The Future of Games Media: AI, Substack, and the Rise of Independent Journalism

In this episode, host Kalie Moore sits down with Stephen Totilo, founder of Game File and a veteran games journalist with over two decades of experience across MTV News, Kotaku, and Axios, to unpack how the media landscape around gaming is rapidly evolving. As traditional outlets shrink and more journalists go independent, Stephen shares what it actually looks like to build a sustainable, subscription-based publication and why he chose to bet on himself rather than join another institution. The conversation explores the shift from institutional media power to individual credibility, and how trust, audience relationships, and direct monetization are reshaping journalism in real time - while also raising new challenges for discovery, sustainability, and the next generation of reporters entering the field.

Kalie and Stephen also dive into the realities of running an independent media business, from balancing reporting with entrepreneurship to navigating ethical considerations in a world where sources can also be subscribers. They discuss the growing intersection between journalism, the creator economy, and AI, including how Stephen uses AI tools for transcription and translation to unlock stories that would have previously been inaccessible, while also confronting the rise of “AI slop” in pitches and content. The episode closes with practical advice for game developers and PR professionals on how to work with modern media, emphasizing the importance of storytelling, understanding reporter incentives, and building meaningful relationships in an increasingly fragmented media ecosystem.

We’d also like to thank modl.ai for making this episode possible! Using a combination of computer vision, reasoning models, and feedback loops, modl:QA+ autonomously explores builds, detects bugs, and generates actionable reports that sync directly with your existing workflows. To learn more, simply visit https://www.modl.ai/.

This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.

Kalie: Welcome to the Naavik Gaming Podcast. I'm your host, Kalie Moore. We've talked a lot on the podcast about how the games industry is changing, but we've talked a little bit less about how the media industry is also evolving and how that impacts how games are being covered. Most legacy outlets have downsized immensely.

A lot have disappeared over the years, and journalists who've built their careers at major publications are now increasingly going independent, running their own newsletters with readers, well, at least some of them who are paying directly for that content. Today's guest has a front row seat, and this evolution, Stephen got started MTV's News as the first ever video game reporter, spent years as editor-in-chief at Kotaku and then moved to Axios where he built games coverage from scratch.

Then when Axios decided that gaming wasn't in the budget, Stephen did something that would've been impossible a decade ago, he went independent. Game File, which is his Substack, launched about a year and a half ago, I believe.

Stephen: A little over.

Kalie: Two years ago, over two, a little more.

Stephen: A little more than that, but still.

Kalie: Pretty, little over two years ago and has grown since your launch. And today we're gonna talk about what it actually looks and feels like to make that leap, how the power in media is shifting from institutions to individuals, what AI is doing to journalism and PR, and how this impacts the gaming industry and what this means for people in the games industry who are trying to build relationships with journalists and 2026 and beyond.

Stephen, welcome to the podcast.

Stephen: Thanks for having me, Kalie.

Kalie: Thanks. So, we're actually here in San Francisco at GDC. I know that this podcast is gonna come out later in the month. We won't speak too much about the trends, as it will be old news, but I did hear a really interesting panel that you were on with a lot of, well think three other fellow journalists who also went independent. And I loved, you actually called your layoff from Axios, the nicest layoff of all time. I think they gave you four months notice and some severance, so you had a little bit of runway to figure out what was next. But I imagine even with that runway there had to have been a moment where the math got scary. I would really love to hear your thinking process of why you went independent at that time rather than going to another outlet.

Stephen: Sure. Kalie, I've been a journalist for over 20 years. The first reporting I think I ever did, I covered boxing when I was in high school.

Kalie: Oh, no way.

Stephen: I was just really interested in the sport. I was able to do an internship for a guy named Burt Sugar, had a typewriter, fedoras cigar. He was like total old school. And so, I've always loved journalism and at some point in my twenties I figured out that combining games that I loved playing and learning about and journalism, which I'd love doing, would be an exciting career path.

And I was fortunate enough to discover that MTV News was hiring for the first ever games reporter in their newsroom. So, I joined them and I was, I had the, a real good fortune to be able to have carve out a full-time career covering video games. Kind of career that was never really easy in the first place.

You had movie critics at every major newspaper back in the, you know, the, the mid two thousands you had, you know, sports desks. So, in addition to politics and some of the other more bigger beats, you would see full-time career pathways if you were interested in television, even if you were interested in covering the opera.

You know, the New York Times had multiple people covering opera, but if you were interested in covering video games, it's always been a challenge to find those spots in the mainstream. And then there, of course, were the enthusiast publications, which they still are. And you had magazines and you had websites.

So initially my career was mainstream, MTV news. Then I decided that I would like more gamers to be reading my stuff directly. I joined Kotaku and I was there for 11 years. I didn't like the way Kotaku was going. After a while, some private equity people bought us and were kind of running rough shot over the newsroom.

So, I pitched Axios about would you guys be interested in having a newsletter? That was their main thing and still is email newsletters that are sponsored. Would you be interested in having a video game coverage video game industry newsletter? Initially they said, no. I kept trying and eventually they said yes, which was great.

They'd found a sponsor, so it made it easier risk to take. And so that was great. And so I was able to leave my third or my second major full-time games coverage job that those two had spent 15 years or so, and it was great. And Axios was wonderful until it wasn't until they decided we don't know that our sales strategy around sponsored newsletters is working so well for some of our ancillary beats.

Suddenly they were no longer gonna be in the business of having a sports newsletter, despite the fact that that was widely read in the gaming newsletter, which also had good readership. Same decision. And I thought, okay, I, I've been fortunate to have a career this long, but has my luck run out.

So that was the first thing I thought about maybe just like I got to spend almost 20 years covering video games full time. Did not have to jump ship into another career. As you know, a lot of games journalists go into public relations, of course. That can be a more steady career for people.

Others going into game development. I don't want to make games. I like writing about them and telling people about them. And so, I thought maybe my time's up on this, but I didn't want it to be up. I'd loved it. And I felt like I've built up a, you know, index of sources and stories that are, that are, that I'm proud of telling and many more stories that I still want to be able to tell.

What do I do? Do I go and I look, do I look for another Axios experience? Well, who's to say it wouldn't be great year one. Yeah, exactly. And then be done with it by year three. Or do I do a thing I thought about even when I was at Kotaku, which is look at platforms like Substack. That can allow you to have a direct relationship with readers.

And I thought, okay. The last time I thought about that, I was the editor in chief of Kotaku. My byline was not as prominent 'cause now I was more behind the scenes. It was my reporters who were better known and I just was, I feared that I would not be able to draw in enough people for what I wanted to do.

Axios, the best thing about it was that they let me be a reporter. Again, I wasn't managing anybody. My byline had been back out there for almost three years doing the gaming newsletter. And then I did the math and basically what I needed to prove out was that if in year one I could get about a thousand people.

To pay, I'd be in good shape. As you noted. I had the four months of severance from Axios, so it made year one's targets a little easier to hit. I exceeded those targets in year one. I got to discover really good news, which was that people will pay for journalism. Not a million people. But I only needed a thousand people.

And so, it went from being very scary but having a certain amount of safety net but I was really, I did feel like I was at a crossroads. Does this make sense? Is this an opportunity that, you know, maybe like I've gotten the most out of, but thankfully no. And I've been able to continue this journey.

Kalie: Well, congratulations. That's amazing also to do it all within your first year. I'm curious because, you know, yes, you're a reporter, right? I, everyone I know reads your newsletter, but in a way, you're also an entrepreneur now, right? What does that split look like? Of like what percentage of your time is spent reporting versus what percentages of time is all the other kind of bullshit that also comes with running your own business, right?

And did you ever want to be your own boss, less entrepreneur? Is this just, I wanna be a reporter, this is the best way to do it and so therefore I'm now also an entrepreneur?

Stephen: It only dawned on me like belatedly that I was basically launching a startup, right? Not only that, I'm launching a subscription service.

So, you know, I'd covered Xbox Game Pass for years and yeah, you know, listen to their ups and downs with, you know, or Apple Arcade and look at ups and downs of like, how are they building up a library and how are they retaining subscribers? And you hearing about this, they're not hitting their goals.

And I'm like, wait, that's my business now as well. I'm having to convince people to pay monthly or pay annually and think about the trade-offs and think about what the, you know, the content is and drawing in new people versus retention. So, in some ways it was interesting to suddenly realize that I was like a lot of the people that I was writing about I'd never really aspired to do that.

