In this exclusive interview, I, Pingal Pratyush from SpielTimes.com—a site transitioning from SEO-focused content to original journalism—have talked to Stephen Totilo, a veteran games journalist, who’s currently running his own reader-supported newsletter, Game File. In our talk, Stephen shares insights from his extensive career, including his time at Kotaku and Axios, the challenges and evolution of games journalism, the importance of DEI in the industry, and the downfall of Gawker Media, the parent company of Kotaku.
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Pingal Pratyush: Hello, this is Pingal Pratyush from SpielTimes.com which is mostly an SEO-based gaming website. But slowly, we’re trying to do these interviews to [create] some original content, because Google fucked us and many other websites. So here we are.
Stephen Totilo: Well, I love joining because Google screwed somebody over. But yes, I’m Stephen Totilo, a long-time games reporter, so happy to be talking to you Pingal and my current gig is [that] I went independent six months ago to the day that we’re speaking. I announced that I was going independent, launching Game File, a reader-supported newsletter, and [I am] so excited to talk to another journalist who is trying to make it in this wonderful world of games reporting.
Journalism School
Pingal Pratyush: Absolutely, yeah. So to begin with, let’s talk about Game File first. How has your Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism experience helped you in your game journalism career?
Stephen Totilo: It taught me to be serious, maybe sometimes too serious. But I have loved video games, you know. You got into games as a kid. I think I got into games maybe having them kind of slightly deprived from me, a little bit, like my friends had the NES, they had some of the cooler systems like the Atari 2600, and I had the Odyssey 2, not to besmirch my parents, because they were trying to do the good thing, but I had some envy and so, maybe my appetite for games came from sort of wanting what the other kids had, and then sort of become, you know, somebody who just can’t stop playing games, even as an adult.
I was interested in journalism and just telling stories. True stories. But for a long time, I didn’t think about combining the two, not in high school, maybe not even in college. Certainly, when I went to graduate school at Columbia, one of the things that they impress upon the students is that in the United States, there’s only one profession that is given any sort of special dispensation in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, in terms of how the government sort of establishes what you can and can’t do. It doesn’t say anything about the rights of doctors or lawyers or anybody else but journalists, they get mentioned. They get mentioned because we have freedom of the press and that is written into the Bill of Rights.
So, you come out of Journalism School of Columbia like, “Oh my god, this job! I’m pursuing this! It’s this mission! It’s so serious, so important, so valuable to this country, to hold powerful people in check.” So I didn’t think I should be applying that kind of skillset to video games, because it just seemed like that was my frivolous, fun thing to do on the side. But years into doing other things with my powers of journalism, I just really became frustrated with how I saw games covered in outlets, whether they were the enthusiast outlets like IGN or mainstream outlets like The New York Times and [the] woman who I was dating, who I would eventually marry, said to me, “Why don’t you just do the journalism about games that you want?” So, I was like, “Oh, of course. She’s smart. That makes sense.”
Lo and behold, I decided to try to start pitching games coverage out there and that led to some very lucky breaks, and ultimately a near 20-year career covering games, but covering them with, I think, a greater seriousness than a lot of my peers may have approached in the past. Not because they weren’t serious people, but just because I was interested in maybe asking a different set of questions, and then beyond that, you know, as an Editor-in-Chief of Kotaku, and kind of thinking about what we could do with the power of that platform, and what the really responsible thing was to do in terms of having journalistic resources.
I’ve had that interest in making sure that I am a part of journalism that does speak truth to power when possible. So I’m happy to, you know, interview the developers of the next Assassin’s Creed or the next Zelda or something like that and if that can be fun, maybe even in those interviews, I might ask a more serious question, but I’m also interested in covering, you know, legal dramas and financial wrongdoing and a lot of the other stuff that comes into that and so that has informed it.
There’s always been this undercurrent of seriousness. Just today, I was kind of sharing a thread on social media about the coverage I’ve done for Game File and sometimes I worry I’m serving a few too many vegetables, right? Sometimes it’s maybe a little too much stuff that you should know. It’s good for you to know this, maybe it’s not always the most fun stuff. [I] try to work the fun stuff in too, but J-school definitely brought about the serious side of things.
Games Journalism
Pingal Pratyush: From the perspective of these game development companies, they see video game journalism as mostly a way of marketing or PR, and throughout the years we have seen game developers blocking off communications and dodging tough questions. How do you see this change in these recent years, and are things getting better than before, or is it the other way around?
Stephen Totilo: Right. Nothing that happens in [the] coverage of video games is all that different than what happens in [the] coverage of other forms of entertainment, other parts of culture, [or] other parts of society, at least from what I’ve seen. I know a lot of journalists who cover things other than video games, and I seldom feel like the experiences I’m having are all that unique. There’s a general trend because of the enhanced abilities to communicate through social media, through a company’s own kind of website or whatever, just that powerful people no longer need the media to be the intermediary, to carry their message, outside of marketing to consumers, the public, audience, whatever you want to call it.
That role of the reporter, kind of being there to, in some ways, be part of like a give and take that would facilitate some communication and maybe get a company message out would also entail the reporter asking a few questions the company is uncomfortable [answering]. That role of that reporter isn’t something that the company is dependent on, because they have more means of communication, and that is really part of the democratization of communication overall. So, that allows people who are powerful and also people who are relatively powerless, to have their voices heard in ways that couldn’t be heard for centuries, you know, if not millennia, right?
So, overall, it’s a positive thing. How it manifests in games coverage is that, earlier in my career, it was kind of an automatic [thing] if I was going to an E3 or something, because I was covering games for MTV News, and MTV is [a] well-known entity, or I [was] the Editor-in-Chief of Kotaku. [It] wasn’t that hard to be able to get an interview with the head of EA or the head of Ubisoft, or who’s who of Nintendo developers kind of going to the show. And because that’s just kind of like what you did, what they did like, and it’s just how it worked.
Over the years, as those companies and those developers and personalities found other ways to communicate, they would [be] less dependent on talking to me as a member of the media. I can still get a lot of interviews, but it’s not as automatic, right? It takes a lot more effort to get them and so really, the people who are going to get the interviews are the people who either have the tenure to be able to try and track people down and get them, or the people who still have a certain level of undeniable scale of audience and there, I would say, you look at IGN, you would look at certain kind of platforms, like video-oriented platforms, where you’ll see people still kind of go.
I think a lot of powerful people get nervous about doing an interview, but then they don’t get that nervous being on a podcast for some reason, [and] even on a podcast, they might speak quadruple the time and slip up, you know, eight times more than they would. So, access to the powerful people as kind of an automatic reflex of the schedule that goes on every year has greatly diminished.
E3 10 years ago, I could depend on, “I’ve got my Sony exec interview, my Xbox exec interview, my Nintendo exact interview,” to the point where I would set up like chain interviews. This may be going back more for like 15 years, where I would know who I was getting, and I would say, okay, “Hey, Nintendo, you know, Reggie Fils-Aimé, my next interview is with this executive [at] Xbox. What questions do you want me to ask him? And then [I can] go to the Xbox executive and say, “Hey, Xbox executive, whoever my next interview is going to be with this person from EA, what do you want me to ask them?”
I run a thing where each of my interviewees had asked the next person because, and we’d all be this class of like, you know, sort of power broker in the industry, and you just can’t book a show like that anymore. You just don’t have that kind of [a] thing. So there’s less of that communication that’s kind of served up for you.
When companies were starting to do video game blogs themselves like [the] official PlayStation Blog, people would ask me when I was at Kotaku if I was worried, whatever, and I’m like, “If there’s any work that we’re doing that could be displaced by corporate blog, we shouldn’t have been doing the work anyway. Or at least it’s time to stop doing that work.” There’s always journalism to be done, right? Always reporting to be done, because ultimately, you’re trying to tell true stories, and often times, those are stories that might be uncomfortable for people at these companies or studios to deliver themselves. So, the work is more challenging in certain ways, but it’s still [a] very exciting beat for me.
Pingal Pratyush: When you’re writing an article or interviewing someone, or, let’s say, you’re revealing something related to a game or the industry, how do you decide that you really want to do it? What’s the conversation like between you and your source and the final piece coming out?
Scoops and Scandals
Stephen Totilo: Um, are you talking in particular about if it’s like a scandal or scoop, or what kind of stuff are you talking about?
Pingal Pratyush: Say, a scoop and then, mostly, you know, you have revealed a lot of things. Recently, the Assassin’s Creed Shadows article also came out. So, how do you decide, like, what do you say to your sources that, “Hey, I’m going to get this information from you, and then I’m going to publish this.” What’s the process like?
