Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic
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The sad reality is the Internet publishing is dead and as a business that business is nearly impossible to operate if you have any moral compass. In its place we have various traffic to ad scams and a creator economy built on the backs of a couple large platforms like Twitch, Reddit and YouTube. While the later option seems freeing for some creators, the reality is that soon those too will become hard to make a living from as those large platforms start slowly squeezing their creator class outside of a couple few who play nice. It's only slightly better than the journalism field because at least some of the personalities can shoot over to Patreon and work directly with their audience (albeit still tied to another large platforms).
I love this space, and it's where I grew up as a kid in the late 90s. I love community websites where I can engage with some experts. With video though, it's extremely hard to run independently. Hosting video for Giant Bomb in 2008-2012 meant home rolling our own streaming service, chat service and edge-based video platform. We had an all-star engineering team. We had one of the largest podcasts in the world and the hosting bills were killing us. Getting an audience with good content was easy. Monetizing it was very difficult. That's only continued over the years as I've seen various companies buy Giant Bomb (CBS, then RV, now Fandom) looking to pick up a premium brand that they could use to mask the giant volume of dead, but trafficked content they had in the background. The shill back then was was to sell Giant Bomb or GameSpot ads, but serve it on GameFaqs or Comic Vine (which had huge traffic at low cost). Various SEO tricks were pulled to hide traffic. For example, Comic Vine moved to a Gamespot subdomain to make this seem more legitimate. I anticipate similar dark patterns every time these sites are resold to cheaper owners. Likely, these brands will be used to promote a mountain of google-driven traffic in other properties.
The question I haven't been able to solve:
How can good content be monetized in a way that allows it to remain independent and not succumb to warping its content to feed that monetization? How can it be audience driven instead? Is such a thing even possible? Right now good monetization strategies beget bad content. There's got to be a better way than cobbling together five platforms under a Patreon account, giving all of them 10-50% along the way.
[1] https://foundation.app/collection/shapesncolors?sortOrder=DE...
Same applies to selling digital assets on Bandcamp or running a Kickstarter campaign.
If your audience is unwilling to pay for your content or support you financially, and unwilling to pay a platform fee like with Netflix, then you might be stuck with monetizing through ads.
In a Patreon-like and Kickstarter-like platform the NFT might be used just the same, as a proof of purchase to access special content. Or, it could be used as a token or badge of appreciation, such as for being the first patron or a 1-year-continuous patron. The same way GitHub profiles show achievements and who the user is sponsoring.
In digital art platforms NFT is as it is already being used: certification and scarcity.
There’s other applications like streaming payments with vesting schedule:
The problem I see is that there's just too much supply compared to demand, thus the price of content is literally zero. Even the monetization models that are (still) available are on borrowed time.
Ultimately there's no easy way to profit off something that is already plentiful and that there's a never-ending stream of passionate people happy to produce said content altruistically out there.
This is the concept that is most frequently left out of otherwise thoughtful analyses on the topic at hand.
Although I would not label the motivation as purely altruistic, what many people fail to realize is that people who create art of any kind, and have honest motivations for doing so, are going to be doing it no matter the profit potential. Personally, I am a music composer [0] and I must make music. I am so unconcerned by profit that I have given all of my work away for free for more than a decade. I do all of my album releases on a podcast feed so that people never have to pay money, accept the terms of service of Spotify, or be raped by ad tech just to hear my work.
To me, payment is the fact that people heard my work. On that metric alone, SoundCloud has given me a lot more "payment" than any other online service out there, since it was so apparent when people did engage with my work, and those engagements were very meaningful to me on the whole.
There's a few passions that I have/have had, but I've found it hard to devote the time to any of them because I tend to feel very drained after doing work on things that I don't particularly care about.
For example, I used to work in VR, which enabled me to begin exploring ambisonics in my music.
Get big enough -- like Linus Media Group, for example -- and companies will tear down your door to sponsor your videos. I do wonder how much a smaller (say, 50k subscriber) channel gets from shilling for Hello Fresh. I just can't imagine many viewers of Joe's Long-Form Gaming Essay Channel are looking for a meal delivery service or a men's grooming accessory.
Sorry if that old joke is now annoying! On a serious note, thanks for all your work on Giant Bomb back in the day. That site meant a lot to me for a long time.
