Hey there, it’s been a minute since I’ve last posted here. I recently started contributing to an up-and-coming game website, PSLegends. I’m now officially a staff writer there and I’m drowning in work that I took upon myself. Overambition is a beast that I still struggle to win against, but regardless, I push onwards.
Unfortunately, taking on work for PSLegends made things difficult for me to keep up to date with my blog. For a while there, I agonized about making sure that I had something to post here, but I couldn’t come up with anything worth writing about.
That was until I did quite a bit of reflecting while planning out my week. I often forget how difficult it can be to write reviews, guides, or features covering various games. I found it easy to write about games or cover new releases when I first started. Over time, I gained experience and valuable feedback that changed my perspective on writing considerably.
The more that I would publish, the less knowledgeable I felt about my craft. For each review that I did, more anxiety and difficulty washed over me when I selected the next topic to work on. I understand more now about writing, specifically, writing in the video game niche, than I ever have before. I still feel like an amateur, even though I’ve had a few successful endeavors that a newbie totally couldn’t pull off.
I often feel very lost while I navigate my path as a writer in this space, so I’m gonna ramble about what my experience is like. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows when you are hellbent on improving yourself as a writer, but hopefully, you can get some valuable insight from me. Here’s what it’s like to write about video games for money.
A Day in the Life
Lots of gamers would love to make an income from playing video games. But to actually pull off such a feat, many forget the actual work that’s required. One of the most common ways to make money by playing games is to review them or cover them. While on paper, it sounds pretty easy, but in reality, you’ll be spending more time writing and editing than gaming. This is what a regular day for me is like:
Waking Up
The first thing that I do is grab a coffee as soon as my eyes open. I absolutely need a kick in the ass to get my day started, or I’ll end up doom-scrolling and wasting time. On average, it takes me about an hour or so to get all of the gears in my head moving at a baseline speed. Once I start to feel like I’m not a slobbering zombie, I make my way to my office.
The To-do List
Every single day I either use a sheet from a composition book or a sticky note to jot down a few things that I absolutely have to get done before I screw around. This also includes important things that occur outside of writing, like chores, errands I have to do, and other miscellaneous things.
It’s crucial to me that I knock out a few of these items on the list before I do anything else or they just don’t get done. The way that I work, especially with writing, is that I have to knock it out early or I’ll put it off until the end of time. Life and work in this field can add up super fast, so you’ll either have to be great at getting things done on the fly, or just good at conquering a pile of work in one brutal sitting.
Hard Tasks First
Once I have some loose ideas of things that I need to accomplish for the day, I start with what I consider to be the most difficult task. For me, I think editing and organizing media on a post takes the most out of me.
Editing alone is taxing, then comes the indecisive bout of selecting images for the post. This process usually takes me the longest compared to writing a draft and it can be tedious and frustrating at times. Taking hundreds of words of trash and crushing it down to two or three decent sentences is pretty damn exhausting.
On to the Rest
After I’ve got the hardest part behind me, I usually take a moment, refill my coffee, and reflect for a couple of minutes. Taking small periodic breaks is a good way to keep the fires of productivity burning strong. Don’t overdo your breaks though, or you’ll end up falling behind or losing your momentum.
I often plan a method of attack when it comes to my tasks. I usually have two or three pieces that I’m working on at the same time, so whenever I get stuck on one for too long, I swap to the next project. This helps me keep up a decent word count for drafting, but I can’t necessarily do this when I’m in the editing stage of things.
My process is very disorganized (much like this blog post, lol), but I’ve set myself up this way based on the highs and lows my focus and energy levels dip between. It’s never super consistent, so often this part of my day requires some white-knuckle writing and powering through.
Networking, Emails, and General Admin Stuff
When I can’t write or edit any longer, this is when I start to slow down and work on the other aspects of the job. Sometime's I'll balance my excel sheet that tracks invoices, clients, and etc. Sometimes I need to follow up with a client that either me or them didn't have time to talk prior. Most of the time, I check and clear out my email as frequently as I can to make sure that I don’t miss any important emails.
In my first year freelancing, I was particularly bad about my email since I was using separate devices for different admin work and it ended up with me missing out on some opportunities that slipped through notifications, so try to avoid that mistake if you are starting out as a freelancer.
Once that’s been done, I move on to checking my Discord, which is another method I use to stay in touch with clients and other writers. This is a little bit more tricky, since it’s easy to get distracted, so that’s why I usually wait until most of the harder, more demanding tasks have been completed for the day.
If I’m close to closing a contract with a client, or if the work I’m doing for them slows a bit, this is about when I’d start to research other websites or clients to work for. This can also be very taxing and exhausting from shifting around hundreds of sites and ‘about us’ pages, but it’s consistent compared to relying only on job boards and other similar sites.
Finally, Playing a Game
Surprisingly, one of the last things that I do in a job where I write about games is actually playing one. I’m sure everyone is different when it comes to their work process, but I absolutely cannot start my day with a game or I get nothing completed.
