I mean, they are literally clickbait. They want you to wonder what the best part of Alan Wake is or what the best soullike of 2023 is. It's just an evolution of clickbait, but it's still very much clickbait.

Those sound like clickbait headlines to me...?

I’ve literally taken to pasting the articles into GPT and asking it to summarize the articles. I imagine they will be the next causality in the coming AI wars.

I would honestly be inclined to pay for a non bs news service, no clickbait titles, no SEO bs in the article which makes it 30 times as long for no reason. Just facts

You are not the only one but there are enough who actually click those titels so it is worthwhile for them to write in this manner and they don't care about the few of us.

If you click on the article, spend two seconds on it, and don't actually read it, have you actually fulfilled the marketing goals of the web site?

For one, you haven't actually read anything, so there's nothing to register "this is a good web site with good content and I will read their articles in the future". No reputation bump from it.

And two, you didn't have time to actually see the ads, that is, if you didn't already had an ad-blocker in the first place.

The goals of clickbait don't actually align with the goals of their profitability.

Can't speak for all publications, especially ones as non traditional as game journalism, but what people say over and over again is that the authors don't write the headlines