hundreds of decision-makers in the industry directly subscribed to Updater, while my work itself reaches millions across platforms. If even a fraction of you subscribe or convert to paying subscribers, I will no longer have to worry about squeezing in as many freelance assignments in a month as possible, and whether the bottom is going to fall out in this industry. That will directly free me up to dig into stories of sexual harassment, misconduct, labor abuses, unionization, financial bubbles, fraud, acquisitions, and more.

I do not print any allegations without heavy fact-checking and I do not print anonymous sourcing without carefully checking who I was speaking to and getting their permission. It is also not all grim news here! I also interview indie developers, learn about the craft of making video games, and have an interest in interviewing founders of new companies building unreleased worlds.

Here’s the bottom line. This work is important and it’s uncommon. The video games industry is opaque from the outside, and even insiders are not privy to what goes on at each studio. I’ve had sources at companies express that if they hadn’t talked to me, they wouldn’t even know what their coworkers had been experiencing. I’ve had sources ask me to warn them if they are taking on a job at a toxic company. You can count on one hand the number of journalists doing this sort of work full-time.

This journalism also impacts the nearly three billion gamers in the world. Some gamers appear to think that their favorite titles grow on trees. Game developers have cited online harassment they’ve received from players as a significant issue. Writing about game development and making the process more accessible to the average person also helps debunk these misconceptions and fallacies to show that it’s indeed human beings making these games.  

Investigative games journalism is rare because the media industry has not monetized well. In the past decades, it has lost countless market share to tech giants, who now command the internet’s information and attention. With the looming head of A.I., it’s also possible that chatbots will replace people’s need to click on articles in the future. Writers, whether in media, games or film, are undervalued, underpaid and dealing with incredible job volatility. 

If you agree with the mission of shedding light on an industry that could use transparency, please consider supporting me. My venmo is @shannonliao if you prefer to do a one-time donation to support. The Substack subscription tiers are either free, a seven-day free trial, $8 a month, or a discounted $80 a year. There’s also a founder’s tier for $100 a year if you would like the distinction of having stood with this newsletter from the very beginning.

We are building a new business model here and developing a reader-writer relationship that didn’t exist before in the classic days of journalism. That involves going beyond the traditional bounds of never addressing the reader, never writing in first person, never asking for donations explicitly, and not frankly discussing the business of journalism.

I can say that Substack is a path toward being an independent games journalist who can actually eke out a living. It is on par with the best rates in the industry, right now, and it has potential to grow exponentially, unlike freelance rates, which tend to stagnate. Just the same, it can turn out to be a black hole where blogs go to die, if the support simply isn’t there.

As they say, democracy dies in Dark Souls. 

Patch notes

• I’ll have The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom freelance coverage soon. The hype around this game transcends niche websites. Mainstream outlets have reached out to me to ask about covering the game, and given how big Breath of the Wild was, TotK certainly looks promising.

• As if things couldn’t get worse for the pandemic biking darling, Peloton just did another recall. This time it’s for its bikes, whose seats can break, resulting in injuries.

• I’m doing a science of gaming podcast this summer for Scientific American and will be doing reachouts to sources for that soon.

• This Saturday, catch me on CNN’s 2010’s documentary discussing TV shows like Fresh off the Boat. The rerun airs at 8pm ET, and is currently available on-demand through the website and app if you have cable.² When I was a staff writer at CNN, I always asked if I could go on camera, so this was a dream gig for me!

• I’d like to go to Summer Game Fest in Los Angeles from June 8-11. Publishers have been very quiet about news so far but without E3, it seems like major gaming announcements will drop during SGF. DM/email me to share news in advance.

• If you’re in New York in late June, I’ll be giving a talk alongside some brilliant internet culture experts and Substackers for Digital Void’s Memes, Myths, and Magic festival on June 21. More details about how to attend or view the livestream are here.

• My old Verge boss Nilay Patel interviewed Semafor’s editor-in-chief Ben Smith on his new book, “Traffic,” which documents the rise and fall of Buzzfeed. There’s a lot of discussion of the challenges that digital media faces today in this podcast/transcript, but sadly, not a whole lot of solutions.

• This is a sick article from New York Times Magazine which has all kinds of fun graphics for visualizing Jeff Bezos’ wealth. It won a Pulitzer and in my opinion, it’s a bit of a hint of how journalism can be more interactive and dare I say, even game-like.

  

1. My model for doing so was Benjamin Franklin, whose time working on the New England Courant I greatly respected.

2. This is probably not the time for me to be admitting that I don’t have cable.