Stephen Totilo: Sure. I’ll give you two examples of things that are sort of in recent Game File history. So, one of them was the kind of the accidental first sort of scoop of Game File, which is, I had heard last Fall that Sea of Thieves was possibly coming to other platforms than Xbox and PC, particularly PlayStation. And I was like, well, that’s reallysurprising. Why would that happen? I think we may be slightly numb to it now, but it was particularly shocking to be hearing this in late 2023 when that was, you know, other than Minecraft Dungeons goes to Switch or that kind of stuff out of Xbox.
So I heard from one source, and I kept trying to second source it because I didn’t want to run anything with one source. It was quite challenging, and they clearly were eager for me to report it. They kept trying to, you know, sort of bolster my confidence [on] what they were sharing and so [that’s] part of that process, and this happens, no matter what. The most fundamental thing you’re trying to verify [is] that the person is who they say they are, right? You’re trying to verify that they have [a] reason to actually know what they’re talking about, that they have not themselves misheard the information, and it’s very hard to zero in on and triangulate or whatever. If it’s just one person, because they can swear to you, “I know this, I heard this, I read this,” or whatever. They can think they’re telling you the truth accurately, but there’s still maybe some flaw in how the information was delivered. Maybe somebody was trolling them, right? They made it up.
So as my reporting went on, I wound up getting extra sourcing, and I felt more and more confident in it, but I didn’t necessarily feel confident in how I would be able to communicate that to the readers. So I reached a point where I knew it to be true, but I didn’t know if the readers would necessarily feel like they were seeing enough sourcing, because I couldn’t name how I knew, right? I couldn’t say it. So some of it is about the confidence of your sources and the trust there and, like, I have a regular track record. It’s easy to not burn your sources. Don’t tell anybody who they are. You know, don’t identify them. And what do you do? You check with how will you be okay with me identifying you? You make sure that they have a very clear understanding, mutual understanding.
It’s a whole other thing in terms of the trust of your reader, right? That can come over the years that you’ve built up the credibility and people know who you are. I was Jason Schreier’s editor for all of his run at Kotaku. I hired him, so I’m very familiar with how he built up his credibility and he’d been doing great work before I had hired him as well. But it’s very familiar with watching him build up the credibility, story on top of story, to the point that you know somebody like him, people just kind of know, “Oh, it’s Jason Schreier reporting it. He’s got good processes. He’s got a great track record.” So, you know, that’s locked in.
I’ve been behind the scenes a lot more as Editor-in-Chief of Kotaku, so I didn’t necessarily have the same track record and hadn’t been digging up nearly as many scoops as him or some of our other reporters at Kotaku. So, you know, the credibility factor is a little bit different. I got Kotaku‘s credibility behind me. Some people are gonna laugh when I say Kotaku‘s credibility, but we actually had a very good track record. So, it’s a matter of how will I be able to put this in front of the reader in a way where I know, first and foremost, I’m not burning my sources, then secondly, how am I communicating that to the reader. That can be its own trick and challenge.
Ultimately, the news started leaking that there was some game or games that were coming to Xbox and so I was able to use the public momentum of a leak to report in one of Game File‘s earliest pieces, “Hey, I’ve also heard that it’s not just any game but Sea of Thieves and as I was writing that piece, I’d already asked Microsoft a comment over the weekend. So, maybe the rumor started leaking out on Friday, I heard I reached out to Microsoft with a comment on a Saturday, I was writing my draft on a Sunday, ready to publish Monday, and as I’m ready to publish Monday, somebody sends me a DM who knew I was working on the story that Jeff Grubb had just mentioned Sea of Thieves on his Game Mess Mornings, although he had said PlayStation and Switch and I only reported PlayStation when I went to hit publish, like, half [an] hour after my friend tipped me off to that and let me know what was coming. So, it’s [your] own, sort of like, when do you do it. I’m not like a big, necessarily, the hidden, secret scoop person. I’m more known, though, for my interviews, I’m known for digging up, you know, the things hiding in plain sight in a corporate filing, in a court case that cover a lot of legal dramas.
I’m the one person who found out that Nintendo was getting sued for labor…there was a labor complaint against Nintendo a couple of years ago that led to a whole bit of coverage about labor conditions at Nintendo of America. You know, this year, [I] got the scoop on Nintendo suing to shutdown Yuzu, which used to [be a] Switch emulator again through my systems for finding lawsuits ahead of anybody else. That was one of the biggest stories of the year. And then interviews. I pride myself on going to interviews and having the nerve to ask the uncomfortable question, right? And that’s probably what you’re getting at with the Assassin’s Creed, stuff that you’re probably interested in, I imagine, correct?
Pingal Pratyush: Yeah.
Stephen Totilo: I know I can go on for a while, so [I am] trying to give you a chance to get a word in edgewise here. Otherwise, I don’t want to monolog over you.
Pingal Pratyush: I really like to listen.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows
Stephen Totilo: This is good right? Cut in when I’m boring you, and unless you’re just falling asleep. I need to watch for that.
So Assassin’s Creed Shadows, right? I did that interview on Monday.
I plan my interviews out in advance and [looking back], when Microsoft gave me an interview to finally talk about the games going onto other platforms, that was in February. You know, I had the scoop of Sea of Thieves in January, the semi-scoop, and I knew I’d be speaking to Phil Spencer in mid-February. They [had] just laid off 1900 people. So when I got on the phone with Phil, even though, in theory, we were there to just talk about the four games they were bringing to Switch and PlayStation, I was like, we’re going to talk about that, but we also need to talk about why did you just lay off 1900 people? I’m not going to not ask a tough question, just because it isn’t part of the talking points or whatever.
So I knew I was going to a Ubisoft showcase over the weekend, Summer Game Fest and all that. Right? I knew that when you go to something like that, the main thing they want you to talk about is the game that they’re presenting the demo [of]. I sat through an hour-long demo of Assassin’s Creed Shadows. I’ve played every AC game since the first one when you know Jade Raymond and Patrice Désilets demoed it for me. Patrice hand-delivered me my first copy of my first Assassin’s Creed at the MTV offices. You know, it’s a bit of a rapport with the history of the people making these games and everything and I’ve also covered all the scandals that have happened at Ubisoft.
I was invited by Ubisoft in September 2022 to go to their Paris headquarters to talk to them about their new Assassin’s Creed. I said I’m only going to go if I’m going to pay my own dime. Axios paid [for] my travel, really. I was working for Axios and covering games for the time, but wasn’t going to take money from Ubisoft. So I made sure Axios would provide the trip [as] I was covering games for them with a newsletter, the way I’m [doing at] Game File for myself and my readers now.
I said I would like an interview with Yves Guillemot, your CEO. He had done no interviews since the scandals broke and I said I’m going to ask him about [those] and I went, and that’s what I did. And not only did I do that, but while I was in Paris, I interviewed Ubisoft sources, current [and] former employees, a mix about how things were going at the studio, right? I didn’t just treat it like, “Oh, I’m going to Paris to cover Ubisoft stuff. So I’m just going to cover Ubisoft stuff, the way that Ubisoft wanted.” I took advantage of [the] fact [that] I was in Paris.
I told a story about how things were going two years after the said scandal broke. So going to this Assassin’s Creed Ubisoft Showcase, I wanted to ask about the first big Assassin’s Creed game since 2020, no offence to Mirage. I was excited to see the game in action. I really like the franchise, but I also knew there was this controversy over Yasuke, this African samurai character based on the historical figure; your first time to play as an historical figure. All these criticisms online about, “Oh, is this just DEI? Woke?” Whatever. Such a bad thing to have. You have the whole Sweet Baby Inc. detected, you know, kind of [an] awful hate thing going on against diversity [in] games.
So, I’m looking at all of that, and I noticed that there had been somebody who had tweeted quite disparagingly over the inclusion of Yasuke in the game, and had said, “Oh, you know, this is just, so obvious what they’re doing. This is only because of DEI. It’s woke. It’s out of control. Nobody, nobody asked for this, right?” There is this idea that diversity is being wedged into games, and to the detriment of the quality of the games. And Elon Musk, no less than the world’s richest man, replies, “DEI kills art.”
I had this open in a tab for a couple of weeks, because I was like, I gotta remember this, and if I get an interview, I’m going to ask about this, because it’s pretty wild. The world’s richest man just reacted to this game saying that. I’m gonna ask him about it. So, I even told them [a] part of one of the things I ask myself. It’s not like if I’m really gonna have the nerve to ask an uncomfortable question. I’m not just going to ask it in the interview, I’m even going to tell you in advance sometimes that I’m going to ask. It’s not so much that I give people my questions always in advance, but I was casually talking to a Ubisoft PR person while I was there. It was a few hours prior to the interview, and I said, “Wow, there’s been a lot of backlash to the Yasuke thing. I’m probably going to ask about that in the interview.” I figured, like, why not?