Asking how to monetize something like GameFAQs or Wikia feels like how do you monetize friends sharing tips and talking about common passions with each other? Why does that need to be monetized? Some dude figures out left-right-B-A-B-B and posts it to a message board and doesn't need to be paid for it.
I guess another example is my favorite podcast, Iron Culture. Both the podcast and the YouTube channel don't accept sponsorships and lose money, but the hosts are both coaches, one is a scientist, one runs a small supplement company and hosts a History channel YouTube show, and they make their money from that. Recording themselves talking about their research and interests that they'd be talking about with each other anyway doesn't need to be its own full-time job.
Granted, I don't know what this means for real journalism that involves running beats, traveling, long-form investigations, all of which are definitely full-time jobs and not something you just want people doing as a hobby they record themselves during. But a lot of "good content" is not journalism. It's just people recording their thoughts and findings while doing a hobby they love in a way that they would have done for free in the past while still having a regular job, but for whatever reason, that's no longer good enough.
Even though magazines are largely dead/dying that subscription model seems like the only workable one. You get a bunch of content for a relatively low yearly price. Even then no individual creator is going to get independently wealthy.
Because it costs money. Some things, e.g. contributing to the Wikia, don't cost money, they just cost time. You can't pay for a website with time, though, you need to pay a host.
Patreon is in a similar category to "donation" links on Twitch/YouTube. It's all phrased as this weird "support us!" thing, instead of "pay for the damn videos you've enjoyed for the past year", which might be necessary right now just to get people to sign up, but I don't think it's sustainable or healthy. Journalists, streamers and video creators shouldn't need to pretend they're busking on the street, asking for donations and support. They're working a damn job, pay them.
Ruined the UI, got rid of all the good content and replaced it with C-tier series that get canceled before concluding anyway. Oh, and have basically doubled prices. I canceled a year ago and haven’t missed it in the slightest - and I had it back when it was still dvds by mail.
Other streamers I find myself starting and stopping as I find stuff to watch. For example, I've started and stopped Disney twice. The first to watch Mandelorian and the second to watch Get Back. It's one reason I really like subscribing through Apple. Subscribe-unsubscribe is a single click away.
Yes some of their new shows are... not to my liking (hey, maybe somebody out there really loves Warrior Nun but I stopped after a few episodes) but several are (Shadow and Bone, Witcher, Umbrella Academy, Ozarks, Cobra Kai, Lupin) I'm looking forward to future seasons, or finishing the series (in the case of Ozarks).
HBO Max might fall into the season-subscription category for me, where I take it 3-6 months a year. And maybe Disney+ too except I've got a large backlog there.
Anyway, the behavior change for me is to watch a show sooner rather than later. I was working my way through Brooklyn Nine-Nine on Hulu and reached season 6, taking a break for a few weeks, to return and discover the remained of the episodes are tied to a live TV subscription. Not sure if some license deal expired in time I took a break after season 5, or if it was always like that (however, I don't think so).
With Netflix dipping into ad supported type things I'm not even sure "pay or watch it turn to shit" is the case. I know right now the ads are going to be on a new, even cheaper tier, but I am not convinced it will stay that way. Increasingly I feel like over time it will all just turn to shit eventually anyway.
Maybe start showing customers estimated cost of what they got for free ? Maybe a sticky header with "You watched 84 hours worth $173" next to a "Donate now" button ?
I 1000% agree with the idea of having to pay for what I consume. Not many agree with me.
I just left a company that's doing its level best to make this more affordable and achievable for small organizations, and I wish them the absolute best, but this was true when GB was new and it's still true now. Video is just too many bits across too many gatekeepers (like any of the big clouds). It's not that there isn't transit capacity, it's that everybody who anyone "trusts" wants to bill you per-gigabyte and if you want decent quality-of-experience you have to play ball with the CDNs, who then proceed to have a noose around your neck.
> How can good content be monetized in a way that allows it to remain independent and not succumb to warping its content to feed that monetization?
I think, most strongly, it either has to not be video or consumers have to be willing to put up with early-2010s video jank. That's the crux of it: an audience trained on YouTube and even Twitch--despite their own jank, they're about as good as it gets for streaming and they're free--is much less likely to put up with something like a 2014 Giant Bomb media player (and 2014 Giant Bomb video quality; the cinematography was always great but 720p lasted for a long time in GB-land).
Also, even if you ignore the "we're camping next to fascists" vibe of the whole thing, PeerTube quality-of-experience management is deeply poor besides. If you're using some small DIY CDN, you have predictably bad performance, instead of suddenly bad performance, and if you're using a big CDN, you have working traffic steering.
