Japanese Gaming Sites Aren't Spared From SEO Enshittification

A few weeks ago, Dengeki Online tweeted an article: "Fire Emblem Fortune's Weave: All the newest info about its release date and characters". The tweet made big (fake) numbers as Japanese FE fans are eagerly awaiting new info. However, the article itself was just a recap of the info revealed after the Nintendo Direct reveal on September 12 2025. It obviously had nothing new, seeing Nintendo hasn't revealed anything since.

This is the same method that was very popular among certain gaming and anime news sites in the early 2020s: Make an article promising new information about a very popular game or anime series featured on Google Trends, even though nothing new was announced, and regularly update it to keep it on top of Google Search pages.

"Demon Slayer New Ending Explained"

"Demon Slayer New Movie Release Date - What We Know So Far"

I was forced to write articles like that myself at some point when working as an SEO drone.

This method of Search Engine Optimization baiting isn't as prominent anymore on the English side due to Google constantly changing its algorithm. However, it has since spread to some Japanese gaming sites as well. Higher-ups at the companies owning big games media, Japanese or English, know full well about the enshitiffication of the internet. Instead of striving to avoid it, they basically do everything they can to monetize it. Constantly adapting whenever Google changes the algorithm and keeps trying to push out cheap articles that makes the most amount of views.

The higher-ups at these groups couldn't care less about their staff. Their sites are machines made to exploit writers and readers. I can't blame any of the marginalized writers still in there though, as I know how dire games media is especially as a minority.

These last few years, Dengeki has also started making question headlines for its articles: "when is X releasing?", another typical SEO trick.

Famitsu has also started to use similar methods, though much less aggressively from what I've seen.

As a reminder, Dengeki and Famitsu are both owned by Kadokawa, which is one of the biggest publishers of books, anime, games, and entertainment in general in Japan. Several of my favorite series like Slayers and Full Metal Panic, or more mainstream stuff like Sword Art Online, ReZero and Elden Ring are owned by Kadokawa. This also creates several conflicts of interest that have already been documented in English.

Thankfully some other big Japanese gaming sites like 4Gamer or Inside haven't fully adopted such methods yet.

However, this is only one of the many issues I noticed following Japanese news sites for the last 8 years. There are also many other issues in Japanese gaming media that aren't inherent to it. Such as game review scores being a blight that should disappear together with Metacritic.

Overall, Japanese gaming sites rarely do "real" journalism, as in taking position. You can't be a journalist without taking a stance. Objectivity, being neutral, centrism etc are all lies and tools used to perpetuate oppression. Japanese sites mainly repost press releases and rarely bring up anything that could portray companies in a bad light. For example, the only Japanese site I know who regularly talks about layoffs is Automaton, which is owned by Active Gaming Media, who also owns Playism. So there is some conflicts of interest there as well, though at least they use disclaimers.

I have yet to see a Japanese gaming site talk about Palestine in a serious manner, or even take a Sengoku 3 China Easy stance like "We must arrest netanyahu" or mentioning the Palestinian-led Xbox boycott. That's a big hurdle for a lot of English sites as well. As always, it comes down to games media and entertainment in general being so White.

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