Wesley Yin-Poole is in charge of the news desk over at IGN and has been reporting on the games industry for almost two decades at this point. He's also been a mentor of mine ever since our days working together at Eurogamer where he helped shape some of my very first stories, while he himself published some incredible work on the rise and fall of Lionhead Studios and its notorious co-founder, Peter Molyneux. Wes is one of the best games reporters in the business and I'm so happy to fin...
Feb 04, 2025•58 min
Jason Schreier is a games reporter for Bloomberg, best known for his extensive reporting on the volatile reality of AAA game development. On today's episode we'll be talking about his latest book, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, And Future of Blizzard Entertainment and the frankly horrifying number of interviews he needed to complete over the course of his reporting. Despite having a young baby to look after and exactly two and a half hours of free time each day (when said baby is soundly a...
Oct 07, 2024•1 hr 22 min
Nicole Carpenter has been reporting on the games industry at Polygon for the last five years, where she's perhaps best known for her coverage of unions and the increasingly vital role they're playing in shaping the future of video game development. In fact, not only has she reported on this subject diligently over the last few years, she also wrote what is perhaps the defining piece of journalism on the subject: The Rise of the Video Game Union . "....the type of journalism we&apo...
Aug 21, 2024•50 min
Grant Stoner is a freelance reporter who specializes in covering accessibility and disability across the games industry in his work. Among other work, he writes a monthly column for IGN where he recently examined how the mass layoffs ripping through the games industry have affected disabled game workers, in particular . This is a great example of why Grant's perspective is so necessary in the games media right now, shining a spotlight on an often overlooked area of games and the people who ...
Jul 18, 2024•44 min
Sarah Parvini was a games reporter at the LA Times until just a few months ago, having been among those who were hit by a staggering round of layoffs at the paper earlier this year. In fact, the publication is meant to have shed around 20% of its newsroom in one fell swoop. Journalism is in a rough state, folks. In this episode you'll hear guest host Nicole Carpenter talk with Sarah about what it's like reporting on the games industry for such an established publication and how she man...
May 28, 2024•35 min
Chelsea Reed Miller is a video editor for IGN and a spokesperson for the IGN Creators Guild , a brand spanking new union that's been officially recognized by IGN's parent company just a couple of months ago. In today's episode, you'll hear guest host Nicole Carpenter talk to Chelsea about what that means for people working at one of the biggest publications in the games media and why it's important to think about collective action before things start falling apart, if po...
Apr 19, 2024•46 min
Quintin Smith is one third of People Make Games , although hopefully you already knew that. Outside of his work with us, he's also known as the co-founder of board games behemoth Shut Up & Sit Down and now, as of just a few weeks ago, he's started something brand new, exploring the world of TTRPGs. It's called Quinns Quest and it's extremely weird and good, just like Quinns. "If you just go into a community going 'hey, I wanna understand why this is fun for you&...
Mar 06, 2024•1 hr 14 min
Stephen Totilo has been a games journalist for two decades now, making him one of the most experienced people in the field. His career spans a stint at MTV News as its first ever games reporter, nine years as Kotaku's Editor-in-Chief and until recently, he wrote a twice-weekly gaming newsletter for Axios. Today, Stephen is looking to strike out on his own with Game File , an independent newsletter published on Substack and funded directly by his audience. "I have concerns about a young...
Jan 23, 2024•1 hr 14 min
Nathan Grayson and Riley MacLeod have just launched a brand new, worker-owned games publication called Aftermath , along with some other ex-Kotaku staff you'll recognise. As in, today, right now! Chris grabbed them for an interview a few days ago to talk about the challenges that come with starting something fresh, crowdfunding and what being "worker-owned" really means in this context. "You know — and everyone knows — that 2022 and 2023 have been nightmarish for games journa...
Nov 07, 2023•57 min
Patricia Hernandez is now the former Editor-in-Chief of Kotaku , having been fired from the position just a few days ago . In today's episode we're going to be talking to her about what's happened and digging into the increasingly strained relationship between Kotaku's editorial team and the company which owns the site itself, G/O Media. "I can't really go into specifics about the reason because it does involve other staffers and their personal information, so I jus...
Aug 23, 2023•1 hr 3 min
Rebekah Valentine is a Senior Reporter at IGN and an instrumental figure in the site's latest ambitions to establish itself as a true home for longform video games reporting. She's also just been on the ground at Summer Games Fest, the potential successor to the games industry's biggest, flashiest trade show, E3. How do the two shows compare from a reporter's perspective and will E3 ever manage a revival? We'll be asking Rebekah all about it. "I am now two and a hal...
Jun 30, 2023•1 hr 2 min
2 Player Productions is a documentary crew that's been embedded with Double Fine Productions for more than a decade now, having first come onboard in order to follow the development of Broken Age and create the Double Fine Adventure series. However, it's their latest work that's absolutely knocked my socks off. Double Fine PsychOdyssey is, quite simply, the best video games documentary work I've ever seen. It follows the much longer development of Psychonauts 2 and is just th...
