How to Break Into Video Game Journalism

In this article on KeenGamer, I talk about how I became a freelance journalist. More specifically, I discuss how I began my career, transitioned into the video game journalism field, and started to make money writing about video games. Currently, I’m a full-time content writer for the marketing team at Gengo (a Lionbridge company) in Tokyo, Japan.

On the side, I write for various publications covering the video game, anime, and pop culture beat. When I first started out, I was writing clickbait and getting paid based on the amount of views the article received. This payment style is good if the article does well. My best-performing article brought me just over $700 USD! The article took me around 5-6 hours to complete. Thus, the per-hour rate was incredibly high for this article.

However, if the article does poorly, you may get paid close to nothing. My worst-performing article I can recall brought me around $16 USD. Now, one of my recurring gigs pays me around $90 USD per 800-word article, regardless of whether it gets a lot of views or not.

Another one of my major side gigs pays a recurring royalty based on the total amount of  views our articles bring in, regardless of when the article was published. On this website, articles I wrote last year are still earning me cash to this day.

If you want to learn how I got to this current point in my career, read the article on KeenGamer to learn tips on how to write about video games and find writing jobs for gamers.