Nintendo Power and the official voice
The games press in the United States began as a mix of technical computer magazines that covered games alongside hardware, general interest publications that covered games as a consumer category, and eventually dedicated game magazines that treated the subject on its own terms. Nintendo Power (launched 1988) was the most commercially significant of the early dedicated publications — 1.5 million subscribers at its peak — but it was not journalism in the conventional sense. Published by Nintendo of America and covering only Nintendo products, Nintendo Power was a promotional publication that provided strategy guides, previews of upcoming titles, and reviews that were uniformly positive about the products it covered. Players who grew up reading Nintendo Power learned which games were coming and how to complete them; they did not learn critical evaluation or how to distinguish good games from bad ones.
The independent games magazines — Electronic Gaming Monthly (founded 1989), GameFan, GamePro, and in the UK, Edge, Mean Machines, and CVG — operated without publisher conflicts of interest and, at their best, developed genuine critical voices. EGM's review format — four reviewers evaluating each game independently, with separate scores and perspectives — was the most developed attempt to create a multi-perspective critical framework for games at a time when most consumer publications still used single-reviewer assessments calibrated around a simple recommendation scale.
The golden age of print
The mid-1990s represented the peak of print game journalism's cultural authority. Magazines including EGM, GameFan, and in the UK, Edge and Mean Machines, were read by every serious game player and were understood to represent informed opinion about game quality. A review score in EGM was a reference point that influenced purchasing decisions at retail — in the pre-internet era, a player who couldn't try a game before buying it had few sources of information beyond magazine reviews and word-of-mouth from friends who had already bought the game. The magazines held genuine informational gatekeeping authority over the market, and publishers understood that positive coverage in the major publications translated directly into sales.
The relationship between game publishers and game magazines was commercially complicated by advertising dependency. A magazine whose review section was negative about a major publisher's titles risked losing the advertising revenue from that publisher, which was in some cases a significant portion of the magazine's total revenue. The accusation that advertiser relationships corrupted review scores was persistent through the print era — the specific theory that a major publisher would threaten to pull advertising from a magazine that gave its games low scores was both plausible as a commercial dynamic and difficult to prove from individual cases. The most visible incident involved EGM and Sega, and involved claims of advertising pressure in response to critical review scores; Sega and EGM's accounts of the incident differed significantly.
The internet and the authority collapse
The transition from print to internet games journalism happened between approximately 1996 and 2006. IGN (founded 1996), GameSpot (founded 1996), and Kotaku (founded 2004) built audiences at speeds that print couldn't match and at costs that print couldn't sustain. The internet's ability to publish continuously — breaking news rather than monthly updates, multiple reviews per week rather than per issue — gave online publications a currency advantage that print couldn't overcome. By 2005, print game magazine circulations were declining sharply; by 2012, most major American and British game magazines had either ceased publication or transitioned to digital-only formats.
The authority transition was not simply from print to internet publications but from professional journalism to distributed player opinion. GameFAQs user reviews, Amazon reader reviews, and eventually Metacritic's aggregation of professional and user scores created a market where any player with an internet connection could publish an opinion and any other player could read it. The professional games journalist — who had hardware access before release, publisher relationships, and writing experience — had a reduced information advantage over well-connected player opinion. The reduced advantage compressed the authority gap and left professional games journalism struggling to justify its institutional role.
YouTube and the final disintermediation
YouTube's emergence as a game video platform from around 2006 completed the disintermediation that web publications had begun. A player who could watch thirty minutes of gameplay footage before purchasing a game needed a review less than a player who had previously been deciding based on magazine screenshots and written descriptions. The information that reviews provided — how does the game look, how does it play, is it long enough to be worth the price — was now available in video form, produced by players and YouTubers whose relationship with their audience was based on shared taste rather than institutional authority.
The YouTubers who built game audiences in the 2010s — PewDiePie, Markiplier, Jacksepticeye — achieved influence over game purchasing decisions that exceeded the influence of any print publication at the genre's peak. PewDiePie's Let's Play video of Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010) drove more sales of that game than any professional review outlet could have reached. The mechanism was parasocial identification rather than critical authority: players watched YouTubers play games not to form purchasing decisions but to enjoy the YouTuber's personality and reactions, and purchasing decisions followed from that engagement rather than from the critical analysis the YouTuber might have provided. The games press built its authority on critical judgment; YouTube built its influence on personality. The latter proved commercially more durable.