My father had who's a clothing designer, had gone from working for large corporations to kind of running his own shop with a very small thing. So, there's a little bit of like, family experience with kind of running your own business. So, I'd seen a little bit of that. He had some advice to me about how to, you know, sort of launch it.

I also had some peers who had already kind of been pushed Yeah. Off of whatever ships they were on in journalism. It's been an amazing learning process. Much, much of it While. With, with me learning on the fly, like I discovered the things that people have known for hundreds of years, like the power of a sale and like, who would've thunk it that when you tell people it's just a little bit less, you know, it's only 20% less.

Suddenly all these people who weren't paying for the product will now pay for the product. And I'm like, you know, the part of me is like, wait, really? Like $80 is that much more achievable than a hundred? Aren't they kind of the same amount of money?

Kalie: It's the mindset.

Stephen: Exactly. It's exactly. It's the, I'm getting a deal thing and it's, you know, so I'm learning these very fundamental lessons of, of running a business, of running, you know, selling a product.

But what I am away from, what I got away from and what's feels so refreshing is that I'm not dependent on somebody else's. You know, one other person's economic decision. Yeah. It's not a sales team deciding they can't sell a gaming newsletter anymore. It is not private equity people buying a media conglomerate and not expressing the values that want make the reporters who are there want, want to stick around.

It's a direct relationship with readers and any one of those readers deciding to continue or to bail out on it doesn't make or break me, you know, financially, and it's, I can sort of do things about the fin financial situation if I need to. That said, to answer your question, I put relatively little effort and energy into the entrepreneurialship because I love the reporting. And I'm, I'm glad that, you know, Substack and Stripe, which is my payment processor, does a lot of that work for me. A lot of the marketing that, that I do for the newsletter is simply the articles. Right? Yeah. It's, I have a scoop. Hopefully people find out about it. They, they see it directly or they see other people citing my work.

But I'm sure I would benefit from having an actual marketing plan. Right. But I don't, there's, it's not quite zero sum 'cause there is that overlap where Scoop is marketing, but I know that if I wanted to build a business more, I would have to do less reporting and I'd rather do more reporting.

Kalie: Yeah. But I also think, you know, my next question is about, you know, you've spent 20 years at these different like, you know, extremely credible outlets. Right. And I think a lot of launching game file was a bet on that accumulated trust. But I also think is you have, I think, almost close to a hundred thousand X followers, right?

Like you're, you're known in the industry, and I think would OB exceed a lot of journalists, whether they're independent outlets or if they're still at major news publications, they can have to be a content creator in their own right. Yes. As a sales funnel as well. And I think you've done a phenomenal job of building that over time.

Do you think that's important for journalists more than ever before or not as much?

Stephen: Oh, more important than ever before. Yeah. There. When I was at that moment of Axios, you know, told me in August of 2023, we're not gonna have the gaming newsletter in the budget for 2024. And I had those four months, almost four months plus to, you know, I put out some feelers and sort of tested the orders of, was there a, you know, corporate media reporting job Yeah.

That I would like. And even though I heard about some that seemed kind of interesting covering games, it was that same thing of like, well, why would it be any better than the Axios arc? So maybe I try this other thing, but, in the process of kind of thinking about that, I thought if I launch a Substack, what do I have?

I was in the mindset that the reason I got the Kotaku job, and this is literally true, is because the editor in chief of Kotaku at the time liked my MTV work and poached me, right? So you think of one job as a pathway to the next job. Yeah. The reason I was able to get the Axios job in my mind was 'cause I chose to leave Kotaku.

So, I went from the security of that to joining Axios being laid off, which I'd never been laid off before, was suddenly a moment where I'm like, wait a minute, what do I have? And you know, there's a bit of panic.

Kalie: Of course.

Stephen: And then there's a recognition, well, if I nothing else, what I have is that credibility, the familiarity people may have with my byline.

That, that opportunity with Axios, as I mentioned, of rebuilding up that byline by sending out a newsletter every day or every other day that you know is coming into your inbox from Steven to, and you are seeing, I, I was seeing that. Okay, there's hopefully enough awareness that's what. I got outta 20 years.

That's what I took with me from there. Where I worry for journalism is that you can be me who's had 20 years of building up a name and then only need a thousand, 1500 people or whatever, to have a sort of healthy, sustainable outlet but if you're a newcomer to journalism, you don't instantly have that recognition, that credibility, or if you do will, the incumbents like me have already taken so many dollars from the relatively small number of people who wanna pay for their news.

Such that the newer people will have a harder time. And so that's a bit of what concerns me is that this may be an opportunity for people who either have a big name or can or, or have proximity to a big name. Hey, you may not know me, but I was the New York Times reporter on such and such beat.

Oh, it's that former times person doing this. It's harder if you're just trying to, you know, start out.

Kalie: That was actually one of the things that surprised me the most about the session that you did at GDC. There were lots of questions after the, the panel and the session, and a lot of the questions were from kids just starting out.

And I think it would be such a, like, I guess in, in the industry, it's not just games, it's not just media. It seems like such a, a different time, perhaps a scary time to be starting out. But I would say particularly in journalism, the one thing, and I'm kind of jumping from topic to topic here, the one thing that I, we see younger people doing quite well, for better or worse, is in the creator economy, right?

So, influencers are now news broadcasters in a way. I would love to hear your thoughts on, on journalism creator Economy. And how they intersect and like what you think that future's going to be,

Stephen: right? Well, the, the thing about reporting is that anybody in theory can do it, right? You don't have to go to medical school or law school.

I went to journalism school. But you don't have to do that. And so, anybody can do it. That means anybody, everybody thinks they can do it or potentially thinks they can do it. And so, people who, who, who, you know, whether they call themselves journalists. They may not actually be very good reporters, or they call themselves influencers and they might actually be doing reporting without even realizing it.

So, I just look at it as, you know, there are people who are ideally telling the truth in some way, sharing truth, sharing information, and whatever they want to classify themselves at. So be it. It's right now we're just in a, a moment where people are trying to figure out the different distribution channels for news and information and figuring how to monetize them is, is key.

Right now what, where I look at kind of YouTuber and, and sort of social media influencer relationship with journalists is that a lot of it that I experienced, especially when I was running Kotaku, was either people aggregating our work or reacting to our work, you know, building up a YouTube channel 'cause we didn't have a big video presence at Kotaku. So, we were one of the biggest games outlets out there that you could read online. But we didn't bother to build up video. And so, there were people who just made a, made a career out of taking our news, presenting it as their own with light credit, and then, and building up something in the YouTube ecosystem and a shame on us for not having or done that ourselves.

And so, I see PE there's more hunger for information than ever before. There's hopefully hunger for truth that is more subjective. Yeah. Some people think they're looking for truth, but they're really just looking for affirmation of what they already believe or what they already, what they want the reality to be.

So, a lot of it is kind of the information marketplace needing to sort itself out. I really believe in this approach of having readers directly pay for work and reestablishing the value of reporting.

Like being able to come to, to GDC, for example, I paid my own way that costs money. Right? And you can imagine a plane ticket in a hotel. It's not the most, it's.

Kalie: Expensive here.

Stephen: It's expensive, but it's not the most exorbitant expense. But it's enough that, like literally I can say, well, if that costs me $1,500 or so to come out and do this trip for a week, that's the equivalent of I need 15 people to have subscribed in order to do that.

So, I can see again that direct relationship. That's the model of Substack. And to me that's a little healthier than having to be dependent on some algorithm of that's gonna sort of play ads for me on YouTube or whatever the decision matrix is for paying people out on X or something like that.

So, I like this approach. You see a lot of reporters kinda leaving a lot of different media institutions and we'll see how it shakes out. But I think it, it, it's key to think of it as a media issue, not a games media issue of figuring out. What is going to be the pathway? Look at the New York Times.

They are one of the only truly successful media organizations right now, making a lot of profits. You can see they're publicly traded, but of course we also know that the subscribers, sub subscribers that they attract are not strictly 'cause of their news. Their reporting is very good in high quality in a lot of regards, but it's wordle and the subscriptions, the spelling being the games, and it's the cooking. It's the recipes. It the—

Kalie: Oh yeah. I.