If I had a website where I'd host my videos as an alternative to YouTube, I'd probably go with PeerTube and have people support me by seeding videos for me.
I tend to think that, since you're already foregoing discoverability by not federating with other PeerTube instances, you might as well also just build your bootleg CDN off of Hetzner nodes or whatever and have points of presence in places you care about. It's not that expensive and it's likely to be more consistent in perf. (You could say "well, run PeerTube and register your pops as peers", but other peers falling out of the swarm is the problem, not your own.)
I just don't really see a point to doing so as a small/individual creator or as a brand/channel.
When a user stops watching for whatever reason, they leave the swarm. If a client has been getting segments from a peer that is close to them, and that user completes watching the video and closes the browser window, that peer goes offline. The player client then needs to find another peer to pull segments from, and hope that the peer can deliver at the same speed. Because most of these player extensions are on top of HLS or DASH, you're not "buffering" in advance very far, so you're sensitive to this bump (this is tunable, and P2P clients generally buffer more segments than those delivered by CDNs exclusively). Whether you can't find a peer with the segments you need, or the peer can't deliver fast enough, or the algo stalls and doesn't fail back to CDN based delivery fast enough, you get a playback stall.
Playback stalls always add frustration, and they're often multiplicative. One stall, you assume there's an internet issue, and it'll be fine. Two stalls, you grow frustrated with the service. Three stalls, you close the window. And now there's another peer dropping out the swarm, causing more interruptions in playback for other users.
IMO, as the tech stands today, P2P video delivery doesn't work super well unless you're setting up a P2P CDN, or have some other mechanism that allows for a peer to more gracefully exit a swarm to avoid stalls and signal to clients to shift before an abrupt exit.
Even then though, your average content viewer has different standards. We're opting for 1080p/4K content over the much more common smaller feeds. Netflix loads the first few segments of even the most esoteric content not in your local ISP cache in 100's of milliseconds, users flit from YouTube video to YouTube video randomly, and scroll TikTok like we used to scroll through the Twitter firehose back in the hey-day of the PopcornTime. More content is consumed on mobile devices than set-top boxes, which brings power and data constraints, both from metered data and with networks that are both highly latency variable and not tuned for upstream bandwidth, that make participation in a P2P swarm not ideal.
While content protection is certainly a core tenant of why content is centralized, if the big players at YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, et al, haven't figured out a way to shirk their highest cost center in lieu of putting it on the backs of someone else even cheaper than ISPs without causing a substandard consumer experience with P2P, then you can be darn sure that this is a tough nut to crack.
You would need to create an ecosystem that rewards public good more than private capital. To do that, you would have to start with an enormous amount of capital, and be willing to essentially give it away.
In theory, that's what government is for. In practice... not so much.
(edit: my cat submitted this post half-finished. I've completed it now.)
HN skews critical but NFT and web3 poses a possible path to improvement for certain types of content creation.
An artist or content creator can deploy their own smart contract, have full control over what media it points to, and be paid directly through it. Marketplaces like Foundation[1] act as wrappers on top of this content, and it is in their best interest to keep the fees low and website free of ad-spam and algorithmic nonsense to retain top talent on their platform that drives revenue.
[1] https://foundation.app/collection/shapesncolors?sortOrder=DE...
Even then as a host you need to provide seeds for all your videos as a P2P swarm will only ever help with currently popular videos. So in actuality P2P ends up with similar hosting costs to traditional video hosting only providing a bandwidth savings on viral content everyone watches simultaneously.
The reality is most people don't need to be able to handle millions of simultaneous views, and so a basic setup with "p2p on top" might work exceedingly well.
My point is the P2P on top is very difficult to actually build and have work well. Like HTTP serving it doesn't obviate storage needs. You need to seed all of the content you distribute via P2P.
Then you're just down to what the CDN cost is for the "active" video, maybe the last two?
Once the network is established as a good place for creators to be able to actually make money, you attract the good creators. They aren't getting pennies on an ad (or, if they are, that's what they were happy with; we all start somewhere/traffic volume is important); they're getting the full ad buy minus some percentage for the site (more like 10% -20%, less like 50%-90%).
As the site, acting as a publisher, you get to dictate the ad network, and set boundaries for keeping things profitable (neo-hayes-code "cost of doing business" gatekeeping). As content creators, they get freedom of association and deal-making (which includes refusing to serve ads that they disagree with).
