Mike Straw
Mike Straw reports on how decisions inside the games industry affect players, staff, and long-running franchises, combining daily news with investigative work on troubled projects and corporate shifts. He works as an executive editor at Insider Gaming, shaping its coverage while continuing to write front-line stories himself. His background includes more than a decade covering the games industry and earlier years as a beat reporter on professional hockey, which informs a methodical, beat-style approach to his gaming coverage.
Layoffs and Studio Restructuring
Straw devotes significant attention to the people behind games when studios restructure, shift teams, or reduce staff.
Recent pieces cover Ubisoft ramping staff off Rainbow Six Siege and other projects, as well as layoffs at Crytek affecting staff in Istanbul and Frankfurt. These stories emphasise who is affected, which projects are impacted, and how publishers position the changes publicly, rather than focusing on game features alone. The beat combines business reporting with labour and organisational angles, making his coverage particularly relevant when staffing decisions intersect with live-service titles and long-running franchises.
Platform Policies and Player Communication
Straw regularly tracks how platform holders communicate contentious decisions to players, such as disc policy changes and platform exclusivity. In coverage of PlayStation’s first public post following its disc announcement, he focuses on the timing and tone of the messaging as much as the underlying policy. A report on Forza Horizon 6 not coming to PlayStation 5 this year highlights how claims about platform availability intersect with player expectations and cross-platform competition.
These articles typically foreground the news hook in the headline, then outline what the decision means for affected communities of players and partners.
Investigations Into Troubled Game Projects
Beyond daily news, Straw undertakes longer-form investigations into troubled game projects and protracted development issues. An investigation into the years of problems behind Ultra Pro Wrestling examines the project’s history and the issues that have stalled its progress.
These investigations sit alongside his regular news output, offering deeper context when surface-level announcements cannot account for ongoing issues around particular games or developers.
Sports and Wrestling Games Coverage
Straw maintains a consistent interest in sports and wrestling titles, reflecting his earlier experience as a sports beat reporter.
He covers update details for College Football 27, focusing on title updates and how gameplay changes are communicated to players. Coverage of WWE’s abandonment of the “Vice City” trademark connects licensing and branding decisions with their implications for wrestling and entertainment properties in games.
Combined with his Ultra Pro Wrestling investigation, these pieces show a strand of work concerned with the intersection of sports entertainment, licensing, and game development.
Editorial Leadership and Multimedia Work
Alongside writing, Straw holds an editorial leadership role at Insider Gaming and shapes the site’s news, features, and investigative priorities.
He co-hosts Insider Gaming Weekly, a video game podcast where he discusses recent news, events, rumours, and industry trends with colleagues on a regular schedule. His broader professional history includes long-term coverage of the games industry as well as work on major professional sports leagues, including the NHL and NFL. This mix of editorial responsibility, audio work, and multi-domain reporting experience makes his perspective useful when stories span business, sport, and game development.
4 more gaming journalists.
Adam Bankhurst
Adam Bankhurst covers the busiest crossroads of gaming and entertainment for IGN, with a focus on breaking news, live event roundups, and franchise guides. He reports on releases, updates, hardware, films, anime, and major fan universes including Disney, Star Wars, Marvel, Lord of the Rings, Nintendo, Final Fantasy, and Mass Effect. He has covered events such as E3 and PAX, and has written The Game Awards 2020: All the Winners and X-Men Movies in Order: The Full Timeline. His work turns announcements, shows, and timelines into clear, digestible stories. He leads with dates, decisions, platforms, prices, and viewing or playing order. He also helps manage IGN’s homepage and contributes news, reviews, previews, features, commerce, and wiki content.
Alejandro Josan
Alejandro Josan specialises in turning complex, high‑information subjects into concise, usable narratives with facts first and minimal opinion. He writes guides, lists, and features for GameTyrant, focusing on step‑by‑step instructions, completion times, and whether in‑game systems are worth a player’s time. His work on titles like Rhapsody in Scarlet, Harvest Moon: Echoes of Teradea, and High on Life 2 explains progression, mechanics, systems, and different completion paths with clear numeric framing. He also breaks down layered systems in games such as Palworld and Infinite Craft into short, direct explanations. Outside GameTyrant, he has an extended track record on live‑service games, especially Destiny 2, covering tier lists, seasonal content, weapon “god rolls,” patch changes, and build optimisation. At Suggest, he is a resident crime expert reporting on breaking crime news and rare medical cases with clear timelines and careful use of official information.
Alex Van Aken
Alex Van Aken is a multimedia video game journalist who specializes in long-form documentaries, developer profiles, and weekly conversation-driven coverage of major releases and industry trends. He is senior video editor at Game Informer, where he leads the video team, travels for cover stories and studio visits, and hosts The Game Informer Show podcast. His reporting centers on cover story features and developer-focused coverage that highlight how games are designed and produced, often anchored to tentpole titles like Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Halo: Campaign Evolved, and World of Warcraft. Van Aken also writes previews, impressions, and reviews across action-adventure franchises, live-service expansions, and racing games. He builds independent game documentaries, appears on major industry platforms, and cites consulting experience on notable series, grounding his work in visual and audio storytelling and direct access to creators.
Alexander Lee
Alexander Lee covers how games, platforms and creators intersect with business. He leads news coverage at GamesBeat across gaming, entertainment, technology, the creator economy and the future of media. His core beat is platform strategy, live services and new game models, with close attention to Roblox, creator tools, monetization, communication features, safety and emerging technology. He also covers esports, content creators, regulation, accessibility and how design choices affect players and developers. Before GamesBeat, he covered gaming, esports and creators through advertising and marketing. His reporting connects product changes and policy decisions to their effects on companies, creators and audiences. He reports from industry events, uses participant voices to show business impact and analyzes longer-term strategy. He also hosts and joins podcast conversations with industry leaders.