Feature: The Hsu Drops: EGM Editor Dan Hsu on the gaming industry and media Subscribe to this RSS feed
DR: What's bothering you most right now about the gaming industry or gaming media?
From Microsoft with love.
Dan: Well, off the top of my head, I guess just because we had been talking about it is the maturity of the gaming press - and again I am not saying by any means that we're perfect or the model of what the gaming press should be. But it bothers me when I see game journalists bragging about, "hey, I got this free trip to Hawaii and I got to hang-out with so-and-so, and now I am going to write about their game". I saw members of the gaming press getting really excited because they won a free HDTV from Microsoft during the Gaming Developers Conference [in 2005]. People; we are journalists-- we shouldn't be accepting gifts from the people that we cover. We shouldn't be acting this way. We have to act like how MSNBC or CNN would act in similar circumstances. We have to earn the trust of the readers so it's stuff like that really bothers me.
I would like to see all of us mature and grow more toward the point where the readers respect what we do and trust what we do and the gaming companies respect and trust what we do. In other words, they can't look at us as their mouthpieces; they can't look at us as an outfit whose message can be controlled. They have to see us as an independent source of information. I would like the outside world to view us as a respectable industry. I want the mainstream media or somebody who doesn't know anything about videogames to look at the videogame press and say "You know what, I want to see what this website says about this because I trust them. They are as reputable as Spin or Rolling Stone is in the music category". I want to us to gain that kind of respect.
DR: Great! Thanks a lot for the interview.
Dan: No problem.