Then, when you have a solid network of solid content, you layer in a subscription model which could allow you to sensibly bundle content. While each content creator could set their own subscription tiers (including free ones, for the purposes of advertising their own content or giving things away for free because they are such absolute champions), they would be able to opt-in certain tiers to be "bundled", which would allow users to pick and choose content creators that they want their subscription bundles to apply to. This is where you get to the first rumblings of reasonable payment for journalism work. Because, as far as I know, it's almost impossible to get people to pay for journalism, no matter how good it is. But if you can add it in to a bundle, while still letting people choose their outlets/sources, you can subsidize the journalism with the media profit (like how we do it on TV).
Of course, to facilitate that, the site would need some robust utilities for writing new articles, such that it might be indistinguishable from a WYSIWYG website creator, but that's not something that's insurmountable. Especially if the site is profitable.
Anyway, that's my swing. I've been working on it, myself, but it's not like I ever intended to run a social media app. I certainly don't have the funds to run it, myself, and it's an untested model so investment would be very surprising. So just POC stuff and collecting feedback from content creators. It all seems very promising, but I still haven't answered the question of 'will it make money?'
Why do you feel that the site's cut could be as low as 10%? It's very expensive to host and serve high-quality video, and you've not described anything that would lower the site's costs relative to something like YouTube (which I don't believe is stunningly profitable).
But I think the answer you're looking for is that the publisher gets to make money as a facilitator, rather than a program scheduler. The model doesn't make users the customers, it makes content creators AND advertisers (together; doesn't work without both) the customers. If advertisers want to work with a content creator on your network, and they want that content viewed with your network, then they will have to make a deal to join the network. That's passive revenue for the site, on top of the percentage of the ad buys. Essentially, you put the "no free rides" subscription model on the advertisers, and then let content creators decide who gets free rides for THEIR subscription models.
On top of that, there's a whole other revenue stream in developing "networks" and selling "social" functionality to advertisers and content creators that get value out of interactivity (ex: monetizing the inclusion of advertisers in "best value" ad-buy deals that target a "content creator type" like "these ads go well if you provide cooking content") . And we haven't even talked about "whales" and monetizing the customer base with twitch-like engagement mechanisms. I cringe at the thought of some of it, but if the creators can make money off of it, more power to them! And a little percentage of their windfall to the site! ;)
Of course, there's always a new way to make a buck, and there's some very deep pockets in advertising, so I don't fear for the innovation that could go on, in a site run as described.
Unfortunately I don't think this is possible. As soon as you bring in ads you open the door to the AdTech bullshit parade. The incentive goes from making good content to clickbait because that drives hits. Subscriptions can pay hosting bills but it's not going to let anyone get paid a meaningful amount of money for co tributing let alone write full time for a site.
I think the best content is going to continue to be entirely community run Wikis. Stuff like NIWA. They aren't going to replace journalism but then game journalism has been barely journalism for decades. Most has just been/is warmed over press releases or reporting on someone else's reporting.
The challenge here is that Fandom own a near monopoly on videogame wikis. Competing with them is exceptionally difficult.
It's something myself and a few other folks have done when we forked the Path of Exile wiki from Fandom to poewiki.net, we've been officially recognised by the game creators, have acquired hundreds of thousands of legitimate backlinks and yet Google still prefer to serve Fandom pages instead of ours.
From the outside, it seems like a lot of people bring their audiences to those platforms and make an okay living at it — not becoming millionaires, but making a "grown up living" — and that they can be relatively audience-driven as opposed to advertiser driven, or following the dictates of a distant corporate directive. That's what it seems like. Is that hopelessly naive of me to believe?
If only there were a way to distribute files freely, in distributed, decentralized fashion.
Drawing an analogy from movies where MCU gets made for theatre format and smaller independent movie for OTT format, creators would also need to diverge in their engagement and monetization paths.
Someone like Joe Rogan may build large audience in big platform to build different monetization model whereas a creator creating content for D&D enthusiasts would depend on building strong community driven monetization model.
My bet is that most of the creators would fall in the latter category who are trying to force fit their content to be relevant on larger platforms which is sub-optimal. As long as they get a chance to bring audience out of the bigger platforms to engage their audience in a format of their liking & create an experience for them, they stand a better chance of monetization.