Stephen: It's, it's the recipe app.

Kalie: I pay for that one too.

Stephen: Of course. Right. And so and so, you know, the difference between the New York Times and the Washington Post is not necessarily even the quality of the journalism that the respective organizations have done over the last decade.

It is, was the post smart enough to build up these ancillary revenue streams that, you know, and they weren't. The times figured things out better about how to diversify, their, their income. So, I don't know, maybe game file needs to have its own world or something to accompany my reporting. I don't have the bandwidth to do that, or we'll do recipes on the side or something.

But it's, it's, it's so interesting to see people experiment. Yeah. And I'm glad that, that there's a platform that I can sort of build. And part of what I'm testing is, okay, people clearly wanna pay for my reporting. Is there a chance that I could turn this into something where I can bring in other people?

I've had reporting teams in the past. Done a little bit with freelancers and I honestly don't know how to go from where I am right now with a subscriber base that sustains me Yeah. To a subscriber base that can sustain an entire other person. And do I wait until I'm close to there? Do I grow slowly?

And, you know, do you, it's, it's that learning to be an entrepreneur thing and figuring that out.

Kalie: Have you seen any Substack that have, and, and not just within the gaming industry. Just Substack overall that where almost an outlet has been built over time with multiple journalists.

Stephen: That is usually, usually you see it start. So, you see like Barry Weiss leaves the New York Times. Yeah. And she starts the free press and she has investment money from outside, which helps her, you know, so it's not just bootstrap from just subscribers and instant outlet with editors and reporters and critics. Medi Hassan leaves, M-S-N-B-C, formerly Al Ja Zeera.

Yeah, I think he was that as well. And he starts at Teo, you know, left wing political site, instant staff, because actually I don't know what kind of funding he got, but anybody who's on tv, it's like easy mode for Substack is being on tv, having been on TV and or covering politics. Because there's so many people that want to pay for proximity to those, those personalities that they're familiar with.

And then also people like to pay for, like being told the politics that they already feel. So, oh, finally I'm gonna, the, the one bastion of, you know, you know, place that's gonna tell me, you know, how, how right I am about, you know, things being woke or how right I am about the ma maga being out of its mind.

And so you can find, you know, your affirmation and, and receive it for $10 or $12 a month. So, I see outlets that start as group outlets and I see individuals like myself who go solo. I haven't seen anybody start as one and build up Casey Newton, a Platformer.

Kalie: Oh yeah.

Stephen: Was doing something like that. Hindi brought on a second writer and, and had some expansion plans and I think that 'cause his second writer moved on to the Verge. I believe Zoe and so I don't know like where he's at. I haven't talked to him in a bit about whether or not he likes maybe being more, you know, smaller or if he has, you know, sort of expansion goals in general. But a lot of it is, is dependent on, I think what you, what you think you can do in terms of drawing people in.

I know that the value that I provide, I think is, is strong for what I charge, given my experience and my ability to get stories. And I work very hard but I also know that. The value would be greatly improved if I had a second reporter and I wouldn't charge anymore. And it's, again, it's that sort of entrepreneurial thing that I now have to think about in terms of, you know, sort of where to go.

And I see some people exploring sponsorships and whether advertising has a role. In independent journalism, use the platforms themselves or sort of testing that. But Substack has not been that aggressive in putting advertising and like, sort of making it easy to sell ads. So, the folks that I know that are doing that kind of thing are kind of going out on their own and seeing if they can, they can get, you know, find advertisers.

So, it's, there's a lot of economic experimentation, which again gives me some feeling of affinity for the very people that I've covered 'cause for so long what I've, you know, recognized that the games industry has been one of constant economic experimentation. Yeah. You know, from, yeah. The arcade games that were all about how many quarters could they get out of you, you know, the free to play games, the business models around, you know, Facebook games back in the day, console games, you name it.

Kalie: So, all the direct to consumer stuff that's happening now with the—

Stephen: Exactly. So, I'm just like, another note of economic experimentation, you know, often a gaming related job myself.

Kalie: I have one more question about Substack specifically. Before we switch gears a little bit. So, I, I know you've noticed, but to people out there, I also am a PR person in my day job, since I'm not at Naavik full-time.

Stephen: Won't hold that against you.

Kalie: Thank you. And the, you know, in the beginning of the year there's always the PR weeks that do, like what are the trends in PR this year and every single person's, one of the top three trends was that we are pitching more niche media which are Substacks. And part of that is there aren't as many journalists to pitch in legacy media. But I think another part of it is we've been able to see a lot more ROI with specific clients. When you're in niche media 'cause maybe you only have a couple thousand readers, but these are a thousand readers who care deeply about the games industry, are you getting more pitches from companies and PR people now that you have your own independent Substack? Or were you getting more when you were at Axios?

Stephen: I mean, I've gotten a lot for a long time. And just to be clear, by the way, on the numbers, to the extent that people care, my numbers are all public. I publish an annual report basically every January. So, you can, you can, and well, game file is partially pay walled. The annual reports are free. So, you can see it's about 27,000 overall readers right now that are, that are subscribers rather, that get, get the newsletter. And then there's about between 1400, a little over 1400 who are paying directly for the work got, which is just kind of a standard ratio.

Kalie: Okay.

Stephen: One edition is free every week. And then two have a paywall. So, there's a little bit that's free and then you pay to read the rest and then it kinda spreads from there. Anybody can read it online. So, there's a, I, in year one I was very, you know, sure. To make the numbers public. Just thought that the readers deserved to understand where their money was going.

But I re one of the things I, I worried about when I put the numbers out was what were the gatekeepers of the industry that I covered going to think. Having run Kotaku, which was I think for a long time, the third largest English language gaming site behind IGN and GameSpot in terms of like enthusiast press as it's called.

I was certainly cognizant of the fact that IGN could get a whole lot more access opportunity first look at games, what have you, than a Kotaku was going to get. 'cause even though we were big, we were not IGN Big, right? And so, I was used to that. I, I knew the editors of Game Informer and its heyday when it was something that you got with every time you signed up for a GameStop, you know, you know, subscription or whatever, you automatically like game former in the mail.

So, they were one of the biggest magazines in the United States. And so I would see at industry events, the game former editors and watch them get, you know, sort of feted by the, all of the PR folks who would bring them in, could wanna show them their games 'cause of course, the, the goal was to get on the game and former cover of course.

And that was like the biggest status opportunity if you had a new game coming out as in as the, having started my career at MTV News, everybody wanted to be on MTV. They hoped that if I was gonna do an interview, I was gonna bring a camera crew. Most times I was, and most what I, what I did was online and video online wasn't as much a thing.

This is late two thousands. But I did do some on air stuff. So very early in my career, PR folks saw opportunity in interacting with me. I had multiple stints where I freelanced the New York Times on the side. People sized up that, okay, we deal with him. We might get in the times. Kotaku was big a bit more raku and rowdy, so some people were a little afraid of us.

But they recognized that we had credibility with, with readers. And so, you had enough people who sort of like would size up the risk versus the reward and would want to interact going to Axios. People recognized it as a startup. But I think they also saw opportunity in another, the rare instance of a new mainstream publication opening up.

They actually cared about games and took it seriously. And so, people wanted to seize that moment. So, all of that made it so that when I went independent, I, it all kind of carried over. I didn't, with, I think one company that I can think of that's, that was an exception. Everybody else in the industry just treated me like, I still mattered.

My audience was gonna be with me. It still mattered. The types of things that I was pitched I think had changed a little just from going from Kotaku where it was assumed, it was like hardcore gamers reading to when I was at Axios and people noticed that I was covering more of the business business.

And so, you would get more of the B2B kind of stuff and just, you know, we have a, we have a new, you know, sort of game financing system or this, we have, you know, funding round for this startup. Are you interested in that stuff that Kotaku wouldn't have covered? So, there was like kind of a medley of those.

At game file, I can, I can't say that I feel like people have, for better or worse game file is sort of like whatever I want it to be on any given day. So, I think it's harder to pigeonhole exactly what my niche is other than the niche is my adventures as a reporter, 20 years on the Beat.

And my instincts for what I think is interesting and worth you knowing but I still hear from, you know. Just about everybody. And if anything, you know, I'm, I'm as at fault as any reporter is for not being able to keep up with my inbox of all the, all the pitches that come in.