Mar 28, 2023•58 min
Tyler McVicker has been utterly obsessed with Valve for more than a decade now, having reported on almost every scrap of news, speculation and datamined morsel to come out of this famously secretive company at the heart of the games industry. Having just published our own report on the reality of working at Valve , with its "flat" structure, no managers and no job titles, I wanted to talk to Tyler about the challenges that come with trying to understand such an unusual business. And on...
Feb 08, 2023•1 hr 9 min
Sam Greer is a freelance games critic, having previously worked for Glass House Games and GamesMaster magazine . More recently, she worked with People Make Games (that's us!) on an incredible video about the lack of working class people employed in the games industry. That's what we'll be talking about in today's episode. "I think when we talked about it before my worry was that the video would just be one of those things that people would retweet and go 'oh this is...
Sep 05, 2022•1 hr 11 min
Hirun Cryer first got his break in the games media writing guides over at USGamer . And guides content, dear listeners, is perhaps one of the most overlooked part of this entire job. Frequently responsible for the lion's share of a publication's traffic, despite rarely appearing on the homepage itself, video game guides are hugely important to the overall success of some of your favourite games sites. So why are guides writers so often underpaid and overworked? " You know how peop...
May 26, 2022•55 min
Danny O'Dwyer creates video game documentaries for Noclip , a crowdfunded YouTube channel first launched in 2016. Known for their high production value and behind-the-scenes access to some of the most successful game developers in the world, Noclip has had a huge influence on PMG's work over the years. Prior to starting his own company, Danny is perhaps best known for his work at GameSpot, where he hosted shows like The Point and The Lobby. "The reason I wanted to do the Bethesda ...
Apr 29, 2022•1 hr 20 min
Lucy James is the head of GameSpot's video team, managing a team of hosts around the world. Having moved from London to San Francisco, you'll have likely seen her face on all sorts of GameSpot video stuff , as well as her more recent appearances on Giant Bomb's The Very Online Show . In this episode we talk about the differences between the UK and US games media, the effect COVID has had on GameSpot's flagship shows and I get to quiz Lucy about the brilliant Audio Logs series...
Mar 27, 2022•1 hr 3 min
Ethan Gach is a senior reporter at Kotaku and has been responsible for a lot of the site's coverage of the Activision-Blizzard lawsuit, in which the company has been accused of a staggering number of gender discrimination and sexual harassment charges. Back in July, Ethan's reporting revealed details and photographs of the "Cosby Suite", a Blizzcon hotel room described by the lawsuit as a place for one high profile Blizzard developer to hit on and harass female employees whil...
Dec 07, 2021•1 hr 5 min
Tina Amini is the Editor-in-Chief at IGN, one of the largest video game publications in the world. With over one hundred staff making up the content team she's responsible for, Tina finds herself in a position unlike almost any other in the games media business. " We're not just encyclopaedic. We're not just churning through the news everyday in an unreflective way. We're not just using our access to bring you First Looks and exclusives. We're also thinking about th...
Nov 10, 2021•52 min
Jacob Geller is a video essayist and critic who draws upon modern art, architecture and politics in order to reframe how we think about the games we play. He's also really into Beat Saber. "I think people haven't been shown why they should care about this history yet. And that is partly our job to say, like, it's important that you know this term, not just because you can throw it around, but because by knowing this and by knowing the conversations that have happened previous...
Oct 06, 2021•1 hr 2 min
Aoife Wilson is the head of Eurogamer's video team , as well as an established freelancer working with the likes of BAFTA, the BBC and Wizards of the Coast. She also used to be a colleague of Chris' before he started People Make Games! "It’s lessened now because I’m a bit more established in the industry, but I think when I started, I really… I felt there was a bit of classism especially where my accent was concerned. I still get a little bit prickly when people take apart the acc...
Sep 06, 2021•53 min
Mark Brown is the creator of Game Maker's Toolkit , an enormously popular YouTube channel that's home to a wide range of video essays about game design. "Reaching the goal of a million subscribers, I knew that was going to feel weird because I'd done a lot of reading about goals and how we set them for ourselves and how it can feel strange when we reach a goal, because we spend so much mental energy thinking about what we're going to do when we get there and that sort of...
Aug 04, 2021•51 min
Patricia Hernandez is the new Editor-in-Chief of Kotaku , having now returned to the site after beginning her career there some ten years ago. "I think, in some senses, it's not just an ambitious idea, it's how do I make this hard, ambitious idea happen while also giving my writers a realistic workload that does not have video games just completely taking over their life? And I think it's especially a concern of mine, because early on in my career I feel I was able to get ahe...
Jul 05, 2021•48 min
Austin Walker is the host of Waypoint Radio and Friends at the Table , having previously launched Waypoint back in 2016 and having been a part of Giant Bomb's New York office before then. "You have to reset your goals. Your goals cannot be 'I'm going to change the conversation'. It has to be 'I'm going to have a good conversation'. I'm going to build a space that is comfortable, and warm, and critical, that I get to be in and that helps me pay my bill...
Jun 04, 2021•1 hr 45 min