That is the bet I have taken in my start-up. The idea is to create an ecosystem of tools that help content creators engage with their smaller set of audience who are willing to pay for the content. Keep the whole experience as seamless as possible to make the experience exceptional.
This still does not solve for the discoverability problem for which they have to still rely on larger platforms. The idea is to give as many tools as possible to help creators once they have identified audience who are willing to pay the creator and give them a better fighting chance.
My 2 cents on this.
I think the habit of doing so (manually or automatically) sadly isn't there yet, because most conversations I see about Brave/BAT are "how much money can this make ME by earning BAT."
Right now I'm paying $50 a month (highest tier) for a group of writers / comedians I really love, and I don't see an alternative to Patreon that would allow me to support them at that level. I don't get anything extra out of it beyond knowing they can support themselves.
I think there are probably those with money to spare, but it's probably like the prisoner's dilemma and they don't want to be the one's contributing if others can get it for free.
What we didn't know then in 2003-2004, was that Apple ended up eating the entire industry (at the time) and everyone just bought an iPod and called it a day. MP3.com rightly fell apart shortly after.
Weirdly enough, that assumed model and need now exists now that content has fractured again, this time with video. Which service is streaming that movie I want to watch? We're getting to the point where we need those registries as much as we need "caniuse" for browser comparability.
Should that directory concept have been attempted on a very important domain like mp3.com, itself having fallen apart earlier in the Internet bust? Probably not, but hindsight is easy looking back. Back then domains were more important.
Anyways, just answering to some trivia for you. I didn't have much to do with that site's origins.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mp3-com-spin...
https://www.theregister.com/2004/01/12/vivendi_spinoff_takes...
https://www.theregister.com/2003/11/19/dont_shoot_the_mp3_co...
Being a community manager during the transition must have been a bit rough, so I apologize if my message brought any bad reminders.
Cheers.
Edit: Looks like some of it was recovered, and there's hope that the archive still exists somewhere. https://www.wired.com/2007/01/ilike-responds-/
The answer that every other entertainment vertical/industry figured out 100+ years ago (thousands?) -- merchandise sales.
Looking at merch from the music world, I believe there's a market for would pay for merch that's thoughtful and creative like a mini-book, custom playing cards or posters that do a deep dive on something that streamer is interested in.
Maybe so, but all of that stuff is expensive to produce and create, music has big publishing companies that build this stuff.
Well, don't go with ads, go with crypto-miners running on the viewers hardware - accessed via the web. keep it slim (0.1% of the GPU or what ever)...
If we went with that - that could be a viable source of income for content creators that don't rely on the every growing ad industry.
Was this true even after you launched the payed GB subscriptions? It felt like you guys were the first ones to do something like that and I payed for it and would have payed more at the time, especially if I knew it would keep whiskey independent.
It seems like now other similar people like nextlander and action button are having success doing the same thing with Patreon. That seems like the solution to the problem you describe to me, just let me pay directly for the things I watch, it seems like there is an audience there who is willing to pay for quality.
IMO, subscriptions. But you have to A) have special content worth paying for, and B) make it easy to cancel and resub.
My local paper failed at B, so I refuse to resubscribe, even though the content is good.
In a crowded space like say, VG reviews, I don't think A is possible.
>> How can good content be monetized in a way that allows it to remain independent and not succumb to warping its content to feed that monetization? How can it be audience driven instead? Is such a thing even possible? Right now good monetization strategies beget bad content. There's got to be a better way than cobbling together five platforms under a Patreon account, giving all of them 10-50% along the way.
I'll tell you how: pay-per-view content
But don't do it by individual silos. I want a service where I pay monthly, say, $50, and I can go to ANY content to get what I need: Bloomberg, WSJ, wikipedia, Medium, CommonSenseMedia, Gamespot, whatever. Stop forcing me to view these sites daily to maximize my return (ie. newspapers). I want ala cart that pulls from a common fund. I don't want to sign up for 20 different sites with recurring fees that I have to remember to cancel when I don't use it anymore. Anyone can put what they want in ($5, $50, $100) and the premium content pulls from that. Per article. Per visit. Per 5 requests, whatever.
Likewise, and I understand it because I was there, but the nostalgia for the "old way of things" on the internet sometimes ignore the constant failures. WM hit it out of the park with Tested, Comic Vine, and Giant Bomb, but it also had Boompa and Political Base. Also, constantly increasing the size of the net of a website network without refining it and ensuring the starting portfolio is profitable was always a constant frustration. You said it best during the 10-year anniversary podcast when you listed the many times when Giant Bomb should have died, but the new monetization systems followed by new monetization systems left behind other key features that needed refinement and updates. Also, the new systems posed issues and didn't draw nearly enough money.