Kalie: Yeah. I wanna talk a little bit about ethics and journalism and how that's changed going through independent outlet.

So, one of the things that you mentioned at your GDC panel is that you see familiar company email, s suffixes, pop up and your subscriber list and actively having to push that out of your head. So I think there's a lot we could dive into when it comes to direct reader relations and how they could be a conflict of interest.

So, I'd love to hear how you handle that, but also how that's changed since you've gone independent. Right.

Stephen: There's always some ethical pitfalls that you're facing as a journalist and some of them I think are subtle enough that a lot of folks outside of media don't think about it, but there's the, there's getting a quote slightly wrong, but you think it's close enough, right? You don't go back and listen to the tape 'cause you trust your notes. Yeah. But you may have misphrased the person a bit. I think that's unethical. I think you should do your due diligence and check the quote. People get fired up about headlines.

Often not read articles, but there's, and then you'll see a defense of like, well, the reporter doesn't choose the headline. Oh, there's a responsibility as a publication to make sure that the headline delivers, that the story delivers on what the headline promises that you're not misleading the reader.

And that also the headline is, you know, sort of true to the experience and not just done there to sensationalize or debate people. Although by design a headline is supposed to draw attention. What there is the historical pressure of advertisers who are gonna have a say or wanna have a say on how their products are appearing or what their products are appearing next to in advertising or in in media. And historically at least news organizations understand that conceptually there should be a firewall between the two. Some actually support that and erect that in some, you know, it's more porous for me as soon as I launch game file. Substack whole thing is they want you to feel as good as possible about what's happening.

So you look at your charts on Substack, by the way, and then you'll get your revenue, your estimated revenue, and they will take, if you sign up for a, a monthly, which is $10, they will say that my annual revenue just went up $120 because they optimistically think you're here for the year. So, the number is, is big if some, if you sign up for a sale, so monthly is usually a hundred, but I'll put it on sale for like 80.

At times they won't, if you buy, you get a sub annual subscription on sale, they don't add 80, they add a hundred again. Well, because eventually that person's gonna convert over to the hundred. So, everything is very rosy. And so, consistent with that is that. Because you put your email address in to have a Substack account and launch it.

As soon as you start getting subscribers, you're getting alerts every time. And for me who like a kind of was, you know, nervous and wanted some affirmation that I was getting subscribers. It was good, but it was also like, oh, I know who that is. I know who that is. Oh, I, now I know this person in the industry is directly supporting me.

He is directly paying me money. You know, Phil Spencer running, he was public about it. He publicly commended me for, you know, the, for, for launching it. You know, he's until recently the head of gaming and Xbox or Microsoft and he publicly commended me for, for launching it. You know, it's just part of this like, good guy Phil Spencer, you know, rep that, he has reason, that's a lot of pressure though. He's, he's a man, but I'm like, and I'm like, I appreciated it. He wrote a, a note like subscribers can write notes like that, other subscribers can see, and he's like, you know, I, Stephen is, you know, one of the great journalists out there or something like that.

I was like, that's all very nice. But I also was like, now I knew that Phil Spencer was paying. Me. Not paying somebody else. He's paying me for my journalism. And I had to think like, what does that do to my coverage of Phil Spencer in the future? Does that get in my head? Even if I say it's not gonna get into my head, is it in the back of my mind? Is there a part of me that's going to think, oh, well if I piss off Phil with what I write, that's a hundred dollars less of income. Thankfully I'm able to say a hundred dollars less. Doesn't matter. Like, I'm not so desperate in clawing this together. Like I had good momentum with subscribers from the get-go, but it's, it was a whole new paradigm that I hadn't thought of.

And you have, you know, people out there in the public who want to, you know, historically, whether it's Gamergate or other things, wanna say they're policing. Like the pitfalls of ethics and games journalism. And this one is somehow not one that I've ever seen anybody really go off on. And yet it is one of the most vulnerable, one of the biggest vulnerabilities I think of independent journalists is that this, you're being paid potentially by people who you're covering. I got regular, you know, gamer folks from the public. I'm sure subscribing as well. Early on though, I realized it was healthier for me to not look too closely at my subscriber queue to deactivate those emails or like send them immediate to immediately archive.

The funny thing, and I, me, I mentioned this at the GDC panel, was the experience not of seeing who in the C-suite was paying to subscribe. It was when I would see C-Suite people subscribing for free and then I couldn't help but think like, you could afford that.

Kalie: You should start calling them out on X. That is not, not supporting games driven.

Stephen: Surely you can expense this but that was, but that again was like, I'm like, now I am like. I'm having feelings about how these people spend money or not. And I'm like, and I'm, and even by just having that reaction, which of course was, was amusing but technically if you analyze what's happening, it's me wishing that this person I cover had been spending more money, had given me money. And I would never think about walking down the street seeing a CEO of a game company and say, please hand me a hundred dollars.

And, you know, functionally the business that I'm doing incorporates some aspect of that. So, I considered like, should I, is there a way to like wall off industry people from subscribing?

And I was like, Hey, I'm not in the luxurious position to immediately disqualify potentially hundreds of subscribers, if not potentially thousands down the line. But I also thought like. There's going to be a compromise somewhere. And this particular ethical vulnerability, I think diminishes with scale.

Yeah. The more subscribers you have, the less that any one person can be an influence and, and really that is part of what this crowdsource support does for you. It was only like, it only needed to be like one or two people at Axios or at Cota who could make a decision about the direction of the company. That would send me fleeing or that would somehow could, that, that could potentially undermine my reporting. And I can't say that, that I was ever undermined in my reporting at Axios. Certainly had really good editors there, but it only took like one or two people. Everything that I'm doing now.

As long as it operates at scale, it solves a lot of those potential problems.

Kalie: Absolutely. One more ethics question before we dive into AI 'cause I wanna leave lots of time for that. So, for the listeners out there who aren't journalists or PR people, a lot of different publications have different rules when it comes to treating journalists. For instance, I have—

Stephen: We're gonna talk about the private jet

Kalie: Oh yeah. I have a Bloomberg friends that I can't even, I can never buy them a coffee. Of course. Right. Of course.

Stephen: Right.

Kalie: Right. That's good. But then there's the, some Forbes contributors where it's more loosey-goosey. But when it's your own platform, what are the rules here? You had a great private jet example at GDC that I'd love to hear you speak more about.

Stephen: I'll give you that one. But I'll also share that I, I recently had lunch with somebody who's, they're, they're an entrepreneur. They've got a startup right now. And they had a $75. GDC card for like, if you're a speaker or whatever at GDC, you're given these cards and you can use them and they give 'em to the press as well.

And it's just a way to be able to get some lunch or whatever at the official vendors. So, it's a perk, you know, make of that what you will. And I sit down and have lunch and the guy says to me, he's like, you know, I'm leaving GDC and I've never used my card. Do you want my card? And I said, sure, I'll, I'll take your card.

But the reason I'm taking your card is because there was a glitch when I registered and I never got a card. So, I'm like, you're not actually giving the money. He's like, why are you even saying this? You're making it awkward. And I'm like, because for me, like I need to establish that I'm, you're not just handing me $75 you a person.

I might write about that instead. You're giving me something that. I'm not trying to be a jerk about it, right. So, I'm trying to accept it. He's like, well, you're kind of making it awkward by doing all this. And so, you know, but I'm working that through. And some of it is just simply a matter of, I think one good core ethic is just to be open about it and sort of be willing in those moments where you think align might be crossed to be clear about where things still stand.

I had a breakfast the other day that a, a, a gaming PR person was at, and she was laughing to me about how like, she's like, oh, last time, you know, I felt so bad because I paid for the bill with the, with the people that you were interviewing before and then you were belatedly, you were like, no, I needed to split it and, and I couldn't do it, and I couldn't figure out how to reimburse you.

So, this time, you know, what, what, what do we need to do? And I'm like, it's fine. Like as long as you understand that my expectation is this. So, I don't, I don't have like a code of ethics that I've published. I have a good sense of what's happening. The, the private jet thing is funny because, I'm out of the Game Awards December 20, 24.

And I knew that the CEO of Sabre Interactive, the company that made Space Marine Game they made World War Z. They've been sort of doing very successful license games for, for well over a decade, maybe two decades. And I knew that the CEO of this guy named Matt Kar lived in the New Jersey area near where I live.