I didn’t say I’m going to bring up this exact tweet. So, I do the interview, and I’m asking about a bunch of other things, but I even said at the beginning of the interview [that] I’m gonna ask about a wide range of things. I kind of give people a signal that we’re gonna go places in the interview. When we just got to the point of the conversation, I said, “Let’s talk about the backlash.” I got an answer that was somewhat within the realm of their talking points, right, of what to say, and they had a reasonable response. “We learn, study history, we look at historical figures, [were] really inspired by this one, wanted to do this setting…” etc. So that makes sense, right? You know what they were saying sounds plausible but I often find that it’s good to do the follow-up question. To ask a second question about the same topic, because they kind of expect it, and they expect [it] to be asked about it in some way, maybe hoping they’re not going to be asked about it. So, they kind of run through what they were going to say.
When you ask a second time, where you ask a more specific question, they may not be ready with any more rehearsed stuff. It’s when you might get something that’s real and that’s raw and I think that’s what I got. I asked the generic question about the backlash, and then I said, “Well, okay, there was this tweet.” And I read it to them. I read them the tweet that came before it. I read the Musk tweet and as people can see in the piece that I wrote, the developer I was talking to Marc-Alexis Côté, and he read the tweet when it came out. [He] said it gave him emotions, made him want to put Twitter back on or X, as he graciously called it, back on his phone so he could fire back. And he held back and said he had a mindfulness app that he checked. And so that whole process and the very revealing answer he gave about the kind of his thought process and his reactions, and there’s a whole lot more to it, but I’m going on long enough on this answer, but that whole thing to me comes from as an interviewer, you’re, you know, you’re being real with the interviewee, as you can see, I from the way I kind of set that up. I didn’t hide my intentions. People know the kind of things I ask. I have a reputation for that being part of the mix of stuff I bring to the table in an interview, and I try to then relate it to the reader in a way that makes them feel like they were in the room, and that they can understand the vibe of the conversation, that it wasn’t that didn’t go in there, just about that, but that was part of what I wanted to talk about. And so everybody comes out of it, I think, with a very clear understanding that that’s at least potentially going to be the story. I did talk to the PR folks after that because I knew there’d be some concern. So I found a way to kind of gingerly bring it up, you know, how about that interview, whatever, knowing exactly what they were feeling. And I was like, you know? And so I sort of preemptively be like, “Yeah, you know, I’m going to cover the range of what we talked about.” Um. So, they’re sort of bracing themselves for it. I feel like that’s, you know, maybe a courteous thing to do. And then the story ran. And one other thing I always do is as kind of a test to myself to make sure that I’m confident in what I’m running, is I always as a personal policy, prettyquickly, email the story to the people I interviewed or their PR handlers, or the mix of it, you know, when relevant, because I figured they’re going to read it anyway, right? So you never send it in advance. That’s just, you know, journalistic malpractice. But send it right away. Because if I’m at all worried about the reaction, let’s get that out of the way right away. And certainly, if I’m I shouldn’t at all be subconsciously worried about the reaction, because I was twisting their words, or I was getting something wrong, or whatever. So I send it right away, so that that phase of it is kind of passed. And you know, it’s mostly down to the readers to react. So that’s the process, and it’s applicable to many, many interviews I’ve done, but it mostly is about being transparent with the people I’m interviewing and being transparent with the reader.
DEI
Pingal Pratyush: That’s really insightful. What do you think about DEI personally? Because just today, I think we heard the news that Black Myth: Wukong devs said that they rejected a “$7 million extortion” from these DEI consultants. Did you see that?
Stephen Totilo: I didn’t see that.
Pingal Pratyush: So, according to a journalist on the Chinese social media platform, Weibo, Black Myth: Wukong is experiencing a harassment campaign from western DEI companies to include, you know, inclusivity and, like, all those things in the games. But they refused. And so it’s, I think it’s going to be a big controversy in the coming days. If you haven’t heard the news, I just want to ask you, what do you think about DEI in video games in general?
Stephen Totilo: I mean, diversity seems like a good value, equity seems like a good value, inclusion seems like a good value. So the idea that any of these things are inherently a problem is a remarkable stretch to me. The idea that DEI consultancies have any great sway in what’s created in video games is something I have not heard in amongst any of the developers who I’ve interviewed. I’ve interviewed developers who’ve worked on games that have black characters, for example, and they have worked with those consultancies, and they said this is stuff we wanted to do internally. So, I think a lot of it is, from what I’ve seen, Sweet Baby Inc., like, the idea that they have some great widespread ability to manipulate the game industry is a remarkable stretch, and entirely inconsistent with anything that I’ve ever seen or encountered in terms of reporting on Sweet Baby or on the developers that I know they’ve worked with. But hey, maybe there’s some extremely well-hidden conspiracy that will be revealed that somehow none of the industry professionals and journalists who have said it’s all nonsense are unaware of so, you never know. And I’m not aware of the Black Myth: Wukong thing they’re saying somebody was trying to extort them for, you said, $7 million. What do they want the $7 million supposedly?
Pingal Pratyush: I haven’t really read the entire thing, but it just came up on my feed, and I was waiting for you to comment and…Well, let’s see. (reading) It says the reason why the team behind Black Myth: Wukong has been subjected to persistent sexist attacks and slander since their first promotion video is because they have… ah… criticized…there’s some stuff. They actually rejected offers from DEI consultants who actually reached out to them.
Stephen Totilo: Yeah, I don’t know. Bringing up a thing in an interview where you’re not necessarily fully sure yourself of what the context is, can make for a confusing conversation. We’re more to go on this, but yeah, this is saying that they were extorted for $7 million in some way, which is quite a provocative sum. Who knows?
Pingal Pratyush: Anyway, I think we can talk about this later when more things come up.
Stephen Totilo: What do you think of DEI in games?
Pingal Pratyush: I think it’s pretty good because necessarily, not every developer is known to a lot of cultures, a lot of diversity. So, when there are experts helping you through that stuff is really great. Like, let’s say, suppose if in a video game, you want to represent an Indian character, or let’s say a Filipino character, and your dev team does not know much about it and you want help from some, let’s say, historians or experts in that culture, I think that brings in a lot of depth to the game. So it’s really, I think it’s good. But I don’t know about the consultancy groups and what their practices really are like in operations. We’ll see.
Stephen Totilo: Yeah, I met with Sweet Baby Inc. people [and] tried to do an interview with them, probably years ago, and they were just talking about like, punching up dialogue barks, like a game they were working on. They made a playdate game on the side. (laughs) We talked about projects and couldn’t name the projects they necessarily worked on. But I went to their offices, [and it’s] like a small office and the reason I never ran an article about this was because you’re getting a little bit of something here and I try to use every interview I do, to you know, make something out of it and in this case, they had some other interview, they thought they were going to do [with] somebody else, and they didn’t get to it. So, they were like, “Hey, can you hold off until this one, and then we want to talk to you more about something.” So, it’s like a sequence of things. Later it was not timely anymore. So maybe not the most satisfying story and that’s why the article didn’t run. But it was like, they seemed talented but it was like a very, very ordinary operation.
I got the impression they were advising on lots of different games, and [in a] couple [of] cases, they’ve let me know what the games were, but I couldn’t report what the games were. And there were games where I think people would look at it and be like, you know, given some people seem to think Sweet Baby Inc. only works on games with characters of color, or that they’re just brought in for diversity consultancy. So, some of the games they worked on, I guess does fit into that category, those expectations and some of them totally wouldn’t. It was just other games that you probably never would have put on any sort of like, “Oh my gosh! DEI list!”
Some of it was, yeah, they mentioned in this game, they were talking about the character of color and trying to help how to talk about…I don’t remember if it was about racism, or it’s just about racial identity, or whatever. And so they were definitely bringing to bear to have diverse teams. A lot of these dev teams are not diverse.
So in that regard, the more experienced the bear, were they therefore, you know, overriding the studio’s wishes and forcing them? Who knows? I doubt it. And I wouldn’t really understand the power dynamic, or how they would be able to do that. The best [of] my understanding would be that they will be able to offer suggestions. Then again, in other cases, it was like, there was a game that they were working on where it was like an open-world game. And you know, what barks are? People following this interview, [if] you don’t know, it’s just like, what NPCs are going to say like on the side, [when] you’re driving around, what are people gonna say on the radio, or [when] you’re shooting people down in a shooter and what you’re gonna hear the enemy say, or whatever, or the guards just before you. They were like writing barks for characters in some open-world game or something and it was completely innocuous-sounding stuff.
