The Photo-Essay Tradition in Games Journalism — Making Games Is Fun

Games journalism has always had a photo-essay tradition that runs parallel to its dominant review and news formats. The photo essay — long-form prose paired with original photography from inside a studio or at an event — has never been the centre of gravity of the industry’s coverage, but it has been a persistent and influential minority format for roughly four decades. This piece looks at what the form does, why it persists, and where it currently sits.

It is an editorial piece, not a comprehensive history. Photo essays in games journalism have been published by enough different outlets, in enough different formats, that a complete history would fill a book rather than an article. The intention here is to sketch the shape of the tradition and to note its current state.

What a games-journalism photo essay does

The photo essay format does something that reviews and news pieces cannot. Reviews are about a finished product; news is about an announcement, a release date, or a controversy. The photo essay is about the making of a game — the office it was made in, the people who made it, the decisions that shaped it, the textures of the work that produced it. The photographs are not illustrations of the prose; they carry significant editorial weight in their own right.

The most successful photo essays in games journalism — Edge’s long-running studio-visit pieces from the 1990s and 2000s, Eurogamer’s extended studio profiles, The Guardian’s tech and games desk pieces by writers including Keith Stuart, and shorter-form work in independent publications such as Heterotopias — share a common shape. They typically run between two and four thousand words. They are paired with between five and twenty photographs, often shot specifically for the piece rather than pulled from press kits. They focus on a single studio, often a single small or mid-size studio, and they are written from outside the studio rather than from a press-tour perspective.

The result, when the form works, is documentary. The reader comes away with a sense of what it was like to be in a particular office on a particular day during the making of a particular game. This is different in kind from “I played a build of the game and here is what it felt like.”

Why the form persists

The photo essay is expensive to produce. It requires the photographer to travel, the studio to grant access, the writer to spend time on site, and the publication to commit substantial editorial space. By the standards of contemporary digital publishing — where the per-piece cost of a news post is measured in minutes of writing time — the photo essay is an outlier in cost.

It persists nonetheless for three reasons. First, it produces durable content. A news post about an announcement is irrelevant within a week. A photo essay about a studio’s process can remain relevant for years, both as a snapshot of that studio and as a more general document of how indie game development worked at a particular moment. Photo essays are cited in retrospectives, in academic writing on game development, and in later coverage of the same studio.

Second, the form produces unusually loyal readers. Photo essays are not the kind of content that drives high single-piece traffic, but they tend to be heavily shared by industry insiders and to be remembered by general readers years after publication. This audience pattern matters more for some publications than for others.

Third, the form continues to attract the most talented writers and photographers in games journalism. The photo essay is one of the few formats in which a writer can do meaningful, durable work; this attracts ambitious contributors and helps publications retain talent that would otherwise drift toward technology or culture publications outside the games industry.

The photo-essay tradition in UK indie coverage

The UK indie scene has been particularly well served by the photo-essay tradition. The relative geographic concentration of the major UK clusters (Guildford, Brighton, Cambridge) has made studio access logistically tractable for UK-based writers and photographers, and the long history of UK enthusiast press — Edge, Future Publishing’s portfolio more broadly, Eurogamer, and the independent magazine Killscreen during its active period — has provided publication venues.

Specific examples include Eurogamer’s extended studio profiles by writers such as Tom Bramwell, Christian Donlan, and Wesley Yin-Poole; The Guardian’s games-desk pieces by Keith Stuart; and a series of independent essays during the mid-2010s, published on personal sites and in zines, that documented specific UK indie studios at specific points in their development cycles. The original Making Games Is Fun project published on the predecessor domain to this site falls within this latter tradition.

The current state of the form

The economic pressure on games journalism in 2024–2026 has affected the photo-essay tradition particularly hard. The format’s high per-piece production cost makes it among the first to be cut when publications face commercial pressure. Edge’s studio-profile cadence has slowed since the magazine’s parent company shifted toward leaner digital operations. Eurogamer’s long-form output has continued but at reduced volume since the publication’s ownership changes. The independent zine and personal-site tradition that produced much of the mid-2010s output has weakened as the broader independent web publishing ecosystem has contracted.

Against this, there has been a corresponding rise in adjacent forms. The long video documentary on YouTube — works by NoClip, GVMERS, and a wider population of independent creators — has absorbed some of the audience demand previously met by photo essays, particularly for the studio-portrait sub-genre. The audio-podcast equivalent has grown similarly; long-form interview podcasts produce coverage that is, in form if not in medium, recognisable as descendants of the photo-essay tradition.

What has not yet emerged in any meaningful quantity is a successor to the still-photography photo essay itself. The form is currently underrepresented relative to its historical share of games journalism, and the talent pipeline that produced photographers willing to spend a day in a Guildford office for a four-thousand-word piece has weakened.

Why the form still matters

The photo essay still matters because it is the format that produces documents which last. The games industry produces an extraordinary volume of ephemeral content — news posts, review aggregates, trailer reactions, livestream highlights — that is, by design, replaced by next week’s content. The photo essay produces something else: a fixed record of a particular studio at a particular moment.

For an industry whose own history is unusually hard to write — much of game development happens in private offices, is documented in internal Slack channels rather than public archives, and is rarely covered by mainstream business press — the photo-essay tradition is one of the few formats that produces source material for later historians. That makes the form’s current marginalisation worth noting, even by editorial publications that do not themselves practise it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a games-journalism photo essay? A games-journalism photo essay is a long-form editorial piece that combines extended prose with original photography from inside a game studio or at an industry event. It is distinct from review and news formats in that it focuses on the making of games rather than on finished products or announcements.

Which publications have historically published games photo essays? The format has been associated with Edge magazine, Eurogamer, The Guardian, Killscreen (during its active period), and a range of independent publications and personal websites. Long-form video documentaries on YouTube can be seen as a contemporary adjacent format.

Why are photo essays less common in current games journalism? The format’s high per-piece production cost, combined with the wider economic pressure on games journalism since the early 2020s, has reduced the cadence at which photo essays are commissioned. Adjacent video and podcast formats have absorbed some of the audience demand.

Is the original Making Games Is Fun photo-essay project still available? The original MGIF project published on the predecessor of this domain is no longer hosted at this address. This site is independent of that project and does not republish the original essays.

Are there current photo essays on UK indie studios? A reduced cadence continues at Edge, Eurogamer, and selected independent publications. Long-form video coverage on YouTube — by creators including NoClip and others — provides a parallel and currently more active form of similar coverage.

Why does the photo-essay tradition matter for games industry history? The format produces durable, source-quality documentation of studios and development practices that would otherwise leave little public record. For historians of the games industry, photo essays are among the more useful primary sources.

Does Making Games Is Fun (this site) publish photo essays? No. This site is an editorial publication that writes about UK indie studios in third-person prose. It does not commission or publish original photography from inside studios and does not present itself as a continuation of the photo-essay tradition.