And I'd been trying to make a connection with him. I see him at there and I say, Hey, Matt, you know, fellow in New Jersey and or whatever. And he made the connection. He'd, I'd written some, some articles I'd written about Saudi Arabia is a public investment fund. Or Saudi, Saudi Arabia IGN Wealth Fund, pulling funding from a company that he used to be part of.

When the Sabre was owned by Embracer groups, it had a big scoop about that. It was savvy games, I believe it was gonna be doing the investment of 2 billion. And they pulled it. And I had that scoop. I had that scoop by the way, the day after Axios laid me off, had like my biggest scoop. I'm like, all right, you don't want any more scoops about, like, the Saudis pulling $2 billion of an investment from a company.

Okay, well I'll do this, I'll do this somewhere else. But again, they gave me a, they gave me a long runway. So Matt knew my work from stuff like that. And so Matt's like, oh yeah, we should talk. We, you know, we could have lunch back in New Jersey. He's like, but you know what, when are you flying back?

I'm like, tomorrow, this was Thursday evening, tomorrow morning. He's like, oh, well I have a jet. Do you want to just go, you know, fly on my jet back? And I like froze. And I'm like 'cause like the alarm bells are going in my mind. I'm like, I should be saying no to this. Like, this is clearly, no, I cannot accept a flight on a private jet, but I'm also like.

Interview with a gaming ceo, a on a private jet. I get, I get him like his undivided attention flying across the country.

Kalie: Probably no PR people too.

Stephen: There was, he was sitting across the aisle. But in addition to all of that, just like, you know, access can be so hard to come by these days. So, there's just the opportunity of access and also like, again, people are subscribing to game file to sort of follow my adventures as a reporter.

And this is a fun adventure. Adventure. I bet my readers would all be like, do the private jet. We wanna know what it's like to be on the private jet with Matt Kart. So, I call my, this is right before the game awards. I go to the, I go and I watch the awards. And then I, I text my wife and she's like, I told the kids we have 9-year-old twins because they were about seven at the time.

And they're like, they both think you should go on the plane. Of course, they, it's gonna cool. Daddy's gonna go on the plane. And I'm like, oh no. I'm like, I text, I text Matt and I'm like, you just gimme his number. 'cause now he's like, just text me to confirm. And I'm like, can we do an interview? Could we do an interview on the flight?

He doesn't respond, but he told me that I had to, I had to meet him at 8:00 AM the next morning to go on this flight. So, I text him at six in the morning, Friday morning. Still dunno, by this point I've figured out that if I'm gonna go on the flight, I can't cancel the flight I already booked. So, part of what made me feel at ease about this ethically is that I already spent money on a commercial flight back.

So, if I got this, this private jet flight, technically I'd already paid to grow across the country. Right. So, there was that. I text him, I'm like, just to be clear, can we do an interview on the record during the flight? That would make it easier for me to make this decision. He says yes, and then you can read the results.

A three part article on game file that all ran in early 2025, where he really opened up in a way that I think very few gaming executives have, like in terms of speaking for that duration and with some, some really good history about his company and about Embracer Group at Microsoft and, and some of the other companies that he worked with and plus I got to find out what it was like to be on a private jet, which pretty interesting.

Kalie: Yeah. Incredible access and an incredible adventure.

Stephen: It's very sunny on a private jet. Because the plane is small, so the sun is coming in from both, both sides, not a you, you're never in that sort of dark middle.

And Wi-Fi is just as bad because other than having a star link or something like that. There's nothing that makes an expensive private jet any better at wifi than, than otherwise. But it's amazing when you don't have to go through security and you don't really have to check your bags and suddenly you're like, wait, it takes way less time to get across the country. It was amazing.

Kalie: So, that's awesome. Let's shift gears to AI because there's so much that we can cover here. I wanna start with how are you using AI as a journalist?

Stephen: So, I could say I'm not using it, but then that would be lying. But I don't use it in ways that you might expect because I haven't found the things that people think I should use it for, to be sufficient enough. So, for example, chat, GPT, which some people will use for research. And is it 'cause, is it hubris or is it, am I correct that I feel like I can still kind of out research Chat GPT? For the things that I need. I haven't like tried to build anything with Claude or anything like that, so I haven't really sort of road test that.

Although I have some AI true believer friends who are like, you gotta, you gotta try this stuff out. You'll find it very empowering. But what I do use it for and like I was using it before I realized it was AI, was I use an interview transcription program.

Kalie: Yeah.

Stephen: I do a lot of interviews. They're digitally recorded on my phone. I have the audio file and it's not somebody somewhere else typing really fast. It's AI that's doing it and that alone is very helpful. What I discovered almost exactly a year ago, I came out to GDCI interviewed a Korean game developer for the company, neo whiz. And I asked questions as often happens with Lang, with interviews with people who, who are not native English speakers.

They know enough English that they don't need the question translated so. I spoke in English, the interviewee responded in Korean, the translator then spoke in English, so that's English, Korean, English. The transcript came back English. English, English. Because what trans, the service that I used was now doing was not just doing, using AI to transcribe, but to translate. So, it was giving, I was reading my question and I was confused. At first. I'm like, why is the answer showing up twice in English? Oh, they've automatically translated what the developer said from Korean to English, and then I'm getting the English.

And that of course, then got me excited 'cause I thought I'm finally gonna know. With these foreign language interviews. Yeah. If the translator is truly telling me what the interviewee really said, or if the interviewee is annoyed and you know, grumbling about the question and the translator's cleaning it up.

So, if you think about AI in part as an, an empowerment tool, something that can expand your capabilities, this was, this certainly fits in that category. Yeah. Because I only had this ability, I did a story for a game file. Last summer, so summer of 2025, where I'd gotten a heads up that EGI, the CEO of Ubisoft, which is a French company headquartered in Paris.

As, as I'm sure most people listening to this and watching this know he'd been called in by French parliament, by some of the communist senators. There's a lot of communists in the, in the, in the senate, in, in Paris, in, in France, and called in because there had been kind of a national question about whether or not large corporations in France should still receive tax subsidies 'cause some of them that were receiving that had had major layoffs. And so the question was, especially from these, from these communist senators, is why are we giving you tax breaks, large corporations if you're then hurting the people by laying them off? So, they called in Yusof and they called in Eve because he's the largest video game company and one of the great sort of recipients of tax credits both in France and elsewhere.

And so, it's French senators interrogating a French CEO for an hour. You almost never see gaming CEOs called into government test to testify for the government in any language, in any region, anywhere. So, this fascinated me, and it was all in French. So, I got the audio knowing what I knew from a couple months prior with the Korean interview that I did, I did all the translation.

I had some French speaking sources, and I bounced some of it off them. But the result was an article that not just spoke about this event and described what happened in the interchange between the, the, the, the politicians and the CEO. But also through that we learned a lot about how Ubisoft actually uses its tax credits. And it's this whole aspect of how that company's economics work

That go to go, go to a level of detail that otherwise was not discoverable anywhere. And so, before AI audio or auto translation or transcription, there are other ways that I guess I could have done that. It could have hired somebody to translate it all for me.

And, you know, there is that push and pull of how much is AI kind of taking away from other people's labor, which I'm certainly sensitive to. But in this case I'm like, this just would not have happened. This just not would've, would not have been written about. And instead I was able to provide an insight into an aspect of gaming that none of my peers covered, maybe knew was even happening.

That's what I'm trying to do with game files. I'm always trying to tell stories about things you didn't know were happening in gaming. I sort of envision a. My job is to fill out, you know, if there's, if you sort of imagine a, a picture frame that covers all of what's in gaming, right? Most of it, there's no light on it, you can't see anything.

Some areas are now illuminated quite effectively by the companies themselves with, through, you know, sort of corporate blogs and social media accounts. People can speak directly to customers in many ways, but there's still so much that is sort of like shouted in darkness. And my job is, I think, to go look at the places that are not yet illuminated and say, what can I, what can I sort of light up here?

What can I show that just helps people understand overall. So it can be a business story one day, it can be a culture the other day. And for me, the AI made that French gaming tax subsidy story, which also sounds very esoteric.

But to go back to what you were saying previously about sort of niche publications, that was a niche story that like really did well for me.