Most writers write around the same time every day, and it’s a good practice to make that a consistent habit. It’s so ingrained in me to write at specific times that if I miss that window, there’s no chance of me getting much done. It may seem easy to just sit down and start writing at different times of the day. For me, I just end up getting distracted or preoccupied with another task that requires my attention if I don't write at specific times.
When I’m finally sitting down to play something, I often keep notes, take screenshots, and record gameplay while I'm playing. I do this even if I’m not going to cover the game, just in case if I ever come back around to it, I have something to go off of and save myself more time in the future.
When I’m playing a game to review, I often take much longer than the average game journalist. Those writers focus on pushing out the review as fast as possible to rank on Google. It’s a rat race for all sorts of sites to fight for dominance on search engines and I’m just not quite that experienced to break down a game efficiently in such a small window of time. I've read hundreds of game reviews, and you'd be surpised how many of them can just be interchanged with nearly any AAA release. That's just another ramble for another time.
I know that my review is probably going to be buried regardless, so I focus more on improving my skills as a writer and as someone who’s analyzing art. It doesn’t have to be that deep, but the more critical thinking I deploy while playing a game or writing about it, the more unique perspectives I end up having. That perspective is what I consider valuable about my writing. I try to analyze and break down a game in multiple different ways to reach players who have a hard time articulating what they enjoy about a game.
I’ll use Elden Ring as an example. While I’m running around the Lands Between, I try to change my build and try as many things out as possible. Not just for the sake of seeing everything, but to determine if players who like a certain playstyle can find value in a part of a game that I particularly don’t play. It opens new doors for me and experiences that I otherwise wouldn’t have sought out if I wasn’t trying to pick apart the game for a review.
I’m not just sitting here and playing a game. I’m reviewing art. I’m trying to determine what the developers intended with their creation and if it was successful in doing so. With video games rising in launch price, it’s also a way for me to give back to the gaming community by trying to figure out what specific niche of player would find value in the game itself.
As part of my reviews, I consider what sold or broke me on a game while I’m playing it and then I search for the antithesis to those while I explore. If a game is amazing, I look for flaws that more picky players would get hung up on. If a game is pretty rough, I look for silver linings that could still scratch an itch for someone who loves that type of game.
So Why is this Difficult?
Sleeping in and waking up whenever the hell I want seems like a dream job for some, so what's the difficulty of this job? Well, for starters, actually doing the work! Take a look at any of your friends or anyone you’ve met who’s wanted to make money through video games. How much are they writing? Did they send twenty pitches out to prospective clients every other day? Do they even have a portfolio?
In a very oversaturated field like game journalism, there are thousands of writers competing against you. Some of these writers have been crushing game reviews for decades, so why would a client hire a green-as-grass writer to cover a game? Hell, even with some bylines that I’ve made here and there, I still miss out on solid opportunities because there’s always a more experienced writer out there. It’s just the nature of the beast and I kind of love it that way, even when nothing works out in my favor.
Working your ass off and hardly seeing results is hard as hell regardless of what field it’s in. And often in this field, you won’t get much feedback on why nothing is working out for you. You have to do so much personal research and analyze nearly every action that you do if you want hard answers and a concrete gauge of how well you are performing.
Writing is Hard
I don’t think I’m god’s gift to writing, but I like to think that I’m experienced enough to know a little about what I’m talking about. On its own, writing is hard work. It’s not just slinging sentences together and purple prosing your way to publications. It’s a creative field that can take your entire lifetime to fully grasp and manipulate on an expert level.
Most anyone can write, that’s a given. But it takes work and practice to write well. You can expect to spend hundreds of hours behind a keyboard or holding a pencil before you can expect to earn a single dollar as a writer. You’ll have to understand the basics of grammar, sentence structure, formatting, have a decent vocabulary, etc.
On top of that, you’ll have to constantly be reading if you want to improve or hone your skills even further, which is another massive time sink. If you struggle to read a blog post, or if you hardly ever read, you are going to have a very difficult time writing about it. If you don’t consume similar works to what you wish to create, you’ll probably be mostly aimless when you sit down to work on things yourself.
I had a pretty rough start when I first got into freelancing because I thought I knew everything I needed to know about writing. Then I got slapped with terms like ‘SEO’ and ‘Keyword Ranking’ and realized that I didn’t quite know what I was getting into. To make it in this field, you have to be malleable and flexible. You’ll have to be able to absorb information and be able to reiterate that for others to read.
You most likely won’t have many people in your corner who are willing to help get you up to speed when you get started. So you’ll have to seek out mentors and avoid getting scammed by some sketchy ‘writing coach’. Pro tip: if someone spews a bunch of nonsense about how to make money fast as a writer and all they do is sell a course to ‘make your first $1000’, it’s bullshit.
That’s still not even scratching the surface of the part of freelancing that actually determines how you make money. Selling yourself to others. You’ve gotta take your imposter syndrome and shove it down when you send a pitch. You have to be pretty good at showing a complete stranger why they should give you their hard-earned money for your writing. You’ve got to actually have the writing chops to point out how your work can benefit both the client and the writer.
