"They're dropping like flies."

That was my immediate reaction when I heard that IGN's Doug Perry, GameSpot's Curt Feldman and 1UP's Luke Smith were all quitiing the game journalism business to go on to work in the larger game industry. Add in the recent high-profile departure of Gamespot Editor-in-Chief Greg Kasavin and we've got a veritable game journalist exodus on our hands.

Of course, this is just the latest wave in a trend that's nearly as old as game journalism itself. Bill Kunkel, America's original game journalist, has bounced back and forth between development and writing throughout his career. "Working as a game journalist was a massive help in terms of game design because, unlike most developers, we got to see every game that came out," Kunkel said. "That perspective is invaluable -- you know what works, what doesn't and you don't have to reinvent the wheel."

Other journalists that have made the jump agree that journalism experience helps in the development world. Former Game Informer editor Lisa Mason said reviewing games was "basically on-the-job training [for a development position] -- play a ton of games, talk about them to death, and explain to other people why the title in question was successful or not." She describes her current designer job at Destineer as the same process, just backwards: "I imagine the game, plan it out, and try to figure out where it could go wrong."

Still, a journalist's understanding of the industry is often incomplete. "I probably learned more about the game industry in three weeks of making games than in six years at Future," said Chris Charla, who was a launch editor at IGN, an editor-in-chief of Next Generation magazine and an editor for other Future magazines for four years before becoming a developer at Digital Eclipse. "I learned a lot more about the nuts and bolts and that was really satisfying to learn."

With all the cross-pollination, it's easy to picture game journalists using their positions as temporary stepping stones into the larger industry. There's some truth to the impression. "I wanted to get into development at some point, I think most professional game journalists do," said Greg Sewart, who worked at Electronic Gaming Monthly for four years before joining developer Vicious Cycle in 2003. "The thing to remember is that, especially in the old days, game journalism was pretty easy to get into without a lot of schooling or even that much experience, so it was a great place to build up your stock and become a known commodity," he said.

Others agreed with the journalism-as-education sentiment. "I wanted to transition from games as a lifelong hobby to games as a career, and I knew that writing about games would give me lots of opportunity to learn," said Vladmir Cole, a former Joystiq blogger who went to work at Microsoft this year.

Some, however, see the move to the industry more as a convenient out than a lifelong goal. "I think most people who get into games journalism realize that if they make good contacts and friends, going into development is going to be an option at some point," Charla said. "But most of the journalists I know are pretty passionate about the journalism part of it, so I wouldn't say everyone has a secret plan. I don't think people with good career planning skills do anything related to games in the first place so I don't see secret machinations there."