You know, I, I had the affirmation of seeing that when I have a scoop or a good story, I can see the subscribers who sign up just for that and so like I saw all that happen and so that's like, I mean, that's definitely one of the sort of success story aspects of it.

Kalie: It's a great use case.

Stephen: Yeah.

Kalie: Okay. So, one of the other things I did in San Francisco besides GDC, is I went to Edelman, which is a big PR agency.

They had an event with a lot of San Francisco AI reporters, and there was a lot of q and a. And one reporter, I believe from Forbes said that 99% of her pitches now are AI slop. And I have to say on the Navi podcast, if you're planning on pitching, 99% of the podcasts I get are also AI generated, or we listened to your last episode, it was great because of X, Y, Z. Are you seeing that too? Are you getting any more thoughtful pitches?

Stephen: I get thoughtful pitches. You know, I, when I started opening game file up to freelance writers, I got a number of very suspicious freelance pitches. Interesting. So I think these were people who were trying to scam, getting freelance payments by being like fake journalists, just all doing it through ai.

Yeah. So, you know, there, there is that, you know what I'm looking for when I'm emailed a pitches is it an interesting story? And, you know, I don't really care if you need AI to help you write that. Yeah, that's fine. But things that don't, you know, things that read with very formulaic language, you know, that act like something's important, but it's clearly not interesting to any human being on earth.

You know, that for better or worse, it didn't take AI to reach those depths fair bad pitches. So, but you know, so maybe, maybe just—

Kalie: More of them.

Stephen: Right, right. Maybe more. Right, 'cause people can operate again at scale in any otherwise, but, so I see some of it, but I, I wouldn't say it's a huge problem that I'm facing.

Kalie: So, one of, I think the most prevalent topics at GDC this year. Is ai, right? Sure. And how people are embracing a ai, how game developers are embracing AI for better or worse. Yeah. I've only seen a couple of really interesting AI companies, though I, I thought there would be more and I wasn't on the full expo floor.

I think you mentioned that you saw one interesting AI company. I'd love to hear a little bit about that.

Stephen: Yeah. I went to this talk by this company called Echo Mark, and there's this guy who formerly worked on missile defense for the Navy. Oh, interesting. And now he works on basically leak defense for, for companies to stop, to stop leaks from insider leaks.

And the, the, the, the title of the, the talk was very provocative 'cause it was about how to use AI to stop leaks from your company. I was very curious what that was about. So, we gave a talk and afterwards I approached him. I said, ah, you know, there were game developers there who were very appreciative.

I'll explain how it works in a moment. But I walked up to him and introduced myself. I was like, I'm a member of the media. He's like, oh, you probably don't like us very much. And I'm like, well, no. It's an interesting story. Yeah. So I'm intrigued, but I certainly in my, in my day have written stories or could talk or whatever, had others, you know, write stories under me that came from people leaking the name of a game or an email that had been sent by, by an executive or art assets or something like that.

And there's always a decision tree that you go through in terms of should this run or should this not run, is kind of just pro interest for the readers and sensational interest but this, it was interesting because. They're branding what they're doing as using ai. And so what they'll do is if they'll, they will, for example say if you use our service, the CEO can send an email to all employees, but we can run it through an AI that will create variations, phrasing variations, if you're okay with not the, the, the CEO's email not being verbatim.

And so, we will have variations. And so, every single recipient will have unique phrasing in some way. And so, you potentially can catch somebody, they had another example where they had a PDF of like a, like a brief of a game, you know, a couple paragraph summary. And so, imagine this is an unannounced project yet, and they want to internally pass around what the proposal is of the game or what the, what the general pitch deck might be.

And think of it as like fully justified text, right? So, it goes from one edge to the other. Now you've seen enough text like that that, you know, sometimes there's weird wide spaces between words. Well, imagine that the AI from, as he was promoting it can change the spacing. Uniquely for each one.

Kalie: Wow.

Stephen: So, every line is the same words, but the spacing, maybe the, is a little over this way or a little over that way 'cause the words still always go to the sides, but they go a little bit more, you know, within, they move around a bit. And so, he said that you can create unique mailings. And so, when you think about one of the potentials for ai, which is to do things in large volume that no individual could do really by hand.

Yeah. They are pitching this idea that if you're a game company and he says they work with, you know, the government, governments, they work with all sorts of, you know, you know, major, you know, tech firms and other corporations. The, the service that they're selling is, you know, don't be damaged by internal leaks.

Be able to identify who's doing them. Consider the strategy of telling your employees that you're doing this to maybe make them afraid. Don't tell your employees you're doing this so that then you can catch people. But it's AI mixed with human behavior. And this was, I think, key to anything you think about related to ai.

There's no such thing as effective AI use. I think that excludes people. And so, one of the things that he pointed out in his talk was that they can run an investigation, which is what they call it when they sort of run things through and they try to figure out, okay, who leaked this document? Do, did we have some sort of digital fingerprinting in some, some in some way?

Well, it may tell you that it came from Kalie's computer, but does that mean that Kalie leaked it? It could mean that Steven was looking over Kalie's shoulder and took a picture. And so yes, it came from your computer, but it was me who was the leaker. Right. And so, he's like, you know, you, you, the technology and you know, the robot can only do so much.

So, I thought that was really interesting because it was a good example of. Using AI in a way you wouldn't expect. I think people keep going to, you know, the same, you know, it's gonna make NP season games talk in more authentic ways. Well I see that technology, it has its pros, it has its cons.

I don't know. But wait a minute. This, this is interesting, you know, is, is a major gaming company going to shore up all their leaks by creating these, the, these things?

Kalie: You know, that is really interesting. We'll make sure to link to that company in the show notes too.

Stephen: I can't vouch for them. I haven't used them. They are the enemy, so.

Kalie: Yeah. Right. That had have a direct impact on some of your stories. So, last AI question for you is, I think maybe actually I was gonna say maybe we've reached peak AI slot, but I don't think anyone knows. But in a world with so much just crappy content. Do you think people are going to be more willing to pay for long form, high quality journalism? Are you already seeing this or is this just the hope for the future?

Stephen: People pay for game file. The numbers largely keep going up. I'm discovering seasonality and other things. Yeah. To go back to being an entrepreneur, I'm learning, you know, the numbers in January are often not as good as the numbers in December.

Because people spend a lot in December. Augusts have been weird, but I've been running sales to counter the, the that, so I'm, you know, I'm learning a lot about that. But in the process, you know, I'm finding that I'm able to convey the idea that there's value in human reported work. There might be somebody who figures out tomorrow how to show there's even greater value in ai, augmented human reporting.

And that out maneuvers me. That makes me feel like, okay, I'm not, what I'm trying to do doesn't really work. So, I, I think it remains to be seen. A lot of it is really in. Training your potential customer to see value in whatever it is that you're doing. The same way that a game developer is hoping that people see value in the game that they're making, or somebody who's got a startup and a new, you know, payment processing plan, you know, a, a platform or whatever else the, the, the endeavor might be right.

It's just trying to convince people that there's value in what they're doing. I'm able to give a lot of it away for free, through the, the free editions. The fact that there's that sort of force multiplier of when I publish a story that's, you know, strong others outlets will write about it and that becomes more of a promotional vehicle.

But you'll also have platforms where people are so locked into that platform and if they're just exposed to people, you know, AI aggregating my news, they never may never know that I existed.

Kalie: Yeah.

Stephen: And then we could have like a fundamental breakdown. Where if that doesn't come back to revenue for me to pay, for me to come out to San Francisco, you know, and Matt Cart's private jet is not available.

'cause I can only do that once. I think, as I told people, a second flight I think would be far more ethically dubious. Than the first I can look.

Kalie: I like the mental gymnastics there.

Stephen: So, we'll see. We'll see.

Kalie: Okay. I have a couple final questions for you. Mostly related to related advice. Advice. You know, I think there's a lot of game studios out there who are struggling.

Maybe they don't have PR agencies, maybe they're just starting out. Journalism has changed. What would be your advice to those companies that are looking to gain some traction in the press? Some initial traction?

Stephen: I think you have to have a sense of why, what you're hoping to get out of the media.

So, if you're looking for, you need to get a clip that's really impressive to other potential investors, you're probably looking for like a New York Times club. You're probably looking for something with prestige media, something established. And so it's a matter of figuring out how to get access to those, those sort of narrowing, you know, or winnowing places in terms of the number of them that are, that are established in known names.