I’m sure there are instances where you have a studio that has some conception of what they’re going to depict and then they may hear from a consultancy, whether it’s somebody they’re working with, or somebody who’s pitching them, saying, “Well, your depiction may be a little different than what we think would actually be”. And I mean, my God! If you’ve played enough games, you’ve seen some pretty off note depictions of characters of all types. So, it’s not exactly to say this work is not potentially useful, even when it’s specifically about advising on depictions of race and ethnicity or other forms of diversity. But yeah, I don’t know the specific instance.
Kotaku vs Axios
Pingal Pratyush: Could you walk us through the differences you actively observed between your time at Kotaku and then at Axios? I know how you agreed [that at] Kotaku, you had a more “talking to a friend at the bar” kind of a style of voice in your article and at Axios, you had more like a straightforward one. So how was that different?
Stephen Totilo: In both cases, the style was somewhat dictated by the owners of the company. So at Kotaku, where I was EIC for nine years, and I worked for 11, Nick Denton was the owner of Gawker Media and he basically hated the idea that there would be anything the reporter would know that the reader wouldn’t know. In his experience as a newspaper journalist would be, “Hey, we put one thing in the paper and then the reporters would be down at the bar and they’d say what really happened about the story they wrote. What we said at the bar should be there.” So that was the ethos of Kotaku. And radical transparency, right? Sometimes you can get in trouble and can you really fully achieve that? Not necessarily. That was the goal. Unlimited word count online.
At Axios, the founders there felt like journalists are wasting readers’ time, too much; self-indulgent, they were writing the stories that they want to write that go on forever. The reader just wants to know what’s going on and move on and most readers don’t finish articles anyway. So instead of wasting readers’ time, or missing what their appetite actually is for news, find a way to give them exactly what they’re looking for, which is cut to the chase, just the essential things and so Axios trademarked the term “smart brevity”, and Axios’s writing style is all about bullet points, here’s the news in one line, here’s why it matters in one line, it literally says why it matters before that line. (laughs)
I found that liberating. I found both approaches satisfying in different ways. I love being honest, earnest, open, and maybe loquacious with my readers in the first for Kotaku, but for the other one, it was liberating because there is kind of this assumption, go do an interview with somebody and no matter what they say, you’re going to write 500 to 800 words about it? Well, if you told me a bunch of boring nonsense, and only said one interesting thing, Axios‘s style lets me get away with writing just 150 word item, where I quote the one interesting thing you said. If you said nothing interesting, sorry, we don’t have space for you. The reader gets to see that I’m saying the whole thing is gonna be five minutes to read and it’s gonna have like four different topics at the time.
So, two different philosophies that are both about caring about the reader, which I valued and that’s a consistent through line, but very different strategies, and I found them both to be useful to even apply to what I’m doing at Game File.
Pingal Pratyush: So, are you mixing and matching both your approaches from your past experiences at Game File now?
Stephen Totilo: Yeah, I mean, pulling on that, pulling on my experience in the New York Times, from MTV from everything, but yeah, I always think it’s essential in my writing to acknowledge out there that I am there in the writing, right? Axios, in a way would try to kind of scrub out the identity of the reporter presenting something where they’d like to use his clinical, but I knew, there’s always choices, there’s always the writer, the reporter, the editor, is always there on the page in some way, even just because based on the choices of what you chose to include and exclude. You may present something, it’s just three bullet points but why those three things? Why do those things qualify as the bullet points, you may only chosen one quote, but why that quote?
So the subjectivity is always there. In the Kotaku approach, which I applied towards Game File, is to still acknowledge that idea of, “Hey, I’m here and I’m not pretending I’m not in the room, that it’s not just the institution that’s being spoken to.” And yet also with Axios, I felt like the idea of not wasting people’s time was paramount and people go on way too long in our writing.
Game File, it’s challenging, because I’m solo. So I don’t have somebody to cut my words back for me. I don’t have somebody to publish a newsletter for me, I’m kind of doing everything and it takes longer to write shorter because you have to write, you write what you think you got and then pruning it back really down to the essentials is an extra labor and I sometimes find myself just straight up not at the time and sometimes not with the perspective that comes with an additional set of eyes. So, unfortunately, one of the pitfalls of being a solo is I can’t do that but I’m always remembering the value of brevity and how much readers found that welcome.
When I started doing newsletters at Axios, there had been no games coverage in smart brevity before and I heard from someone people were like, “Oh, I love following gaming news this way.” Just, you know, in a way, it’s kind of what you might also get from following games coverage through say, Twitter or something like that. But just to get it all so succinct, right, people were interested to read an interview that’s done in that way. Sometimes I would feel bad. I interview somebody for half an hour and then I’m like, they’d be like, “Okay, where’s the long version of the interview? And I’m like, “Sorry, that’s all it is.”
Pingal Pratyush: Did you ever mention why did you leave Axios?
Stephen Totilo: They laid me off, man. Yes, I mentioned that but I did not make much of a production over that. So in August of 2023, they told me that they were not going to fund the gaming newsletter in 2024, and that’s a long time to be told in advance. It is very generous and thoughtful of them. They told me I can continue to do the newsletter through the end of the year. So, I had four and a half months of notice to do it. It was very disappointing but on the other hand, it was super unexpected, that in 2020, I was able to convince this publication that was only four years old, that was interviewing CEOs and politicians, the President of the United States, and everybody else and they were doing great coverage on health care, politics, business, technology, and it was remarkable that I was able to convince them that they should do a gaming newsletter because they weren’t doing a movie newsletter, they weren’t doing, you know, that many things that were kind of outside of core major beats.
I knew from experience over the years in my career that it is challenging to get mainstream institutions to jump in and cover games coverage. My God, how many times did I had a conversation with editors at The New York Times. I freelanced for The New York Times since 2005, but they have not had a full-time person covering games or reviewing games since 2012 I think. Even now, they’ve been expanding their games coverage some more and they’re doing it with some great people like Zachary Small over in the Culture Desk. But Zachary is technically there, hired to cover things other than games, and games became an extension of what’s happening in the way that’s the case with reporters and critics throughout. So, I knew how precious it was that they were willing to take a chance on games as a newsletter beat and that they hired me.
I pitched them on that and they listened to me enough to recognize that having a second reporter will be great. We hired Megan Farokhmanesh and she and I were daily newsletter writing tandem for a year, and when she’d left for Wired, they didn’t replace her. They listed a job and didn’t replace her. That was a red flag that they liked doing games coverage but it’s hard to get these big institutions to continue to build on that business because it’s a challenging business. Media business is challenging in general and if you expand it to games coverage with the expectation that it is easy, that the advertising will come easily or whatever, or that you can find this whole new subset of advertisers, it’s going to be I think, an even tougher road to hoe or whatever the right expression would be.
For me, my assumption would be, my recommendation was, don’t treat it as if it’s so different than everything else that we’re doing. The people who read politics news, the people who read business news, they also play video games. Now, you don’t have to worry that the advertising clientele needs to be that different. This was to be clear to everybody in yourself.
Axios was all about free email newsletters and then also publishing and stuff on the internet. They would sell ads in the newsletters, right? So you’d have a newsletter [and it] would have a sponsorship by whatever company and advertising things in a business, that always seemed remarkable to me, given the numbers we were doing, which were quite good, you know, six figures in terms of the number of people that were getting newsletters every day, the product is there. I think in terms of the editorial quality, [it] was there, especially doing it in the first year alone. The readership was there. [So,] why is it so hard to market? But you have The Washington Post, you know, throwing up ads as well with Launcher. So that was frustrating. On the other hand, maybe business-wise, they didn’t really have it all figured out with what to do, about games coverage. But as people, as bosses, [they were] super humane, like, four and a half months, telling me, “We know this is your dream job, this career is your dream career, you’ve told us that there’s not a million jobs in this career, we respect what you’ve done for us, [and] we want to give you a chance to figure out how you can do and if you know how you can do it, you know, elsewhere.”
So, I looked around a little bit at full-time gaming reporting jobs, and there were a couple of [them], nothing that like blew me away, but also like, it is not the most job-abundant field of media and then media itself was pretty challenged field. So, I’d always kind of fancied the idea of like, well, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could do something where readers just paid for my work? What a concept.”
So, Substack was one of [the] several platforms where you can do that. I had some people I knew who were publishing successfully on Substack and they said, “You should try it over here. Give 10% of your money to the company, 3% to your payment processor, [and] the other 87% is yours.”