All that aside, the reality is that just having a single domain your one stop shop for everything, like what Giant Bomb and Comic Vine tried to be just is not how people consume media on the internet these days. Web 2.0 also had its glory days and I certainly look back at it with a big smile on my face, but you look at things on YouTube and Twitch and you cannot help but thing media online is just changing. That's the nature of the beast.
All that aside, I wish you and your family nothing the best and I want to thank you for the many memories and for listening to my nasally voice during those call-in segments many years ago.
I wish there was a frictionless as possible way to pay content creators per consumption of their content. For example content creators could set a price in a podcast app per episode or maybe a bulk deal if I bought a "season". Don't make me think too much about paying and I'll gladly consume.
I am not a huge fan of signing up for a Pateron and setting up how to ingest the content. I don't mind paying to read an article but I don't want a huge yearly subscription. Give me the chance to pay you right then and there and my poor impulse control will do the rest.
A good part of the revenue eventually was generated by cheaply generated meme content while longer form, crafted content was suffering. I'm honestly surprised they're still going. I assumed Jeff would peel off with most of the Giant Bomb guys and start something new by now. All that's left there is the Giant Bomb personalities and even that's not enough to float GameSpot and the others. GameFaqs should probably go back to its original owner.
These days when I tell actual gamers I used to work on GameSpot, they always think I mean GameStop and then don't even know what GameSpot is. It is a pretty pointless thing now given you can watch any number of Twitch streams to see what any game is like and is worth playing.
...anyway I'm sure this was a fire sale of an asset CBS forced Red Ventures to take in order to get CNET. I'm also surprised it took this long for Red Ventures to dump it.
*Edit* Ok wow I did not realize the Giant Bomb as I knew it completely fell apart. So Jeff did leave as did Vinny and Brad and they are doing their own things now. I don't know anything about the new crew but I don't see how any can complete with even the most mediocre Twitch streamer.
Oh, so this is the likely reason for those autoplaying, sticky videos that are everywhere! The ad industry bubble should have collapsed by now, but somehow it keeps growing.
Not sure if you saw, but Jeff did leave several months ago, and started a solo Patreon.
> Also at the time Facebook considered a view when the video was visible on the feed for a second
It was always 3s. That being said, if any of the video was in the viewport, it counted, which was nonsense.
I remember when that sale first happened and the owner announced everything would stay the same. He would be running things, his stance on advertising wouldn't change, and so forth.
I'm not sure if anyone actually believed that, but from what I recall the original owner (forget his name) said he was making $80/year and the stress levels were way too high. No one was shocked when he left.
What I'll tell you is that I used to be a huge fan of gamefaqs and I still visit it from time to time, but after gamespot bought them I started using them less and less. I don't know that it was anything specific they did to the site, it may have simply been me changing through life. But I do know I used to frequent the GD&P (Game Design and Programming) boards over there and they're basically a ghost town now.
Same thing here. I wonder if it's just a change in my gameplay habits and getting older. Also modern games are for the most part very hand-holdy. And I usually have used Youtube to find clips to help me through difficult sections of games.
I think Gamefaqs is a relic of its time and today doesn't have a lot of relevance for a large portion of today's popular games.
There's exceptions of course (Elden Ring comes to mind) but these are few and far between.
I remember using gamefaqs to help me through the water section of Zelda: OOT. Today I'd probably watch a play through on Youtube and be constantly scrubbing the video to learn where to go next. Second best would be a community-moderated wiki walkthrough.
Part of this is because there's monetary incentives to produce walkthroughs (SEO farms, or even just random peoples' YouTube channels). The altruism of writing a .txt guide is gone.
I hope they don't apply that same monetisation to GameSpot, GameFAQs, etc. Otherwise those sites will die almost overnight.
Which is a good thing honestly. There's such a big difference in usability between the independent internet that exists out of genuine passion/interest and the internet that's run by advertising companies and people looking to make money off advertisements.
Just hope your owners don't decide to cash out and sell the site to Wikia/Fandom later on, otherwise the whole branching stuff will have to be done all over again.
Curse used to traffic the ads for this site, at least in 2016 when I worked for them. They may very well still be getting trafficked by Fandom who have since acquired Curse Media.
