Ask George, November 2024
Why I stayed on Substack, the mainstream media and games and looking ahead to 2025
Have you considered migrating your newsletter away from Substack?
Why is there so little good mainstream news coverage of video games?
Now that the industry has survived to 2025, what’s next?
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Hello VGIM-ers,
Let me level with you. I am a bit hungover from yesterday’s VGIM 1st Birthday Drinks.
I’ll write more about everything that went down at the event in next week’s full fat VGIM. But as promised, I’ve managed to drag myself out of bed to write my usual monthly Q and A column for VGIM Insiders.
Given that the first question this month was about the running of VGIM, I’m making a rare exception to my usual pay-walling approach and letting you all read the first question for free.
But if you want to read the rest of my answers, hear about exclusive VGIM events first and get 10% off all VGIM sponsorships and adverts, make sure to become a paid subscriber right now using the button below.
Anyway, let’s get on with the interrogation.
Have you considered migrating your newsletter away from Substack? - Robin
Yes, I have. Between the tail end of 2023 and the middle of 2024, I actively explored moving Video Games Industry Memo to ButtonDown, Beehiiv or Ghost as a hedge against possible reputational damage from being present on Substack.
In November 2023, The Atlantic found a number of newsletters on the platform which featured overt far right content - including Nazi iconography and articles about The Great Replacement Theory - and were monetising via the platform.
This is, of course, problematic. But it wasn’t the reason I nearly considered leaving Substack.
As many readers of VGIM know, one of the themes of my work here is that digital and physical spaces alike will, inevitably, be bastardised by extremists and, well, bastards.
Therefore, the question isn’t whether this kind of stuff happens; it’s the response to it that matters. If a company is straining every sinew to stop the issue where it can but getting beaten by the sheer unreality of reducing societal level risk on a digital platform, I can live with that. But if it can’t demonstrate it is up to the challenge of tackling the problems its platform can inadvertently create, we have a different issue.
In December 2023, Substack issued its first response and it was pisspoor. Hamish McKenzie, Substack’s co-founder and writer of a particularly uninteresting newsletter that’s fobbed on all of the platform’s users, released a statement which said the platform would keep Nazi and extremist content within its walls because it didn’t want to engage in “censorship” - despite the company disagreeing with it.
This was the wrong response. It was wrong because it was thick. It was wrong because it was immoral. It was even wrong because it breached both the company’s terms of service and its own agreement with Stripe, a payment provider who wouldn’t have been thrilled to hear the company waving on through that sweet Nazi gold.
At this point, two writers I respect immensely - James Whatley and Jared Shurin - left the platform immediately. I chatted to both of them about why they did it, their reasons for doing so made perfect sense and left me thinking that Substack might be the wrong place for my newsletter.
So why didn’t I leave? Ultimately, there were two major reasons why I didn’t jump ship then.
First, I’ve done enough corporate and crisis comms in my life to know that Substack would struggle to hold the line against the executive brain fart that had engulfed it.
Beyond Stripe - a company literally legally responsible in countries across the world for not funding those kind of groups - presumably being on the phone to the business going “what in the actual fuck are you doing”, a number of major Substack outlets including Platformer immediately put pressure on the platform to change its approach. I judged that this was likely to lead to action in the new year in some form in an effort to stop the bleed.
And this mattered because the second point was that I was bloody knackered after the end of the year. 2023 was a rollercoaster for me, which saw me set up my own business and start up VGIM less than two months before all this happened. Migrating a newsletter in the dying days of December at a time when I was more frazzled than a popular brand of British crisps wasn’t a realistic option.
So beyond doing the due diligence of understanding which platforms I could move to if I wanted to and grabbing some prime real estate to make sure I could move if I needed to, I told myself that if there wasn’t major movement by Substack to resolve the issue in Q1 2024 then I’d shift to a rival - which probably would have been Ghost - ahead of turning on paid subscriptions.
Fortunately for me, my hunch proved to be right. In January 2024 in response to more writers leaving, Substack reversed course - actively removing content and making it abundantly clear that the company understood the need to challenge such work directly.
It was the right outcome in the end and encouraged me, along with outlets like Platformer, to stay on the site. Was I disappointed that the statement did not come directly from Mackenzie? Yes. And was I even more disappointed that he didn’t use the fact that he can email everyone on Substack to really hammer home that up with this they will not put? Absolutely.
But in this context, my view of whether to remain on the platform changed. Yes, it took too long for the bone headed tech bros in San Francisco to deposit their copies of Atlas Shrugged in the bottom of the bay.
Nevertheless, good sense prevailed - returning the conversation to a more measured chat about whether Substack offers the feature set for me to do what I want to do with VGIM.
However, this isn’t to absolve or forget the issue. I’ve written numerous times about how community standards matter, including within a recent conference talk when I was in Australia. To lean into footballing parlance, Substack is on a booking over the way it handled this.
And with my brain now more freed up than it was in the three months after I set up my own business, I’d be more willing to take my business elsewhere if necessary.
So for now, here we stay. But if the company errs again in the future, I will - once again - consider upping sticks and taking us all somewhere else.
Why is there so little good mainstream news coverage of video games? - Andrew
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