I thought about doing that when I was wanting to leave Kotaku, and I didn’t feel like I was widely well-known enough. I think you have to be a pretty well-known writer to succeed on a reader-supported platform or [a] personality in some way. And I’m not like a TV person, I’m not a video personality, and my byline, that kind of faded from awareness. I was a much more well-known byline at games coverage when I was at MTV News before Kotaku and then as an EIC, I wanted my writers’ work to shine.
It wasn’t my role to be noticed in the same way in Kotaku. But after rebuilding myself as a reporter, and as a byline and people recognized that at Axios, I felt like I had a better shot. So, they let me promote it (Game File) while I was there, which is why even though I ended at Axios, at the end of 2023, I’m able to celebrate on June 14, my six-month anniversary of announcing it, because they let me announce it on December 14 while I was still there. So, my last few newsletters promoted Game File.
Pingal Pratyush: It’s June 14, which is today.
Stephen Totilo: That’s right, I’m saying that’s the six-month anniversary of me being able to announce it back on December 18. So in other words, I was able to announce it when I was still working at another place. And that was really, really cool they let me do that.
Pingal Pratyush: That’s awesome. Congratulations! But I really want to ask, did they ever mention where they were closing down their gaming newsletter? The specifics about it?
Stephen Totilo: Nothing that I can recall…
Pingal Pratyush: Did you ask why?
Stephen Totilo: Certainly, and it was business of, you know, where the business is going and like, what their business priorities were. There’s a little more specific than that but I don’t feel like I should go too far into what they were kind of reasoning through. But it was nothing shocking, because there’s nothing consistent with Axios being a relatively young media organization. People looked closely at Axios Gaming and it is not the only newsletter and it didn’t continue to 2024 and they have invested in other areas that are like politics and business coverage. That’s what they started on. So, they were going back more into their bread and butter. They were going into a presidential election year and that’s the time when, if your politics beat is what works best for you, in terms of not just readership, but sponsorship, what have you, and you are going to a presidential election year, and that’s the most effective part of your media operation, you [would] want to double down on that.
You’re not in something that was more of an experiment. They never said, “You were an experiment”, but I felt like it was an experiment and if Axios comes back to me, it wouldn’t shock me, if they were like, three years from now, they’re like, “Hey, we want to try it again.” But you know, I hope three years from now, I’d be like, “Game File is doing so absurdly. I now have five colleagues, because we’re doing so well, that we are our own reader-supported journalism operation. Why would I? I’m laughing at you. That’s cute, but no, thanks.” So, we’ll see. But zero hard feelings. And like I said, it’s kind of a fluke to even get there [and it] wasn’t shocking.
Media business is tough. I wouldn’t want to be running the business, especially when you’re in the ad-supported side of things because, it’s what’s I like about Game File. It’s stressful at times to have to worry about like, “Oh, I need to get more repeat readers. Bit by bit, as I’m trying to sort of build the income and everything, I need to get readers to come in and show up and pay for the work and they’ve not had to pay for my work for 20 years and who am I now to suddenly start asking them to pay for the work.
But at least I’m asking people to pay, readers, people who would read the articles to pay. It’s a kind of abstraction where you ask people to pay to run an advertisement to sell a product to somebody else, obviously, that it’s a classic thing that has existed for more than 100 years, right? Advertising, right? It’s not like there’s like, you know, it’s a business. It’s a very big business. But it’s still so mysterious to me and to know that my thing is no longer tied to a business like that, that I don’t understand, that isn’t an indirect aspect of, you know, the reader-reporter relationship, it’s liberating and it’s exciting.
(pause)
Stephen Totilo: Come on, there’s gotta be some Kotaku drama you want to know about. What do you want to know about Kotaku? Don’t waste your opportunity, here you go.
Switch Pro
Pingal Pratyush: No, no, I will get to it. But yeah, But first, I want to ask you this. Three years back, Megan, and you did an AMA on r/Games, the subreddit, and there you answered that the Switch Pro reports from Bloomberg were legit. You mentioned how you had a developer telling you [about] a Switch Pro version of a game they were working on years ago. Since then, have Nintendo scrapped the idea of a Switch Pro completely? What’s the update? Do you know anything about that?
Stephen Totilo: I don’t think I heard more about it since then. Yeah, I know that’s all true. I think I lost the thread on that one, I’m sorry to say so I couldn’t tell you. I mean, I don’t think we’re really thinking about a Switch Pro anymore anyway. But yeah, I know, Bloomberg had kind of a weird run with those stories, because they had reported down to I think, like supplies being prepared or something like that. Yeah, I don’t know. It’s a good unknown, [a] great unknown about what happened with whatever the mid-gen refresh was going to be. But there’s probably a reason that only came up in an AMA thing that I reported. I probably didn’t have much more to go on it and the little bit that I shared there, and certainly not enough for an article. I wish I could tell you more.
Midori
Pingal Pratyush: What do you think about the recent Midori case?
Stephen Totilo: I haven’t paid any attention to it. I had COVID this week, so I’ve been doing what I’m doing as much as I can, just trying to get my newsletters out this week. I saw you know, [a] leaker is not who they said. Yes. Sounds I don’t know. Is it a funny story? A sad story? Is it a tragic story? What is it? How are we classifying this?
Pingal Pratyush: I don’t know, man. Not a lot of their supposed leaks were confirmed and then they have been like, constantly posting stuff, like every hour, I think in the last few days. And then suddenly, the rumor comes in, and then they confirm that yeah, they’re someone else.
Stephen Totilo: I don’t really like that part of gaming journalism. It’s all about finding out about things you’re gonna find out about anyway. Not an area of journalism that I’ve tried to put too much energy into, which is why even something like the Sea of Thieves thing coming to PlayStation was something that I was interested in as a sort of shocking move, changeto business strategy for Xbox, more so than a new title come out. It’s gonna come out and you’re gonna find out about it anyway. So I mean, I know a lot of people really like the you know, the subreddit, r/GamingLeaksAndRumours with all their multi-different-tiered credit sources for credibility and all that and that can be fun. But I’ve never really put much energy into reporting that kind of stuff, let alone and not much into following it either. So, I couldn’t even tell you who the top leakers are, and when I heard somebody named Midori was outed as not being who they said they were, my first reaction was who is Midori? (Pingal laughs)
Geolocation for a Journalist
Pingal Pratyush: How important do you think your geolocation is to be a game journalist?
Stephen Totilo: Oh, being in a specific place certainly helped me early on. I grew up in the New York area and well, people went to Columbia from anywhere. Certainly, it’s not just your location, right, it’s your class and opportunity and privilege, and all that kind of things. So, certainly mindful of that. So, being able to go to Columbia, and a lot of the connections I had coming out of that, that led to a lot of my early journalism jobs. “Oh, I know somebody who’s an editor at that publication, you can pitch them,” kind of thing.
That becomes very, very helpful so the physical proximity to people that year that I was at Columbia Grad School is important. And then game companies used to come to New York a lot more than they do now just when there were a lot more physical events. Companies, just kind of in general, don’t do the physical showcase things anymore. So, I actuallythink in some ways that’s less important.
At this point, I live in New Jersey, just outside of the city and I don’t really even have that much reason to go to New York that often for meetings. It helps to go in-person to an event like a GDC or something like that, because there’ll be a lot of people around that you can interview or you can just kind of meet serendipitously and find things out. So, there’sadvantages to being able to move around or certain things that you can’t replace by physical proximity. So, it certainly helps.
Game File
Pingal Pratyush: Can you tell us how many paid subscribers are you sitting at, at Game File and if there are other people helping your operations at Game File. Not full-time, but in general.
Stephen Totilo: I could tell you the paid subs because I know it but it’s not a number that I put out publicly, but there’s over 13,000, free or paid collect readership who will be able to read one free edition, most Mondays are free, and then they can read the top of the other two editions.
Officially, it’s just me doing it. I have a network of peers who I bounce the headline off of, or who I’m, you know, [when I’m] not sure about an angle for a story or [when I’m] interviewing this person, what other questions you think I should ask, you know, and so those are journalists that I’ve worked with in the past or I respect. Again, some insiders covering games, some not, you know. Certainly, my wife is an invaluable sounding board for a lot of the work that I do.
Pingal Pratyush: Is there an option for subscribers to give you feedback? Like, how do you implement things, or if you can tweak a little bit in your newsletter? Do you take feedback from my subscribers?
