How do we find our stories for People Make Games?

Hello everyone!

It's Chris here, with something of a spontaneous blog post for you. Actually, I'm not sure if you're still meant to call them blog posts if they're published on Patreon. What are they then? Patreon posts? That's boring. This one's a blog post. I've decided.

One of the most common questions we get asked about our work is: where do you find your stories in the first place? I thought it might be fun to talk about that a little bit, if you're interested. Maybe you're a journalist yourself, or perhaps you just like knowing how things get made. Either way, I hope there'll be something to take away here.

I absolutely love reporting. I think the best part of my job is probably found in those excellent little moments where I stumble upon something, or someone, that I just have to know more about. What do you mean Neopets has a link to Scientology? Is Nuclear Gandhi even a real thing? The Queen's golden what?

Let's dive into how we go about finding stories like these on a regular basis.

In my experience, I've found that it's less about knowing where to look for this stuff (although some amount of that does help) and more to do with actually recognising a good angle when it pops up in front of you.

One of my favourite examples of this came back when I was still at Eurogamer. I'd made it a habit to regularly check in with what other games publications were publishing on YouTube, mostly to see what formats were working for other teams.

Back in 2017, PC Gamer had produced a video titled 'We ask a lawyer rapid-fire questions about videogame law'. It was mostly overlooked by their audience for whatever reason, with just a few thousand views, but I liked the idea and gave it a watch.

It reminded me of Game Informer's legendary Rapid-Fire Questions series, with a mix of serious and not-so-serious questions, all answered at high speed. They'd managed to track down Ryan Morrison, AKA the Video Game Attorney from Twitter, and were quizzing him with a bunch of legal queries.

One such question was: "Should players legally own the games they purchase through Steam?"

Huh, I'd not really thought about that before. I suppose you do just own a license to play the game...

 "Right now, if you die, you can't even leave your Steam account to your kids," responded the lawyer. "You can't sell your games second-hand. I think that is something that needs to change, for sure."

And with that, they carried on to the next question. The video format meant that there was no time to really delve into any one particular answer, but I remember thinking: oh my god, that should have been your whole piece!

You can't leave your Steam account to somebody else in your will?! When you die, it's potentially all gone.

That question and answer ticked three super important boxes for me:

• It's not something I'd seen many people talk about before now, even tangentially. 
• It affects tonnes of people - anyone who owns a Steam account, in fact!
• It suggests that Valve could be taking advantage of its customers.

I paused the video, called over my Deputy Editor and excitedly pitched a larger piece that could investigate this problem further, ideally bringing in our own lawyer and confronting Valve about the issue ourselves. The result was this video, which I'm super proud of and has now been watched by more than 600,000 people.

Yeah, alright. Our YouTube thumbnails have come a long way, thanks to Anni.

But there's a great lesson in that example, I think.

I wasn't looking for a new story when I stumbled upon that one, but when I did, we didn't let it go to waste. If you can train your brain to start recognising and reacting to potential angles when you find them, you'll be amazed how often they tend to crop up.

So what makes a good lead? What should you be always be looking for?

Here are a few things I like to consider:

First up, and this one sounds like a no-brainer. Is it actually interesting? Are you absolutely sure about that? It can be surprisingly easy to find yourself getting invested in a story that might not end up grabbing people once you've finished.

I've made that mistake plenty of times, by the way! In hindsight, our episode on how Ubisoft puts together its press conferences was just too inside baseball. There's nothing really in there that's going to blow anybody's socks off and I didn't realise that until it was far too late. Ugh. We live and learn.

An ex-colleague of mine, Wesley Yin-Poole from Eurogamer, has a great way of trying to determine this ahead of time. We were talking about a potential story once and he asked me: would you tell your mate this story at a pub? And if you did, and you had to pause halfway through to nip to the loo, would they be dying for you to come back and finish telling it?

Those are such great questions to ask yourself before you find yourself too far deep into the reporting of something. In fact, I do run most PMG episodes by friends from the games media beforehand (never trust a pub invite from me, for this reason) and I tell you what, you can always tell when you're working on something exciting.

Aside from that, if the story does already exist in the public domain in some form, how can you add a meaningful contribution? When Activision-Blizzard was laying off 134 people from its office in Versailles, that meant going there ourselves to meet the staff faced with losing their jobs and the unions fighting on their behalf.

Sometimes you're going to be in that incredibly enviable position of looking into something that almost nobody knows about before you tell them, but that's not always going to be the case. When it's not, what original reporting might be worth doing?

Even when it's a story that many people will have already heard about, like the mass layoffs at Telltale Games, we try to find a way to offer something fresh. With it taking us the best part of a month to produce each episode on the channel, we're rarely going to be the most timely publication. That doesn't mean we can't tackle ongoing stories, but it does usually mean we need to approach them differently.

Anyway, there's a few thoughts that I figured might be worth sharing. I liked the idea of just writing a little bit about our process and putting it out there, without being too precious about the whole thing! 

Finally, if you are interested in journalism and want to hear from folks much more capable than myself, I'd highly highly recommend giving the Longform Podcast a whirl. I've learnt so much from the people who've been interviewed on there over the years. It's an incredible resource.

As ever, thanks so much for supporting what we do.