Early career Schreier initially worked as a freelance journalist covering local news stories. He worked for
Wired from 2010 to 2012, covering video games and related technology. Other freelance work included a weekly column at
Joystiq on
Japanese role-playing games, and works published at
Kill Screen,
Edge,
Eurogamer,
G4TV,
GamesRadar, and
Paste.
At Kotaku Around 2011, Schreier was contacted by Stephen Totilo, the editor-in-chief for the website
Kotaku, offering him a position as a full-time news reporter.
Kotaku had been founded in 2004 as the video game front under
Gawker Media. While crunch time had been identified before in larger firms from other sources, such as at
Rockstar Games, Schreier's reporting identified crunch also tended to persist at smaller studios. In addition to working conditions, Schreier wrote stories on the development histories of troubled or canceled video games, typically through reporting from anonymized workers. His articles included the stumbling blocks that
Bungie overcame for
Destiny, for the planned
Star Wars game
Project Ragtag at
Visceral Games that eventually led to the studio's closure, and the difficulties behind
Electronic Arts's and
BioWare's
Anthem. Schreier's reporting on
Bethesda Softworks, such his 2013 story on the cancellation of
Prey 2 that relayed internal communications he had been provided, is believed to have led Bethesda to "blacklist"
Kotaku, denying the site any pre-release copies of their games or interviews at trade events since 2015. Schreier and
Hello Games founder Sean Murray received death threats after Schreier reported on inside news that the highly anticipated ''
No Man's Sky'' from Hello Games would be delayed by a few months. As a result of the
Bollea v. Gawker lawsuit, the Gawker Network including
Kotaku underwent a series of ownership changes after 2016, eventually falling under the
G/O Media family in 2019. The new G/O management was more demanding of what content the sites carried, which resulted in a major incident at
Deadspin, the network's sports-oriented site, in October 2019 leading to the firing of its editor in chief and subsequent quitting of most of the remaining editorial staff. The book was a
New York Times bestseller for non-fiction during the week of May 30.
Play Nice, his third book, documenting the history of
Blizzard Entertainment, was released in October 2024.
Podcasts Schreier is one of the co-hosts of the
podcast Triple Click with former
Kotaku co-workers Kirk Hamilton and Maddy Myers. It is hosted on the
Maximum Fun network. ==Personal life==