Stephen Totilo: There’s nothing more important to my work than thinking about what the readers want and hearing from the readers and listening to the readers. I don’t think there’s like a formal message inbox and feedback thing but comments are open on the free posts. I’m very easily reachable publicly through social media, through whatever else and I’d like to think I have a reputation through over the years of being responsive, maybe sometimes too responsive to feedback. So, yeah, have you got any feedback for me? Anything I should be changing?
Pingal Pratyush: Not really. We’ll talk about that. I also want to ask when I talked to Nathan Grayson, he told me that he’s paying $2,500 per month for rent in New York, which seems crazy. So I want to ask, like, after Game File, how are you managing your finances and what’s the difference between you being in a full-time job at a company and now that you’re being independent?
Stephen Totilo: Well, the goal for Game File is to build it into something where it’s a sustainable wage for me, right? So, I was pretty well compensated at Axios and my hope is to be able to reach a point with Game File where I’m not just matching the salary I had, but I can cover expenses to places doing shows, like Summer Game Fest, GDC, what have you. Certainly, United States healthcare is unfortunately tethered to employment and so, but thankfully, if you’re married, or you know, some other arrangements, but particularly if you’re married, you can be on your spouse’s health insurance. So, those types of things can help.
But my hope is to build this into something and it’s on its way, like the chart is going in the right direction with a nice slope to something where I’m able to say I can sustain this. So, right now, because I had that advanced warning that Axios had so generously given me because I had the things you get when you’re laid off from a job, including severance, I wasn’t in a financial hole right away, and I don’t know the exact situation of how the Launcher people were treated on their way out. But I know that I was treated in a way where I was valued, and it just wasn’t really the direction or the thing that they felt made the most sense for them as an outlet.
So, again, to go speak highly of the culture of Axios, they may have had their own mission and priorities in terms of what Axios was going to do as a newsroom, but they didn’t exactly treat me like I wasn’t a human being or a life that had somewhat been tethered to their decisions, both to my benefit, and to my detriment. So, even when they made a decision that was in some way to my detriment, they didn’t just hang me out to dry.
I’m trying to build this up into something that you know, God forbid, if we can be successful enough, I can bring other people on board, where we could do something more so, it can be challenging. I have a mortgage, I have two kids, it’s like have a certain kind of financial needs to be able to make sure that my kids have a good life. Thankfully, because people have heard of me and because hopefully my work is compelling enough to people, I’m on a trajectory with Game File, where I’m hopefully going to be in pretty good shape.
Also if you look at Aftermath, I think super highly of the Aftermath team and I’m rooting for them. The thing though, that’s a challenge for them is that there are at least four people, and Chris person, the video producer and contributor, I’ve had a peaceful time. So, no offense to Chris but they’re four and a half people. So, you got to split that subscription amongst all those folks. I’ve heard from some people like, “Really Stephen? $10 for one person a month? That’s ridiculous!” And I’m like, “Yeah, I know, that’s not for everybody. It’s expensive for some people.”
But when people do pay that, I don’t have to share it with anybody and so the number that I need to hit to accomplish all the things I told you before, is lower than the number of subscribers that Aftermath or something needs to hit in order todo that for the team. But of course, they’re offering more content, and many people would say, more value, you know, depends on what you’re looking for, right? Some people are gonna be like, “Well, I want Stephen Totilo’s reporting.” Well then nobody else can offer that value, because that only comes from my report, right? People want different things. So, that’s part of it.
That’s the challenge of the independent journalist’s life, right? The thing is, we tell ourselves that it’s more guaranteed when we have a salary, you know, they may tell you, “Oh, we’re paying you this for the year.” But six months out, they can be like, “No, we’re laying you off.” Then you’re not getting paid that for the year. So, you have this sense of security, you have this sense of long-term stability with a salaried job. That in a way is illusory. This takes away the illusion when you just see the raw reality of like, “Oh, well, if things stop growing today, I will have to change my lifestyle, or, you know, give away one of my children. (laughs) I’m not giving away one of my children.
Pingal Pratyush: I hope that doesn’t happen.
Stephen Totilo: Okay, I gotta write my own newsletter soon, though. I love talking to you. So, now’s your chance. We’re on bonus, bonus, bonus time at this point. So how much more time do you think you need to get to the questions you want to ask?
Pingal Pratyush: So I have like just three more questions and then we can end this interview.
Stephen Totilo: Alright, three. Oh, boy. (laughs)
Pingal Pratyush: I think you’re pumping up the things a little too much but I don’t have anything really controversial to ask.
Stephen Totilo: Oh man, really?
(Pingal’s remarks: Stephen’s eternally disappointed with me. :’) Sorry)
Stephen Totilo: I was there for all the shit to talk about Kotaku and Gawker Media. I was there when the Hulk Hogan sex tape was delivered to Gawker Media‘s offices.
Pingal Pratyush: So, you wanna talk about Kotaku?
Stephen Totilo: Not really. (laughs) I ran the site for nine years. But anyway, go on. What do you got?
Pingal Pratyush: I talked to Ben Hansen from MinnMax.
Stephen Totilo: Loved that.
Pingal Pratyush: And he said to me that it’s high time that game journalists start appearing more on YouTube or onpodcasts, you know, to build kind of a personal brand of their own, especially video-form [for the] potential of discoverability. Do you think, like, of course, you’re a known name but for people who are just starting out, like young kids graduating journalism school, do you think the medium of writing is not enough in today’s world?
Stephen Totilo: No, it’s probably not enough in the sense that you need to be [on] as many places as people are, to try to get that attention. The medium of writing is not, by the way, just writing articles. The medium of writing is writing tweets. Lord knows people like writing tweets, right? It’s writing on social media, it’s writing on LinkedIn, it’s writing in all different places that people might be [on]. It’s writing good copy on Instagram, it’s writing wherever you think people might be, doing video and audio. So, I think being [on] as many places is the exhausting thing for even established reporters like myself, the extent to which you have to constantly be promoting your work.
I think Luke Plunkett over at Aftermath was talking about this where he was like, “The old feeling was I could just do the work and it would just find its audience.” Because you can rely on the reach of your platform, [and] just not have to worry about it. The modern journalists, again, not just gaming, as I said, at the very beginning, almost none of this is linked to games coverage. Modern journalists need to be promoting their work to define the readers because the readers have so many things going on in their lives vying for their attention. So, get on that podcast, get asked questions, whatever. But the key thing, the most important thing, if you’re a journalist, and I’m distinguishing that from being a critic, no disparagement for being a critic, but [I] have far less useful advice for people as critics. I feel like I don’t have the track record of helping critics the way I think I have the track record of helping train up really talented reporters. Just felt like I had a better aptitude for that.
For reporters, the most important thing to do and this is gonna sound almost condescendingly tautological, the most important thing to do is for reporters to do is to report. And that just means to ask questions, find out information, and then get that information out there. It is exactly not to overly flatter the interviewer, but it is what you’re doing right now. It is to say, it doesn’t matter where I am in the world, doesn’t matter who I know or don’t know, doesn’t matter that I don’t know you, you know, you’ve reached out to me, and we didn’t know each other, right? It doesn’t matter. You have things you want to ask, and you say, “Dammit! I have a way to get to you to tell you that I want to ask you them and I’m going to see if you’re up for answering them.” And I can easily say, “No” right? “I don’t want to talk to you.” You know, but I say yes. “Hey, let’s talk.” And then you know, you ask a bunch of questions and in some cases, you’re like, “So, how many paid subs you got?” and I knowingly don’t answer your question. So, you’re not gonna get an answer to every question. But you say, “Hey, how’d that go, interviewing Assassin’s Creed Shadows?” And you get the behind-the-scenes story that nobody else got, right? A little bit about how the setup and all that goes.
So, is that necessarily the news that’s gonna make it for you, or even make it for you today and get your attention? Maybe, maybe not. But that is the thing that will get you as a reporter to get your work built up. The thing I worry about right now [about] people in a state of the media and all that, you’ve talked to Ben, talked to Nathan about this, hopefully you’ll talk to other people about this as well, is that there are signs of life and opportunity through crowdfunding platforms, through, you know, some entities like Washington Post loses interest, and then somebody else like Variety comes in. And by the way, this is very American-centric. I mean, what a surprise! American only knows about what’s happening in America, right?
So I can’t speak to how games media might be [about] finding new opportunities in other countries. But I’ll say, yes, there are crowdfunding platforms, there’s all that kind of thing. That’s great. But for a lot of people, it’s hard for the young journalist to break in. And there’s not as much opportunity there, I think. And that’s what I’m worried about, right? How is the young journalist going to break in because me, I got a name and so I can say, I’m doing a Substack, Game File, I got 100,000 followers on Twitter, makeup connections on LinkedIn, I can publicize it, and people show up, and they will pay to the support and everything like that. But if people don’t know your name, you haven’t had a chance to do the work to build up the credibility and it’s not that you don’t necessarily have the skills or the talent, but you managed to not have had the chance to do it yet. So how do you get that going?
