Christopher Bratt's Online Newsletter: Losing VideoGamerTV

As I sit down to type this, I’ve just clocked the fact that I’ve now been a video games journalist for more than a decade. It’s been ten years and three months since a baby-faced (and honestly, not especially qualified) Chris Bratt weaselled his way into a full-time gig making videos on the internet. That makes me some kind of greybeard by this industry’s standards these days, I suppose.

And it all started at such a *weird* website. VideoGamer was unlike pretty much any other games publication around back then, I think. It was punchy and scattershot and absolutely determined to remind its audience that the games industry is an absurdly silly thing at times and it’s okay to gently poke fun at it too. In fact, more than that, it’s maybe even a healthy thing to do in a space so often dominated by Capital ‘G’ Gamers and some of the less savoury aspects of online culture.

The site really established itself, I suppose, thanks to Matt Lees’ Abridged videos, in which he put on silly voices and savaged whichever video game execs had been unfortunate enough to present their latest wares at that year’s E3 or Gamescom. Don Mattrick, in particular, was a favourite target of the VideoGamer team. But more than just this, there was an energy on the team that’s almost impossible to fake: we (mostly) really liked each other and recognised that we’d somehow landed these unbelievable jobs in which we were being paid to muck around and make each other laugh.

Here are just some of the things I remember being involved with during my two years there, off the top of my head:

• I filmed my boss, Simon Miller, as he literally sneaked his way onto the E3 2014(?) showfloor a day before it actually opened.
• I introduced my fake Scottish dad (but very real friend and coworker) Jim Trinca to a range of video games I’d been playing as he berated me for the life choices I’d made up until that point.
• In response to the US games media reviewing Alien: Isolation lower than the Brits, we spoofed a fake “American patch” for the game featuring many, many more guns and erm, John Wayne?
• I helped film a video review for Rambo: The Video Game, except the review was also a musical. A reviewiscal, if you will. There were a whole series of these. They varied in quality wildly.
• We handed out our most prestigious E3 award ‘Least Likely To Be Absolute Arse’ to The Witcher 3.
• I can’t remember why, but we threw a Kinect out of the office window in one particular video. Maybe it was after Xbox decided against the idea of needing Xbox One customers to keep their Kinect plugged in at all times? I’m not sure. But I do remember that Microsoft’s PR team wasn’t delighted by this and told us as much the following morning.

It was perhaps the most ridiculous, exhilarating job I’ll ever have.

Although, with that being said, I shouldn’t romanticise things too much here. VideoGamer wasn’t without its problems. While I was working there, there wasn’t a single woman or person of colour on the team, I was constantly struggling with debt thanks to a starting salary of £16,000 while living in Croydon and many of us overworked like crazy. It was, in many ways, unsustainable.

But all these years later, it remains an incredibly formative time in my life. I made some lifelong friendships on that team and without VideoGamer, I doubt I’d ever have found my way to People Make Games.

Which is why I’m struggling with the fact that back in March of this year, the VideoGamer YouTube channel, where all of our work from back then was published, suddenly disappeared.

So what happened exactly? Here’s what I know at the moment.

VideoGamer.com (and its YouTube channel) was sold a couple of years after I left to a company called Resero Network. Many of the folks I’d worked with had left around this time too, as the site’s new owners looked to breathe life into the site once again with a new team.

To be completely honest, I don’t know much about this particular era of VideoGamer. It seems to me that the site’s staff did the best they could with what they had, but it doesn’t look like there was much in the way of funding to back them up. VideoGamer was never hugely profitable (hence that starting salary I mentioned) and I suspect this situation only became more and more difficult as the years went by. Eventually, all that was left was a skeleton crew.

And then, in August of 2022, VideoGamer was sold off once again, this time to a company called “By Gamers, For Gamers”, or BGFG for short. Unlike Resero Network, I’d never heard of this company beforehand, although a little googling around reveals it to be a publishing group that now also owns N4G and a variety of sites focused on PC building.

Looking at VideoGamer.com today, it looks to me that it’s been purchased solely for the URL, with its news articles following a near identical format based largely on discussions happening on Reddit. In fact, I’d bet a decent amount of money that these articles are at least partly AI-generated. They might want to avoid the World of Warcraft subreddit, if so.

Anyway, as if that wasn’t depressing enough, a few months after BGFG bought our old home, the YouTube channel we’d poured so much of ourselves into seemed to vanish overnight. There was no fanfare, no statement, no apology. One day it was there and the next it wasn’t.

At first I worried that it had simply been deleted by its new owners who’d perhaps never even watched those old videos in the first place. I tweeted something to this effect, as did some of my former colleagues, leading to the following response from whoever is manning the VideoGamer social media channels these days:

That was more than three months ago now and since then I’ve nudged BGFG about it personally a few times and even passed on some advice from a contact we have at YouTube ourselves. And absolutely nothing’s happened. Nor has there been any kind of follow-up statement or update. The channel remains offline and I’m not sure if it’s ever coming back.

It’s a strange feeling, this. It’s not like I spent a lot of time rewatching those videos personally and to be completely honest with you, I find some of my own work on there a bit cringey to think about these days. But the suddenness of this is hard to process. I feel robbed of the opportunity to go back and reconnect with that part of myself in later years, to look back at a different time in my life that helped me find my own voice. Also, some of my friends made some unbelievably cool stuff back then and I’m angry that it could all be snuffed out so carelessly.

I mean, to state the obvious, this is what happens when you don’t own the work you make. How many game developers have faced this exact issue with their games no longer being available to purchase? And other game journalists too. A huge amount of video work was almost lost forever this year, if it hadn't been for Noclip stepping in to help preserve it.

Speaking of which, I’d like to thank whoever’s behind the VideoGamerTVHistorian YouTube channel, who’s so far been able to save and reupload 170 of our old videos. Shoutout to this promo we made ahead of our E3 2014 coverage, which just put a big smile on my face as I rewatched it while writing this newsletter.

So what’s left to say? Capitalism doesn't care about any of us and I’m really very glad that People Make Games belongs to Anni, Quinns and myself. These videos ain’t going anywhere, that's for sure.