But there are ways to do that. And one way to do that is to figure out who the people are who handle gaming or tech or whatever it is that your sector is. Another way is, you'd step up to that by interacting with reporters like me or PR folks like yourself who could be the gateway to that 'cause either you do a story with me and then the times folks who read my work notice it, or I can then tell you how to get in touch with times people, you know, and it's, it's those sort of things, but it's figuring out what you want out of it.

If you just want your story told in an interesting way, or if you even wanna road test whether your story is interesting, a good way to do that is to talk to a journalist and see what they, what they make of your story, you know, maybe it's too risky because then they run a story that is boring and you're like, oh, my story was boring and I only found that out when it was put out in front of the public.

But you talk to a good enough reporter, they will figure out what's interesting about you. And they will figure it out. Hopefully. It's what you think is interesting about you as well. And it's not that, you know, are secretly, you know, a kleptomaniac and they've discovered your, your major fault.

And that's out there for everybody to see. But it's, it's sizing up, you know, assessing what do you want out of the media recognizing the risk and the reward, right? So, you are putting your story out there in front of other people. It is having a sense of who in the media makes sense to work with and be in this age of more and more independent journalists.

It's less than ever a matter of thinking about the institution. You know, what do I think of interacting with CNN or Fox News or, you know, the LA Times. It's, what do I think of interacting with Steven Ello? What I think of interact with Casey Newton, even. Please play me if you recognize bylines at publications.

You know, two of my former ER reporters, Jason Schreyer and Cecilia Anastasio Bloomberg, both do excellent reporting at Bloomberg. And I would say you should go to them, not 'cause they're Bloomberg reporters. But because of who they are and the track records they have in the, in the reporting that they do.

So, it's, it's educating yourself about that. And that's one case where I think PR folks can be very helpful in sort of showing people, okay, these are the reporters that actually would be the people worth your while to talk to. And these are not, it's like everything else these days. It's a discovery challenge.

Yeah. It's, you have an abundance of options and how are you going to narrow it down? You have greater potential proximity to reporters like me because I'm directly available. I'm right there. You certainly don't need to subscribe to a game file for me to, you know, give you the time of day. It's just, if you email me, you know, it's Stephen at Game file News and it, you have an interesting pitch, then, then, then I'm interested, but it's not what you want.

I was at the DICE Summit Yeah. In February. I had a couple people approach me who said, you were the only reporter who paid attention to me 10, 15 years ago, whatever. It was a different, slightly different scenario for each one. And that really helped me, in one case, gain confidence to keep doing it.

In another case, it was to get my game recognized and to, and to move on. So sometimes the interaction with the press may not have the immediate thing you're hoping for, and sometimes you might say, it's still better for me to just work, you know, communicate directly with the, the people.

Kalie: Yeah. Going direct is a lot of value.

Stephen: What, and, and what is the point of the, the reporter, but to me it's, I have an ability to tell your story in a way that might frame it in a way that you hadn't imagined that may bring it to people in a different way than how you were already presenting it. So, you already have one way of talking about your game, but now I'm talking about you as a person.

And that creates a whole new angle from which people might be interested in what you're doing or, you know, that game file is read by a lot of industry people. And so, okay, now my work is, you know, now what I do is in front of, you know, this, this audience of, of, of people, you know, we know Phil Spencer's a subscriber.

We don't know if that's useful anymore to get in front of him 'cause he's only advising and he's not gonna be running Xbox anymore. But, you know, one of the most formative experiences for me as a, as a journalist was back when I was in journalism school. And they paired us up as, as students to write profiles of each other. And that exercise.

Kalie: A great exercise.

Stephen: It has stuck with me to this day. Because I had the experience of sitting across the table from somebody interviewing them about who they were, what they were. Story was, having them do that to me, knowing the next day that whatever I wrote they were gonna read and so kept me honest about, like, did I accurately represent them? And they're gonna, I'm gonna have to live with them knowing that I got it wrong if I got it wrong. And also having that happen in the other direction and having somebody, all reporters should have reporting done to them, I think. Right?

Kalie: I think so too. Yeah.

Stephen: So, they can understand. The intrusion that we make. You know, the, just the, the fact of writing about somebody is inherently going to present a truth that feels to the person who's being written about different than the truth that they thought just, just 'cause we all have our own perspectives, right?

Kalie: Yeah.

Stephen: So even the best intention reporting, the most accurate reporting is going to feel a little different to the subject of the story than what they thought the truth was. And every reporter, I think, should experience that themselves and understand what that's like. And it's not the same, by the way, as it's not enough to get yelled at by people on social media or whatever like that.

And that isn't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about if there's an opportunity and it's how often is it gonna happen. But this was, I guess, one of the reasons you pay absurd amounts of money to go to journalism school at Columbia, because you have exercises like that. And it has stuck with me for, you know. Nearly, nearly 30 years ago when I, when I did that.

Kalie: Was your partner in that project, is that person a journalist now? Have you stayed in contact?

Stephen: I'm not in touch with her anymore, but you know, she was a very good journalist during the time that I was, that I was in J school and you know, other friends of mine who are from, from journalism school of that year, class of 99, we still talk about that exercise.

Yeah. It really stuck with us. And, and it's just, you know, I, I've, I impress that upon my staff at Kotaku. I impress that upon people I work with and I often will hear from young reporters who are looking for advice and even the experienced reporters will come to me for advice. 'cause it's been doing this for so long, you know, wanna bounce a story off me or think, well, you know, what do you think?

I'm trying to figure out how to navigate reporting this out. And I'm often trying to put myself in the shoes of the person being written about to think, not to sand the edges off the story, but to think like, are we, are we potentially representing something that is going to feel true to that person?

I say to people that I'm writing about, especially if it's a contentious story. I'm not asking you to like the story. I don't expect you to like the story always. But my goal is for you to consider it to be have been fair. Yeah. Right. And so it's that kind of dynamic that I'm trying to be sensitive to.

Kalie: What's the best pitch you've ever gotten?

Stephen: The best pitch I've ever gotten. Oh my gosh. I mean certainly in terms of access when Nintendo, you know, tell me that I could fly across the country to interview their CEO. You know, and who I've been wanting to speak to for years, you know, something like that is a, is a, is a great opportunity.

There's just sometimes, like in the fourth paragraph of a pitch, you know, you find out that this game is actually about, you know, surviving in a war zone. And it's not a war game about, you know, fighting the war, but it's about survival of it. And that was 11 bit in this war of mine. Which is a game I first saw at GDC about 15 years ago, or maybe a little bit less than that.

So, it's, it's just. Those things that kind of are those details that even the best intention folks may not recognize is the hook and it's gonna, there're gonna be different hooks for different people too, right? Yeah. So, one person might be like, oh, it's that company whose last game I'd like. That's why I'm interested in wanting to book a meeting.

And for others that name of the company doesn't mean anything, but it's, wait, that's what you're making a game about? Or that's who, who's involved in this project? So, things like, things like that stand out. I will say it is a waste of time to send a pitch that you yourself don't find interesting.

Kalie: Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah.

Stephen: I know that as a PR person, you may be, you know, you were paid to do that, right? You're on contract, you have to represent this, this project, this product, whatever it is. But there are so many choices of what to write about.

Kalie: I think there's always a human angle, right? To where there is a story. Maybe the product isn't particularly interesting, right? But there should be something of the founder that's compelling.

Stephen: If you wouldn't read the story yourself.

Kalie: Don't pitch it out. That's very great advice.

Stephen: Well, I'm not gonna say don't pitch it out. You may, again, you may be obligated contractually to pitch it out, but don't be surprised if nobody picks it up.

And be suspicious of those who do, if it's inherently boring. Just like, you know, if it's interesting and so many stories, you don't have to have like category expertise. One of the reasons that politics and sports are such like, sort of major categories in society, isn't it? 'cause everybody cares about politics or everybody cares about sports, but those are, those are fields of life that are so much about people.

Right? I don't care anything about football. But wait, one of those football players is dating, you know, a, you know, a pop star, you know, dating Taylor Swift. Okay, now I, now I care. Ah, I'm maybe tuned out of politics for better or worse, but that politician just said that outrageous thing. Okay.

