Tired of reading bad takes about the end of Kotaku Australia? So am I.

Earlier this month, the news broke that Kotaku Australia, Gizmodo Australia and Lifehacker Australia would be unceremoniously shuttered as part of a wider cost-cutting measure by Pedestrian's parent company Nine. The story from outgoing Pedestrian CEO Matt Rowley suggested that the move (and the subsequent wave of layoffs) was a byproduct of a broader strategic shift away from licensed titles like those mentioned above and towards wholly-owned brands such as Pedestrian and (potentially) its web3-focused publication The Chainsaw).

Despite this (and the obvious complexities that renegotiating the licenses for both Lifehacker and Gizmodo would involve now that the Gawker brands have been sold off to various parties), there have been many in the Australian media industry who have been quick to conclude that there is now neither money nor value in the kinds of locally-oriented speciality outlets that these represented.

This overly simple narrative has gotten under my skin over the past week. More to the point, it misses the forest for the trees.

Bear with me while I get nostalgic for a minute. When I was growing up, I spent countless hours reading and revisiting local gaming magazines like PC Powerplay and Hyper. As I played more games, I found myself wanting to write about them. Getting those words into print seemed hard. Putting them on the internet seemed easier. One thing led to another, and I have been working full-time in media ever since. Back then though, the internet was in a period of enormous growth and as someone who liked to read about video games, I had no shortage of options. More and more websites cropped up every day, from Destructoid to RockPaperShotgun.

Nowadays, it would be an understatement to say that the vibe has shifted. The web is not the same place it once was. Many of the sites that once held a spot within the bookmarks of my web browser no longer exist. Some have persisted, but are shadows of their past selves, consolidated into a larger corporate entity to the point where they’ve lost what made them worth reading in the first place. I am very sceptical that this broader contraction in mid-sized media outlets will end anytime soon. With the collapse of millennial media brands like Vice and Buzzfeed, it would not shock me if venture capital and private equity had become a little more bearish on the idea that media is a profitable business to get into.

Ever since my partner got into game development (Sidebar: She just finished her contract at SMG and is looking for work!), every week has become something of a metaphorical coin flip as to which of our respective industries will suffer a wave of mass layoffs. It's almost as easy to fall back on gallows humour about this stuff as it is to become sentimental about it.

As both a longtime reader and someone who considered themselves incredibly fortunate to write the odd article for these sites, I am genuinely very sad that this is the end of the road. That being said, it's almost more worrying that nothing is waiting in the wings.

As the readership of gaming magazines like Hyper and PC Powerplay reigned and then waned, it became obvious that the enthusiast audience was migrating towards online blogs such as Kotaku. This time around, there’s no such transference taking place. It feels less like a painful pivot point and more like the end of the line.

Although that sounds dire, I do not think this situation can be blamed on a behavioural shift on the part of younger generations towards social media platforms like TikTok, growing consumer preference for formats like video over written content nor even the rise of individual creators and influencers within the media ecosystem.

I believe it is because many media businesses stopped trying to build loyal audiences at the expense of larger ones. Building any kind of online following has never been easy, but it's become more and more difficult as the web forced everyone in media into indirect competition with everyone else.

In the face of that rising challenge, my impressions from working in the industry are that most media organisations re-oriented themselves around that reality. Being good at a media gig has become less about the impact of your reporting or the precisions of your paragraphs and more about understanding (and being good at taking advantage of) the various platforms that underpin the web.

It would not be fair to say that this shift in outlook has always come at a cost to the quality of the work involved, but it does create business incentives that warp it. The fact that the best tech and games journalists of my generation have spent most of their time this week writing up Prime Day deals (or left the industry after doing nothing but that) speaks for itself.

That style of service journalism is important and has a valuable place within the media ecosystem. However, when it's something that every outlet is chasing because that's a surer path to organic traffic (which can then be monetised) than actual reporting, opinion or criticism, the value of that work is diminished. It's little wonder that audiences aren't being engaged enough to form any sort of relationship with the writers involved when they are all producing the same thing.

I'm getting a little side-tracked here but my point is that cultivating an audience is a foundational skill that many modern media outlets have been lucky enough to get away with either failing or forgetting to learn. If being a sustainable business is contingent on you being good at TikTok (or Facebook), then you are only sustainable as long as audiences are looking to consume content on that platform. It also means most of that audience isn't looking to visit your website. You're subject to that platform remaining relevant, that platform not attracting the ire of a government and that platform not actively trying to cut you out of the loop entirely.

Indeed, the value of most reporting does decrease significantly if nobody on the internet can find it. However, it is also true that the quality and qualities of that work are the catalysts for any reader to go from being someone who ended up being served a given article (through whatever intermediary) to being part of an audience that seeks that work out on their own.

Writ large, the closure of Kotaku Australia has been a ton of discussion about what this means for the future of games journalism in this country. The reason for this is obvious; there aren’t that many commercial technology journalism outfits in Australia, but there are far fewer examples you can point at when it comes to games.

While the local gaming scene has no shortage of enthusiast and community-based media (such as WellPlayed, Player2 and Checkpoint), the only entities comparable in scale to Kotaku Australia in terms of size and commercial value are the SCA-owned Press Start Australia and ScreenHubs’ sister site GamesHub Australia. Both do incredible work, but the two (2!!!) websites are hardly a firm foundation of a vibrant media ecosystem. It should go without saying at this point but it's also well short of what a modern Australian population full of people who play games deserve.

Before recent developments with AI and Google’s ongoing efforts to seemingly sabotage its monopoly on the search engine market, I would have predicted a return to a games media ecosystem dominated by influencers, content creators and other forms of enthusiast press. A de-professionalised games press isn’t ideal, but I guess it’s better than nothing.

It’s depressing to say but part of me wonders whether the era of publications like Kotaku and Gizmodo may have been something of an anomaly to a historical norm. Australian media (and games media especially) benefitted massively from the influx of investment that came with the growth period of the mid-2000s and early 2010s. I do not think it is a coincidence that both Kotaku, Gizmodo and Lifehacker (and most of the modern games media landscape) came into existence around this time.

I’m not an expert. I just live here. I'm tired of watching the industry around me get smaller and smaller. I am not going to sit here and pretend I know how to solve this very dire situation that seems to get worse with each passing month. We are seeing some green shoots in the form of newsletters and smaller direct-to-consumer media startups like Defector, Platformer, Aftermath (who wrote a terrific obituary for Kotaku Australia), and 404 Media (whom I subscribe to and wholeheartedly recommend), it seems like this business model is only one you can make work if you already some kind of an audience and are doing something exclusive, difficult or SEO-unfriendly enough that other outlets aren't likely to pursue it.

Above everything else, journalism is a public good. Its natural outputs are not profits and dollars but information, impact and (in some cases) a sense of community. This does not mean it is impossible to make money in media, but it does require some reverse engineering. Getting everyone on the internet to pay for news again feels like a forever war, getting enough of an audience to pay for news that it becomes a sustainable business seems like it might be more winnable.

You cannot monetise an audience you do not have and while I can't pretend to know what the next era of games journalism in Australia will look like, I can only hope that they aren't built on the same quicksand as the one before it.

*My heart also goes out to those affected by the layoffs at Vice Australia, Refinery29 and anyone else affected by the recent round of layoffs at Pedestrian. I do not have the same relationship with those brands that I do Kotaku, Gizmodo and Lifehacker but hope you all land on your feet.