Marketing and selling your work is just another skill a professional writer must have to start making money.
Analyzing Games is Hard
Aside from all of the challenges that come with being a semi-decent writer, analyzing the games that you play is just as difficult and is a whole skill set of its own. How can you actually tell if a game is good? If a game works and doesn’t break, isn’t that good enough on its own? How much do you know about the audience that you are trying to reach with your writing?
Writing specifically about video games can be a surface-level tier or as deep as you’d like to go with things. Some of the videos that I like to toss on in the background while I’m working are in-depth analyses of games that were released over twenty years ago. Some of these creators will share incredibly interesting perspectives about the game and hardly any analysis is the same.
This is the part of the job where I feel like I invest the most energy. Anyone can sit down and mash some shit on a keyboard, but what does it take to stand out? The answer to that is simply: perspective. That’s all that I feel like I can bring to the table when it comes to analyzing a game.
When you toss in a deadline and certain keywords I have to use to ensure that the client that I work for can get the traffic that they need for their site, things get a little more complicated. It’s hard to analyze a game and share the experience of what it was like to play it while following certain writing rules to make sure the piece even gets picked up by search engines. It’s a little restrictive until you get used to writing to hit keywords and share an entertaining analysis of a new release game.
As for actually analyzing games? There’s not really a right way of going about it, due to art being subjective. Especially in a medium as complex as video games. I can confidently say that I’m no art snob, but when I’m reviewing a game, I try to think about why the developers made the decisions they did.
Why did they make that enemy so difficult for it to just give so little exp? Is this a bug or a feature? Am I doing something wrong or is this weapon just trash? It’s often way too easy to just write off things other players might, but to give a game a pretty fair review, I’ve got to put myself in the seat of one of the devs to understand why the game is the way it is.
I’m lucky to have some limited experience in game development (programming just didn’t click for me so I hung it up) so I can have a loose idea of how the process of making a game goes. I’m definitely not an expert, but I know enough about the process that can help me during a review. I’ll know roughly if a level designer took their time to create an environment compared to just ctr+v some cookie-cutter assets all over the damn place.
Obviously, if I want to critique a game in a much more expert capacity, there’s still a lot outside of writing and playing a game that I have to learn to increase my perspective.
Doing This Everyday is Hard
As with most creative works, consistency can be tricky to uphold. There are some days where I’m just stumped on how I want to word a section and I just refuse to write some crap that doesn’t make sense. How can I improve if I knowingly allow work that isn’t my best to be shipped? I sure as hell wouldn’t want to pay for shit writing, so I owe it to my clients to deliver on what I promised.
In most jobs, you can work through a rough day. Writing is a very mentally draining task on its own and it requires a boatload of focus and discipline to execute at a professional level. I’m not trying to sound pretentious, but sitting down in a chair and actually writing a couple thousand words a day is hard work. If the words aren’t working, it’s going to be very hard to make something happen.
Imagine trying to write a 2-3k word essay with a migraine. By the way, you don’t get paid until it’s done and you’ve got five more to do before the end of the week. Oh, and if it’s not good? Yeah, you’ll have to rewrite all of that, so it’s probably better to not cut corners in the first place.
Think about the last time you’ve sat down to actually write something. Can you see yourself doing it every day? For some, yeah, it’s not that bad. But for those who don’t write regularly, you’ll probably quickly run into why some people don’t actually commit to that dream of writing professionally. It’s work and you’ve gotta love it or it won’t get easier.
So, is Video Game Writing Worth it?
This post probably sounds like I’ve done nothing but complain or spit negatives. In reality, it’s the opposite. I LOVE every single aspect of this job. It’s hard and challenges me to always be working on something new. Sometimes I’ll fail. Good, I got a little better during that attempt.
I am never bored as a writer and I enjoy it so much that I do it for free on this blog. That’s what will make the difference between Steve who ‘could write about games’ vs a writer who’s addicted to the process and can’t see their hobby as anything else but a healthy obsession.
Writing about games opened up an entire world of writing and reading for me and it reignited my passion for both while also fueling my desire to keep exploring virtual worlds. I am never bored and I am never just sitting around waiting for inspiration. I’m always thinking about the next post I can make or the next game I should play.
If you think you want to make money writing about video games and this post inspired you rather than deterred you, you are ready. You could probably do much better than me, and I encourage it! Just know that you’ll face lots of hardships, so do it for the love of it, not for the money (because the money isn’t that great anyway).
Anyway, thanks for reading yet another one of my rants. I’ve got a couple of interesting posts in progress at the time of writing, so if you want more mindless rambling and fawning over video games, stay tuned. Subscribe to email notifications if you want a random email to notify you that another ramble is published.
If you don't see anything from me here in a bit, it’s probably because I’m pushing out reviews and guides on PSLegends.
Gotta get back to the blog-post backlog,
~Greysyns