The video game market may be reaching new heights, but the specialized media are struggling to survive and their journalists are wondering about the future.
Set out to conquer video games at the end of 2021 by acquiring Melty (La Crème du Gaming, SuperSoluce, and GameLove), Reworld accelerated at the start of the year by buying Eclypsia, a historic esports brand, and JeuVideo-Live .com, more generalist. Within five years, the group intends to take second place on the French podium on the theme, occupied today by Webedia, with the portal JeuxVideo.comor Breakflip, owned by communications agency WSC.
But his methods, which aim to make profitable sites acquired at a discount as quickly as possible, are struggling to pass. “The La Crème du Gaming site is disgusting, there are ads everywhere, many bugs”, and “as everything is outsourced to Reworld, there’s no point in reporting it
», criticizes the same source.
“Reworld presents itself as a huge structure, but it often continues to be very amateurish internally”, supports another employee of the group. “Almost every week, someone quits or burns out,” he says.
“Worrying”
Added to this are late payments for freelancers.
Asked about this, the co-founder of Reworld, Jérémy Parola, concedes “a few failures at the time of payment”, but he defends “the group’s technical platform and power, which allows it to be” more efficient “for lack of a miracle editorial recipe”.
The manager also wants to be reassuring about the uniqueness of Gamekult and its 12,000 subscribers. “The paid model is ultra-virtuous”, he assures, “provided that it involves the creation of new services so that subscribers want to pay a little more” .
Contacted, the Gamekult teams did not respond to AFP’s requests. According to Valentin Cébo, who left the editorial office in the spring, “worrying signs” had already appeared with the announced merger of Gamekult and the tech portal Les Numériques, and the move to the TF1 tower.
The concern of journalists is reinforced by the acceleration of the difficulties of the media in the sector: the magazine Canard PC has just reduced its pagination and cut 3 posts, due to the explosion in the price of paper.
Jeuxvideo.fr, owned by Clubic, closed in May, 7 years to the day after closing for the first time.
Video and streaming
According to a French representative of a major game publisher, “The specialized press is always the one that structures the stories. But new media have emerged,” especially video. As a result, editors have turned into videographers, like Julien Chièze and Carole Quintaine (more than 800,000 subscribers on YouTube) or Gauthier Andres (Gautoz) on Twitch.
“For a publisher, it’s much more interesting to send the codes of a game to streamers. The audience is wider and the gaze a little less critical,” says journalist Julie Le Baron, former Canard PC.
“Most journalists will last 5 or 10 years, but after a while, if the remuneration does not follow, you think about changes”, believes Valentin Cébo.
“For a very long time, it was a dream vision to get paid to play video games, which was reductive,” concludes one of the Reworld journalists. “But in recent years, fewer and fewer people see journalism as an end in itself. »