The Jason Schreier Interview: Games, Blizzard, and The Industry
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Hey everybody, welcome to a special one-off episode of The Instance and Core. This is going to go up on both feeds. And this is Scott Johnson, of course. Thank you all for being here. You're about to hear a very cool interview, I think. I'd like to welcome one Jason Schreier to the show, a games journalist and author known for his in-depth industry coverage. Great books like Press Reset and Play Nice, which I just recently read. Fantastic book. He's currently reporting for Bloomberg News. Jason, thanks for being on the show. Hey, Scott. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, it's great to have you. It's been kind of a few years of me wanting to reach out and have a discussion. Given your status, I don't even know how you feel about this particular status, but when people think of who's out there really poking holes in things in the games industry in terms of journalism, your name is always coming up. Is that a weird thing for you to know that you're that guy? Absolutely.
It is a weird thing. Yeah, I mean, I'm proud of it and proud of the work and proud of all of the people over the years who have spoken to me and told their stories and trusted me. I'm proud that I've been able to earn that trust. And yeah, I mean, I certainly don't have any complaints about it. It helps me do my job a little bit better and helps me tell people's stories better. which gets more information out there and gets more people educated on the realities of the video game industry. So that, to me, seems like a win. If I can kind of leverage that quote-unquote fame or notoriety into telling more stories, that is a win for me.
Well, let's talk more about that. You're known, obviously, for kind of hard hitting games industry coverage. Sometimes breaking news about an upcoming layoff will come through one of your channels, social media or something or something you've written. Sometimes you're the first to kind of know why something didn't happen or something got canceled or something like this. And I'm just curious how you got there. I mean, I assume games have been a big influence on you for a long time, maybe since childhood. But what led you down the road that would take you, I guess, all the way to NYU and graduating and then off into the games business as a journalist?
Yeah, I'll try to give the abridged version of my life story here, which is that I had always wanted to be a writer. And I discovered journalism in high school, joined my high school paper, kind of fell in love with it then, and then did some writing for my college paper as well. And then after school, when I graduated, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with myself and wound up doing some kind of freelance reporting and wound up doing local journalism for this outlet that was covering nearby my hometown where I grew up because I moved back with my parents for a little bit after I graduated college. And I'll never forget this. I was sitting in this room, in this big town hall sort of room, covering this zoning board meeting. And a bunch of old dudes were sitting on stage arguing over whether a fence is allowed to be 25 feet or 30 feet. And I was just like, I cannot do this. I need to find something more interesting to write about. And before then, I had written a little bit about games. During college, I had done some...
I won't even call it freelance reviewing because it was volunteer reviewing. Like I wrote reviews in exchange for like getting codes and that was it for gaming sites and stuff like an RPG site. But after that, after that zoning board meeting is when I decided, okay, I think what about video games? Like I grew up playing video games, have loved video games my entire life, have never stopped playing games. What if I try to cover that And what I wound up doing is I wound up wanting to write reviews, of course, and just cover it in as many ways as possible and get my byline out there in as many ways as possible. But also I think something that not a lot of people were doing at the time was approaching it as a reporter. And when I kind of – I got my – big break, so to speak, or a foot in the door from a guy named Chris Kohler, an industry legend who was at Wired at the time.
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