Suddenly I'm engaged. So, to your point, people. Wind up almost always being able, the people angle can always kind of cut through and compensate for a lot of other things. It's an interesting person. They have an interesting story behind them. You know, they, it's, it's a grassroots effort. It's a person from a part of the world or an economic class that hasn't, you know, that is sort of achieving beyond what you might have expected.

It's person not a comeback after having a failure and hoping for a success. There's so many things like that where it's the human story where you're right. It can be that ultimately what they're doing, the reporter and the reporter didn't care. Like the reporter shouldn't care if it's like a great product. Is it a great story?

Kalie: Yeah.

Stephen: When I was pitching the New York Times many, many years ago when this would be 2005 their tech reporter was gonna go to E three, rest in Peace to the E three trade show, and they were very fired up about covering Sony's entry into the handheld gaming market.

The PlayStation portable, and this was the story they should cover now. I grew up playing Nintendo. I had more of an affinity, maybe more of a soft spot for Nintendo, let's say. Okay. Maybe bias for them. But I was like, on the outside pitching, I wasn't on staff. And I'm like, y'all don't you think the more interesting story to do here at the I three is what Nintendo's gonna do in response?

And they were they, they had watched Sony PlayStation take the home console market away from them. Nintendo is battling Sega and then here comes PlayStation with their CD-ROM based console, and they take the home market away from them, become the lead platform. And here they were about to do the same to Nintendo.

And that is an interesting story in and of itself. But there was a Nintendo, which had saved the industry from collapse in the eighties with the Nintendo Entertainment system saying, okay. We've got something, we've got something experimental, we're teasing what it is, and it has two screens. We're not gonna say much more about what it is, and it's gonna, and it's gonna come back.

And it's like, how are these guys gonna pull this off? How Sony's already beaten them once? How's this gonna work? And to me, that was the more interesting story. Maybe not so much a people story, but a story, you're more interested, I think in the, the, the once mighty, the underdog angle and somehow was the underdog.

So, there's narrative, right? That can, that also I think can animate. So thankfully they Greenland that and so then I, I, you know, I got, it was my second, my second time story in the Times was, was about that. It's very cool. It was cool.

Kalie: What's your favorite story that you've ever gotten to tell?

Stephen: A couple come to mind. One is there was a guy named Vile Rat, who, that's not his real name, and he was, there was an attack on the US Embassy in Libya during the Obama administration. And he was one of the three people who was killed. And he had been a big player of Eve online. And when he died, the players realized that Vile Rat had actually been a State Department official.

He'd been known within the game that eon Online is known for being an MMO with a lot of diplomacy and skullduggery and cloak and dagger and betrayals. And people are in these virtual science fiction corporations and they spy on each other. And people discover that Vial Rat, who's one of the great diplomats within the game, had actually been a member of the State Department and that he'd been killed in this attack.

And his widow who opened up to me and was willing to do an interview and talk about him and his life story and how this game sort of impacted his life and, you know, this was the only interview she'd done about it. So that comes to mind as just something where I was really grateful that, you know, yeah, a lot of what the reporting that I do is about the trust that people put in me to tell their stories. So that one that one stands out. It was a ker story. There's another story that I published on my birthday, or I found out about on my birthday. I don't remember which one it was, but I often think of it as like, the best birthday gift I could ever get is a great story.

And so, a Tomb Raider game had come out Shadow of the Tomb Raider. And this came out, I don't know, like a little less than a decade ago. And I'm watching the message sports 'cause a lot of what's interesting, and I, I wanna emphasize this one of the things we learned at Auka, one of the big learnings was that so much of the media and games, media is way too future focused.

Always covering what's next, not what's now. I wrote an editorial in 2014 called The Future of Video Game Coverage is the Present. Yeah. I felt like people were way too focused on hype and that there's gaming communities that are doing interesting things. We're not talking about human stories, by the way, about games, about products.

It's not just the human stories of the developers or the entrepreneurs. It's also of the customers. If a gaming community is doing something interesting, maybe even something a little out there, risque or whatever, but that can be compelling to readers. That's what these people are doing with this game, this product, this gadget.

So, I'm looking into the community of Shadow of the Terminator. What are they? What are they up to? Game has just launched. And there's this thread where this person is like, I can't believe this thing happened at the end. And other people are responding like, what are you talking about? That's not what happened at the end.

And it's like, and they're like, what are you talking about? This is what happened. At the end, you get the, Laura Croft goes back to her manner and she opens up this letter from this character, this villain from like three games ago. And people are like, come on. That would be incredible if it happened, but it didn't happen.

I'll eat my shoe if that happened. The guy, the next day, he writes back another message. He's like, I just went and I replayed the entire game so I could take a screenshot and show you this. And people like, that's doctored or whatever. They don't believe him. They tell him he's wrong. And then one of the biggest skeptics in this thread shows back up and they say, okay, I have a friend who lives on an island off the coast of Japan where the internet is very bad and they have played through the same game, and they tell me you're correct.

And that actually their version of the game ends with Laura Croft getting this letter. And they realized at that point that the game had secretly been patched. And what I realized as a reporter is that these people have accidentally discovered that the game shipped with the wrong ending and that, so then I go to the publisher, I think was S at the time, and I'm like, did you guys secretly change the ending of the game the day this game shipped?

Did the day one, day one pass notes? Don't say that. You changed the ending. And they admitted that they had. And so, these people collectively around the world had discovered this incredibly bizarre circumstance. And I, as a reporter, just kind of lurking there, had witnessed this and then pieced it together and then used my access to be able to go to the game companies and just like.

You know, it's a good story. And I, that's the other thing. It's a story, right? Yeah. It's not just, I'm telling you about a thing. It is action. It is people discovering something, doubting something. The twist that happens with the person, you know, in the island off on the island of coast of Japan. And it's putting that all together into a story.

And so that, I think, again, I discovered that on my birthday or I filed it on my birthday. And so I always think back to that story as, you know, something where I'm like, Hey, that was a, that was a nice birthday gift for myself. And certainly, you know, those are stories from prior to game file, but I'm very proud of a lot of game files of the stories I've done there too.

And I'm, I'm very excited. There's so many more stories I wanna do, so it's like, I'm glad I can keep doing it.

Kalie: Well, I was gonna end with a future forward question, but I'm gonna walk that back and let's talk about the present for our final question.

Stephen: I, I, future's interesting too, but can we go for it.

Kalie: Let's, let's stick with the present though. And I keep coming back to your GDC session and all the people in that room who wanna get started in games journalism. If you had one piece of advice for those people getting started in 2026, what would it be?

Stephen: You gotta figure out what you can write about or make a video about that nobody else is doing. So many people wanna review the same game. I want to, you know, I wanna be a game journalist so I can review GTA Six. Yeah. Well there's gonna be a thousand GTA six reviews. And these reviews are reviews. So critic review, how much is that even gonna stand out? A lot of people conflate games, criticism with games reporting I think about how the two different things. What is the thing though? You might have a, a kind of game nobody else is writing about or reviewing ai experimentation in games. Maybe there are, and there are some AI games out there. Maybe you're gonna review them. Nobody else is doing it. Right. Oh, I, I don't wanna do that.

I got a bad rep. Right. But it might be interesting. Who cares what it's rep is? It might be interesting or as a reporter you might realize nobody's been talking to these people. Will you talk to them? Or there may be a thing that you know as a player that a question you have always had. And you've never seen an answer.

Well, you can tell yourself you're a reporter. Like I said earlier, anybody can be a reporter. Tell yourself you're a reporter, and go ask the question. Yeah. Find out, produce something that no one else is doing. It doesn't mean instantly people are gonna see it. It doesn't mean you won't have the experience of somebody else aggregating it and taking credit.

But the best path you can put yourself on is to be unique in your work for it to stand out and to trust your gut about what is interesting. And not worry so much about what everybody else is doing.

Kalie: Thank you so much, Stephen, for taking your time out today to talk to us at the Naavik Gaming Podcast. Everyone who's listening, please go subscribe to Game File. We're gonna link the website in our show notes.

Stephen: My pleasure. And as much as I hope people get something outta reading Game File as a newsletter, you can also read it online also. I think the Naavik newsletter is great. So thank, I'm a happy subscriber to, to the Naavik newsletter, and I think it's just great for people to be able to get so much more information about ames.

Kalie: Awesome.

Stephen: Thank you so much. Thank you.

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