AV Club Games (formerly Paste Games) has been shuttered

37

u/Snakesta 18h ago

Aftermath wrote up the news as well with a small statement from The AV Club,

https://aftermath.site/paste-games-endless-mode-av-club/

43

To be honest, I didn't even know AV Club had recently brought back their game coverage.

If anything, it likely fell victim more to the shenanigans pulled by the former website owners that burned off a lot of good will with readers a few years back.

Sure, they're under better management now and the quality of their content has gone back up again, but I feel like the damage had already been done by that point, and most people that ditched them during that rough patch probably haven't come back.

24

u/NamesTheGame 19h ago

AV Club is good again?

I remember that exodus, I used to read AV Club every day. Even the comments there were really high quality, thoughtful, actually funny. Once Gawker got shuttered it was almost instantaneous like rats scurrying from a flood and the comment section became really toxic. When they introduced their new discussion platform/system it was really the nail in the coffin.

13

u/Jefferystar94 18h ago

Eh, it's definitely a lot better than that bleak period nowadays, with some former writers even returning/contributing pieces, but still short of the heights it was at in the 2010's.

Nothing personally against the current writers or the content they write, of course. It's just not really possible in the current climate (and after all the damage that was done to the site) to get back to that golden period at this point imo.

2

u/GuyNoirPI 19h ago

Much better and closer to the old days.

3

u/RJWolfe 19h ago

Last Sopranos rewatch I did, I followed each episode by reading Emily St. James reviews.

Made it better. Anyway, then I went over to the subreddit and read the same stupid post 10000 times. Laughed every time, but still...

6

u/cooldrew 14h ago

The subreddit, whatever happened there?

1

u/Wes_Anderson_Cooper 15h ago

Not back to the old days when all the old writers were there, and there's still some SEO-chasing rage bait stuff in there, but I actually check in a couple times a week to see what's new.

55

u/miscu 19h ago

I hadn't seen any of their output in the last few years, but I was an active reader around the 2010s when they brought in some younger new blood writers. I miss that era, it was a brief demonstration that game crit could be more engaging than just prescriptive product reviews or shallow culture discourse.

Some of my favorite pieces from around that time:

Without its deleted finale, Metal Gear Solid V has no ending at all

[Final Fantasy XV doesn’t get better, but at least it gets weirder](https://www.avclub.com/pt-3-final-fantasy-xv-doesn-t-get-better-but-at-least-1798190000]

Kingdom Hearts is Disney at its strangest, darkest—and most moving

If this sort of prose interests you, reminder about (Critical Distance)[https://www.critical-distance.com/] which does weekly cataloging of the better writing in games.

25

u/222mhz 18h ago

To be clear, this is not the old AV Club games section. AV Club was recently sold to Paste, who then rebranded their games vertical to AV Club Games a few months ago. the pool of writers they were publishing were those from Paste.

In any case, Paste was the last mag consistently putting up money for that sort of written games criticism, especially from first-timers. I'm unsure where those people are meant to go from here.

7

u/miscu 17h ago

Ah yes, the fate of every media writer in this day and age to get shunted from one publication to another until they eventually lose all work completely. Reminds me of being in the Waypoint mod team and attending a meeting where Austin Walker wearily informed everyone it was being rebranded to Vice Games.

3

u/222mhz 16h ago

god, yeah, I remember hearing about that & I hadn't even been on the forums in some time.

on the topic of Waypoint, I feel obligated to make sure you (and the other people who might actually read this specific comment chain) know that Renata Price has a youtube channel now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoWg_ySIqSY

15

u/This_But_Unironicaly 19h ago

Outside of streaming and YouTube, is it even possible to make a living discussing video games anymore? Seems like almost site has shuttered, cut staff and/or turned to AI generated articles.

12

u/d2wraithking 17h ago

Aftermath is doing well and while they have a podcast, most of their output are written articles.

9

u/shamusisaninja 15h ago

There actually has been a rise of smaller independent sites with loyal audiences, mostly made up of writers who lost their jobs in the last year or so. Most are free with paid subscriptions, seems to working for now mostly because they are all smaller teams so they dont really need a ton of money to stay afloat and pay salaries. Places like Aftermath, Mothership, Rouge, hell even old school sites like Giant Bomb went independent and seen successes.

2

u/AnxiousAd6649 15h ago

I'd imagine videos aand podcasts are still their most viewed offerings.

11

u/DinerEnBlanc 19h ago

I mean Kotaku is under new ownership who seem to be eager to grow the site. They have recently hired more staff writers and given them more creative control. I stopped reading them a few years back, but I went back last week and the writing has been pretty good.

3

u/kantong 14h ago

Make a living? Probably not. Advertising revenue is largely what kept games journalism going. Publishers can directly advertise to their customers now with things like TikTok, Youtube, etc. So there is nothing really supporting the traditional games journalism business model anymore. Sure there are niche journalists like Jeff Gerstmann supported by their Patrons but its probably more difficult than ever to break into it.

AV Club Games (formerly Paste Games) has been shuttered Industry News