In the past, you’d be a staff reporter at a publication that already had the senior reporters and maybe the senior reporter was well-known. As a staff reporter, you there, you’re not getting maybe the biggest stories, but you’re growing. You’re building up. That opportunity is not as abundant. It’s not there. When the gaming media ecosystem has atomized and now I’m solo and, you know, Aftermath is its own bunch of people, but it’s not part of the larger Kotaku entity, and Washington Post‘s Launcher has, you know, kind of spread people out into various places. When that happens, there are not as many institutions that can help young journalists train. So, it becomes much harder in that way. That’s what I worry about is how you can do that.
While I’m saying that doing the reporting, even as an independent, even as a young journalist can get you that attention, getting the training, getting what I value, what I think works, and maybe there’s a bias of being a former Editor-in-Chief of, “Oh, it’s helpful to have a mentor. It’s helpful to have somebody help you through thinking through how to report a tricky story.” The absence of that I think, might stunt the development or slow the development of a younger journalist and make it harder to find that pathway into something. So, that’s what we lose when the institutions themselves aren’t sort of as robust as they were and things are more splintered out.
Independence can be helpful in some ways but I would recommend and I would advise even independent journalists, to not be shy about maybe asking an experienced journalist, you know, for advice on something and I would hope the experienced journalists, I’m certainly open to it, are happy to help a newer journalist kind of figure [things] out. Again, not just like, in broad strokes [of] what to do, but [say,] you’re struggling on a specific story, you don’t know what to ask this person or you got this weird answer, or you feel like you’re being given the runaround by this PR team, or you feel like you’ve just been given a contradiction, you know, in something you’ve said, or having trouble finding this document, very specific questions that in the past my reporters could have come to me when I was the EiC at Kotaku.
It’s harder for me to know how you can get those questions answered and my hope is that you know, I say this in this interview, anybody out there as an aspiring reporter, and you’re working on a story and you’re stuck, I’m more than happy to help you. I’ll not steal your story from you I promise. (laughs) I’m more than happy to help you figure it out. Because I want there to be more journalism about games. I want there to be more reporting. I want there to be more truths on Earth and that’s why I’m hopeful that Game File can eventually be something that expands and incorporates more voices and more talent, so that I can take that part of the things that I thought I was pretty good at Kotaku and help other reporters, to train up other reporters, because I’m really excited with what great reporters are able to do. ‘m excited when I see a new reporters, talents, percolating up, you know, into public awareness, and anything I can do to support that.
Great Hill Partners
Pingal Pratyush: About Great Hill Partners. What do you think?
Stephen Totilo: Not so great.
Pingal Pratyush: When I talked to Nathan about this, he obviously told me his side of his story being a writer there. But obviously, a lot of things I think went wrong. So, what actually happened? Why did the acquisition happen in the first place? Then all of these sites are being sold. I think recently another of the sites got sold. I want to know your story and then also, what do you think of Kotaku’s future because it already seems to be in a very blurry state.
Stephen Totilo: I joined Kotaku in 2009 and it was part of Gawker Media. It was a part of a very kind of wild buccaneering company. I mentioned much earlier in this interview that there was a, you know, approach for radical transparency that led to a lot of really important journalism about a lot of key things. Especially at Kotaku, we really sort of took that idea and said, “We’re going to tell people stories they’re not going to get from other games media.” Deadspin had great stuff about stadium financings, the sports side and about the guy who claimed he had a girlfriend who was [a] motivated college football player, Manti Te’o, it was all a hoax. This was the big motivational story of this college football player and girlfriend of his who died and motivated him to be this great player and then they discovered she was not real. Donald Trump famously tweeted at Deadspin commending them on that and Deadspin responded in a tweet saying, “Go fuck yourself.” He then responded saying, “That’s the last time I’ll ever try to be nice to anybody.” So, that might be the inception of like the Donald Trump we’ve known for the last 10 years as a very acerbic fellow. But I haven’t really put that on Deadspin.
So, there was [a] reputation for Gawker Media sites to be wild in a lot of ways and that included when a Hulk Hogan sex tape was delivered to the doorsteps of Gawker Media that they published eight seconds of grainy black and white footage to do a post that was kind of about sex tapes, and showed this little bit and Hulk Hogan secretly financed by a billionaire Peter Thiel sued for a number of things, including I think “Invasion of Privacy”, and Gawker took the tape down but didn’t take down the written description.
It wasn’t enough for the judge in Florida, [a] jury trial [happened] and we were found liable for $140 million or something as a company. Something more than people get for wrongful death. So, you know, really, really big-time verdict. One of the jurors had asked one of the editors of the company who was a woman if she’d slept with the owner of the company. So they were in some pretty salacious things themselves. Sadly, while claiming, we were sort of scandalous people from New York and so a lot of this led to tough times, because the company had to declare for bankruptcy because we didn’t have time to do an appeal. So, it led to a cascade of issues.
We got bought by Univision, a Spanish language broadcaster in [the] United States and that’s how our sites became [a] part of the family with The Onion and The Root and Splinter News, which had been a fusion and so we were a bunch of English-language websites with really wild readerships; hundreds of millions of readers. It was still a very widely read, well respected, and liked by its readership group of sites, including Kotaku. But a couple of years into being owned by Univision, the Univision bosses went I think like, “Why are we doing this English-language web stuff? We’re a Spanish-language TV broadcaster. What are we doing?” They tried to do a public offering, go public, sell stock, [then] they pulled out from doing that and so then they went into contraction mode.
They did [a] round of buyouts at our company, including our sites. If anybody wanted to leave, they couldn’t take salary and that led to the shutdown of a briefly run site called Compete, which was a joint operation between Deadspin and Kotaku to cover eSports from a sort of mix of our two mentalities covering our respective areas. So the Univision era didn’t last super long. You can say what you will about the Hogan thing, but it had very clearly nothing to do with Kotaku, specifically. The Univision era, where it went awry had even less to do with Kotaku because it had to do with what this large media company was doing with what it owned.
So then they were selling all of our sites, and for whatever reason, couldn’t find many buyers, except for this guy, Jim Spanfeller, who had not had a major success recently in online media, certainly not a journalistic success and a private equity company that he brought on board to deal with him; Great Hill Partners. They told us [they were] about private equity, regrowth equity, and whatever that nonsense means. So, we wound up you know, in rapid succession to two different owners who I’d say, were not the ideal owners, because they were not invested in the mission of buccaneering journalism, thinking about what the reader wants, and finding a way to do that.
I mean, Nick Denton’s mentality with Gawker Media had already been changing while I was there. So there was definitelyalways going to be an evolution to what Gawker Media was, and I think in a very healthy way and I was quite proud of the work we were doing at Kotaku. But that wasn’t meant to be. Because of, you know, the Hulk Hogan stuff and because of Univision. So, Great Hill was a match made with us in hell. The first thing that Jim Spanfeller did when he came in was question why we needed an editorial director across all of our sites, which was a sign that he didn’t understand what was, you know, sort of effective about our organization. The second thing he did, I might be getting the order wrong, was to lay off or try to lay off all of our investigative unit, which was an investigative reporting team that served all the sites collectively.
Many strong media institutions around the world have a sort of an independent desk within it that is not part of any particular departments but does investigative journalism. Anybody who comes in to a media company and immediately thinks, “That’s unnecessary, let’s get rid of that,” is a person who is telling me they don’t understand how to commit journalism and perhaps is allergic to committing journalism or [is] averse to it, if you will. So, [it was] the second bad sign of it. There I was working for an ownership and I could tell, didn’t really understand reporting, didn’t value the way that I did, probably didn’t value my readership the way that I did. To little surprise, they had conflicts with Deadspin‘s editors and I was in the room when the acting EiC of Deadspin was pulled out of the room and subsequently fired. I was like, sort of their front-row seat to all the disasters that have happened at Gawker Media over the years. It was just like a slow, depressing decay, really not even that slows through 2019 of watching people realize that, yeah, we’d had many enemies outside of the company, many people who didn’t respect the journalism that we did, you know, who were outside the gates yelling at us. Now, we knew people were like that were inside as well. Right?
