The Escapist Lays Off Majority of Staff
gamerevolution.com
gamerevolution.com
I recall seeing some really good content from them a while back, but it never was quite good enough that I'd go there explicitly to check them out. Then without really realizing it, I stopped seeing links to their content, and sort of forgot they'd ever existed.
Some quick googling shows why: They'd gone totally off the deep end. What a baffling way for them to end. I wonder if it was just a (very ill-advised) tactic to try and boost traffic, or if the owner/editors were actually true believers?
I think this has been a long time coming, it sucks that we're probably going to lose some cool names in the process but overall I think it will be a good thing.
Semi-professional reporters w/ unsustainable income streams + large studio advertising budgets + massive investments in AAA games != recipe for integrity
Steam refunds did more for game quality than most of the game journalism industry.
Any other good gaming sites out there I should check out?
[1] https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ [2] http://gillen.cream.org/wordpress_html/assorted-essays/the-n...
Although he now writes for Kotaku, not RPS.
techraptor.com and nichegamer.com are pretty good.
That's...alarmingly obsessive. The article, I mean, not Grayson.
Now, here’s the point: you could spend the next year meticulously documenting every last store voucher the guy had ever received from gun shops B to Z and still no-one would care, because everyone knows that, even if it was true, it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference in the grand scheme of things. If you then announced that this was part of a larger campaign for “Clarity in Defense Spending” people would conclude that either a) you were truly clueless or b) you had an axe to grind with this guy that was nothing to do with gun store vouchers.
Anyway, that’s what people mean when they say “It was never about ethics in computer game journalism.”
As far as other good outlets, I think Techraptr is the only one I know of that holds water these days. Loved Tom Francis' work at PC Gamer back in the day too, before he left.
It's not even kickbacks. It's free games. It's sustaining paychecks. It's free food, booze and t-shirts. It's free steam keys, and trips to LA to meet developers.
It's not kickbacks. It would have amazed me to have even had that option of money bribes on the table: all I ever got were chocolates, plush dolls, a miniature plastic trebuchet. In the end, I never changed a rating because of any of that junk. But smaller outlets where they can't afford to be honest are swayed by this stuff. Most osf these folks you suspect are probably cheap fucking dates: bought with a game branded bottle or scotch.
There's a lot of money to be made by being a "Cheerleader for the Industry," and not as much in being the bastion of good content, honestly.
That's because the first option requires no real readers or followers, just sponsors. The second requires your content to be somehow better than everyone else's, and today that means competing with like, 10,000 other people one URL away.
The thing that I find most troubling is publishers of video game review and news sites buying up publishers and distribution platforms, the latest being j2 Global, which owns Ziff Davis, IGN, PC Mag, Geek.com, and many more buying up Humble bundle on October 13.
I remember realising slightly later than something similar was true for most magazine reviews. It still is.
That’s why I read Which.
1) Consumer product reviews, as if games were fridges or TVs.
2) Artistic engagement; either trying to be the "Roger Ebert of games", or the NGJ approach of self-interrogating the reviewer's feelings while playing the game, or the cultural studies/media studies approach of techniques and influences.
3) Sense of belonging to a fandom, like sports, and competing for victory. Either within the game or between competing fandoms.
The trouble with (1) is that it's at best dull and very easily degenerates into payola.
(2) had the potential to be far more interesting, but collided very badly with (3). Critique requires standing at a distance. When people identify themselves very strongly with the object of critique, they turn critique of the thing into criticism of themselves, and get very upset.
And finally (3) has the same problem that football(+) has long struggled with: hooligans, "ultras", and extreme partisanship taken out of the game. For football, this was to streets and pubs. For games, it's voice chat and forums filled with a never-ending torrent of abusive language.
Eventually gamergate provided an opportunity for (3) to mobilise, nominally against (1) but in practice destroying (2) in the process.
(+) "Soccer"
Meanwhile indie game developers are gambling their life savings, with very poor odds. For every Cuphead - which was funded by the developers remortgaging their houses - there are 100 other indie games that sell ~0 copies.
PUBG is sucking all the air out of the room in the gaming market, and I expect we'll see a lot of attempts to emulate its success in the near future, most of which will fail.
And the weird thing is that, otherwise, we're experiencing a golden era of video games. But organic discovery is harder than ever, on every platform.
Still, you're probably right about the golden era and the difficulty of discovery. It's a shame game journalism is so corrupt.
There is stuff for me to play on mobile and I was able to find it by myself. And much cheaper overall.
Gaming is just becoming an endless series of thinly disguised Skinner Boxes and slot machines, designed to turn you into an ongoing income stream.
Cuphead was funded by Microsoft. The whole "mortgaging the house" story is just a marketing stunt, same as "the guy who couldn't complete the tutorial level in 40 minutes" video. They have a really good PR agency, probably hired by Microsoft as well.
http://fortune.com/2017/09/29/cuphead-microsoft-video-game/
I wouldn't call Cuphead indie game at all.
Games are good, but culture of gaming is oftentimes quite crappy without any need to organize it by marketing stunts.
As someone in the industry, how can you not know how gamedev works?
I understand hanging out on HN can kind of blind people to the fact that "funding" isn't always endless. But "Funded by Microsoft" could very well mean they got $100k out of it, which would be peanuts for the amount of work that went into the game.
After all, do you really think MSS is going to shell out half a million for a "2d run and gun with an animation gimmick"?
Please don't call stuff like this "marketing stunts" unless you back it up with strong evidence. The games industry, even moreso than SV, is filled with the husks of projects that ran out of money, and of devs that ruined their lives on a bet that didn't pan out. Here of all places, I would hope people have some respect for that.
Gaming mass media is full of reviewers who often do not seem particularly interested in the titles they're reviewing, and are operating in a situation where there is always implicit (and sometimes explicit) coercion from big advertisers. Would gamers prefer that or would they prefer to listen to thousands of other gamers who presumably enjoy the a game's genre and almost certainly bought the game with positive expectations? I don't think there's any real competition there.
In a way it's the same problem that media at large is facing. The media had a monopoly on information for decades. The decentralization of information and access provided by the internet destroyed that shockingly quickly. And so they're left to create draws other than information itself.
And I would agree this will be a good thing. I don't see any particular benefits to the centralization of information. Like any centralized system it just creates a single point of failure.
Nowadays, popular web series like that bring in more interest than written articles do. Alas, they didn't quite find a new golden goose after some of their original ones left, so they ended up with Yahtzee as the only real attraction there.
Probably also doesn't help that gaming news sites aren't the moneymaker they used to be, with the people that visit them generally not paying for subscriptions or clicking on ads.
* After we stopped paying them and took away their access.
It wasn't the staff all choosing to leave, it was the staff being told to leave. That'd be two very different stories, which is why 'exodus' would be misleading.
I wonder if there's a term for these sort of words - those which are commonly confused for something the opposite of what they actually mean...