They could say whatever they want, Jim Spanfeller could say, he’s all for good reporting but at best, he’s lying to himself, fooling himself, because Great Hill, Jim Spanfeller and that management team, were just, they don’t know a thing about running an actual journalistic operation. And so, my job once they were in charge, more than ever became insulating my staff as much as possible. From the idiocy above me in the cluelessness about reporting and journalism and what it takes. They wanted to chase easy, cheap traffic. He looked at me like I was crazy when I said, “You cover the things that you care about, the reporters care about and the traffic comes, right?”
I sit in meetings where they show me all the terms that we’re doing well, in SEO, I know SEO is important for a lot of people, that SEO is the way of the modern internet for a lot of people. When you’re an incumbent website, it’s been around as long as Kotaku had, when you were a front page URL that people type into their browsers to this day, in this century, in this decade, in this year, you don’t necessarily have to do those things, if you can maintain that credibility with that audience. But if you don’t know that history, if the only history that you seem to know is, “Oh, you guys have been a bunch of malcontents!” It’s just not quite said, but surely implied. You treat us the staff, like we don’t know what we’re doing, even though we have tens of millions, 100 million+ loyal readers, every month, collectively across the sites, then you wind up with what we wound up with, which is people losing faith in that ownership with me having less and less of an ability to stay the course for people, I lost my own confidence in what that company was doing. Some of them held the confidence that they believed in journalism. And you know, some people are going to start laugh when they see this when they hear this because they don’t like fooling yourself think that Kotaku is about real journalism? Well, it is.
And I’ll tell you, in many ways, it still is. There are people there to hold the flame, they hold it, they’re trying to do it against a lot of very obvious disinterest in journalism, that still, you know, unfortunately, exemplifies the strategy, that management at that company. So that’s some mix of specifics of broad strokes. That’s what happened.
I lost one person on my staff every year for the first eight years I ran it. I lost eight people on the final year that I ran Kotaku, because I’m not going to put all of it on management above. Every outlet has its challenges. But when you have an exodus like that, and you’re looking across one site after another, after a while that management should have been looking at themselves saying, “What are we doing wrong?” Instead of just trying to cycle out every person they decided was not, you know, down with whatever their, their mission was.
And so, unfortunately, you know, I think Kotaku is fighting a much harder fight than it’s ever had to fight internally than ever before. And my hope, you know, I still see the glimmers of the Kotaku that I know that it’s hard it truly is and wants to be, that reporting, that that fearlessness. But I know that they face a challenge to do you know, all sorts of things, whether it’s more service pieces. I’m not there. So I can’t speak authoritatively to exactly what mandates they’re currently under. But as a former EiC knowing what advantages could talk ahead and knowing how the ownership squandered so many of those advantages, just because they didn’t understand what they bought, or didn’t care about what they bought, didn’t care enough to understand it. It’s quite disappointing.
But there’s another way to look at it, which is that to me, the spirit of Kotaku lives on. It lives on in not just the staff that’s there, but it lives on in the staff that’s moved on. It lives on in the staff at Aftermath, its staff at Bloomberg, staff that’s elsewhere, doing freelance, doing full-time, It has been able to do things. It has been able to do influential reporting. It has been able to do bold criticism. It has been able to hopefully inspire reporters elsewhere.
And so in some ways, the spirit of Kotaku also lives on in other publications and with other people who never worked in Kotaku, but who read a Kotaku article and said, that’s the kind of journalism that I want to see done about games. That’s the kind of journalism I’m going to do about games and I’m lucky enough to hear from people when I encounter them, you know, in real life or whatever that, thankfully, we did have an impact on people. So that’s my hope. My hope is that whatever Kotaku is in sight, may be hard to judge how that’s going to fare long run, but whatever Kotaku was in spirit, that’ll go on forever.
Pingal Pratyush: Absolutely, yeah. That was kind of the heaviest part of the interview.
Stephen Totilo: Hopefully, it’s good for you. Man, the heavy part of my day is, I really enjoyed this but how screwed I am for my newsletter. So, any final things you need or, if not, we’ll disconnect. We can certainly keep chatting you know, I can type things to clarify anything you need.
A Game Stephen’s Excited For
Pingal Pratyush: Any games you’re excited for, this year?
Stephen Totilo: I’m about to write about a game called UFO 50. The article will be live by the time this comes out. It’s by the lead developer of Spelunky 2. It’s 50 games for a fictional video game company and you can play them as 50 separate video games, but they’re also kind of indirectly telling the history of this fictional 1980s video game company and when I realized it had this whole metal layer to it, I was so enchanted by that and so intrigued by how that’s going to sort of manifest itself when you play through it. So I have one game I’m looking forward to there are 50 games typically referred to as UFO 50. So that’s the one.
Pingal Pratyush: Will you be publishing the newsletter today?
Stephen Totilo: I gotta write it and publish it today. But yeah, that’ll be published today.
Pingal Pratyush: Any people that you want to shout out to? Journalists or people in the media industry that you reallylook forward to or admire?
Stephen Totilo: I admire every reporter out there who’s hustling. So I mean, there are tons of great reporters out there. I certainly want to hear, you know, if you’re out there, and you feel like people aren’t seeing your work, I would love to see your work. So you know, people can hit me up by sending me a message on social media, or you can email me at stephen@gamefile.news and I would love to encounter the work of like the next generation of game journalists more and more, you know. It’s easy to find Jason Schreier’s reporting, it’s easy to find Nathan Grayson’s reporting, easily find Nicole Carpenter’s reporting, Cecilia D’Anastaio’s reporting, you name it. Terrific journalists, all of them.
There’s great reporting happening more and more on YouTube, People Make Games , for example, Ben Henson does great interviews, as you know. But who’s like the next generation of games journalists? I hope there’s some names that I will soon feel very embarrassed to have not known to shout out and I want to know what those names are. So if there’s any, you know, kind of the next-gen game journalists out there, if you are the PS5 or even the PS6 of games journalism, I would love to hear from from you. I would love to hear from those folks and know what the next generation is doing in games reporting.
Jason Schreier’s New Book
Pingal Pratyush: Hopefully, soon. Are you getting Jason Schreier’s new book’s review copy?
Stephen Totilo: I’ve already read it.
Pingal Pratyush: Oh, come on! So, just a one-word remark, anything you’d want to say about it?
Stephen Totilo: Oh, no. I can’t say anything. (laughs) It’s Jason’s book. I gotta play nice.
Playdead’s New Game
Pingal Pratyush: All right. Do you know about Playdead‘s next game? Game 3?
Stephen Totilo: No.
Pingal Pratyush: Ah, okay.
Stephen Totilo: (laughs) What’s going on here? What’s happening in this interview?
Pingal Pratyush: Is that the truth?
Stephen Totilo: Why would I know about Playdead‘s next game?
Pingal Pratyush: I mean, of course, I have to ask this to you guys and not on Twitter from some random like leaker or something.
Stephen Totilo: Do you have the scoop? Is that why you’re testing me?
Pingal Pratyush: No, no. I’m just asking.
Stephen Totilo: Oh, no, I don’t know. Again, that’s not my reporting. My reporting’s not what I secretly know or what the studio is working on. I can tell you more about the 20 lawsuits trying to go after Nintendo, Roblox, Microsoft, and whoever else trying to get them all for addicting kids to video games, like that’s my reporting. My reporting is reading through Take-Two‘s annual filings and finding ways that how the company is sort of hinting at how it’s transforming and the new risks it’s facing. I’m not your guy for like, what cool game announcement can you tell me a week ahead of the Nintendo Direct? I’m sorry, like it’s fun stuff, but uh, I’ve never been on like really taking that stuff up and I’ve never spent that much time into it. But hey, this was fun. I genuinely have to go. I hope this was good for you. Did this get you what you wanted?
Pingal Pratyush: Yeah, absolutely man. My only objective was to talk to you and get to know you better. So the next time we do this thing, we have more stuff to talk about.
Stephen Totilo: Yeah, had a lot of fun stuff in this one. Cool. I’m gonna go into writing mode.
Pingal Pratyush: Thank you so much.
Stephen Totilo: Awesome. Have a good night.
Pingal Pratyush: You too.
Thanks for the interview, Pingal. This was my conscious introduction to Stephen T., I am certain I have uninowingly read his efforts before. I will check out Game File. My only other thoughts after reading this interview are; gaming certainly needs more quality reporting, special attention should be given to the handling communication of technical topics (games are a technology platform, suffering the same barriers as science reporting), and finally studios should be scrutinized rather than appeased…not because they are inherently bad, but because this industry is a social interaction and how they handle staff, story, customer interaction, multiplayer design, HACKING, and distribution is kind of my business, our business. Cheers.
Thank you so much for your kind words, and yes, I definitely agree that we need more journalists in the video game industry.
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