CBS did not do a good job of running it especially after the site's founder left so its good that they're selling it. Its just probably not good that Fandom is buying it.
Best result is a Steam forums link, second best is YouTube, third is Wikia and all that crap (why would you auto-play an unrelated video and make that take up a third of the screen in a sticky div if I scroll down?!?!). Fourth are seemingly machine-generated garbage results that don't contain anything useful but try to look like they do.
Gamefaqs would still be the best on desktop but it doesn't show up in searches so I kinda forgot they existed and also text FAQs suck to navigate on mobile, and 99% of the time if I'm looking up how to find the Yellow Key or whatever it's on my phone, because I'm either not at my computer, or am gaming on it. Some other comments here make it seem like they don't have content for a lot of modern games, anyway.
In the mid 2000s, a lot of that traffic got diverted to IGN (who started siphoning off prominent FAQ writers to write guides for their own site) but also Digg and then Reddit. Having a game-specific forum on GameFAQs didn't matter as much when you could moderate your own subreddit community for it.
- In super Mario you can gather 100 coins for an extra life!
- There are no currently known cheats for Civilization VI. If you know one, tell us!
2. Large portions of the page dedicated to "engagement bait", e.g. related articles in a permanent sidebar (mixed with ads), piles of random forum discussions/elsewhere on fandom links at the end of the page.
3. Open a fandom page with your adblocker off. Video ads in the header, in a floating overlay, randomly mid article, etc.
5. Despite nominally being Wikis the Fandom wikis have effectively zero Wiki-like intrapage or interpage navigation.
I remember the likes of Wookiepedia and Memory Alpha before they got Fandomed. They are sad ghosts of what used to be very good fan oriented Wikis. Fandom is a dumpster fire and I wish them nothing but ill fortune.
The dark patterns must drive many people away completely. You have to fight them every step of the way if you use the site. Who wants to see their creative work featured on such a site for sore eyes?
If it paid some people might overcome all that but to do it for free?
I get it, Fandom sucks. The rest of the points are completely accurate. But the amount of interlinking isn't their fault.
How is it only a problem on Fandom?
No, they're not the same by default.
Wikia/Fandom defaults to a WYSIWYG editor, linking is a 4-click process.
Wikipedia has a toolbar atop a wiki code view. It does offer the option of a WYSIWYG editor, but it is _not_ the default. Linking is [[some article title]].
I'm a logged out user on both sites, so it's not a preference I've set.
As a platform, Fandom provides the same visual editor that is provided by MediaWiki. That was the claim.
> I mean, it’s the same VisualEditor that’s used across MediaWiki sites, including as the default on Wikipedia.
I mean, I guess you could claim technical correctness if Wikia was defaulting to a non-visual editor, but that's going on a wild tangent and the opposite of the real situation
I'm not sure how the opt-in visual editor on wikipedia being the same as the default editor on wikia would disprove the claim that the visual editor's more difficult linking would cause people using the default experience on wikia (wysiwg editor) to link less compared to those using the default experience on wikipedia (source editor) with it's less sidelined linking experience.
The site mechanically sucks, with all the ads, needless videos, comment sections, "related content", etc, but this one is up to the writers to do. It's not Fandom's fault if writers don't integrate wiki functionality more thoroughly.
I personally never even noticed Wookiepedia or Memory Alpha switching to Fandom. They seem about the same as they always have.
When Wikia was more standard MediaWiki layout both sites were extremely usable. The Fandom trash styling makes both very difficult to navigate now. They're unusable without an ad blocker.
Compare, a few pages on, say, http://poewiki.net (the community fork) with http://pathofexile.fandom.com
Compare the loading times. The jank. The layout, that optimizes providing you information, over serving you ads. The usability difference is night and day.
They were both founded by Jimmy Wales. They both have the goal of organizing information using crowdsourcing. And look at the difference in outcome.
On that note, I wonder if Fandom contributes back any funds to the Wikimedia Foundation. If so, it might actually make sense to have two branches of the same software, if the commercial arm can fund the non-profit one.
The inevitable problem with these schemes is that the MBAs at the commercial part will eventually try to "optimize" the funding channel towards the non-profit section.
edit: source code is here https://gitdab.com/cadence/breezewiki
The fandom wikis are just...terrible from a UX standpoint. And it's a shame that such massive game wikis like Minecraft and Terraria are trapped on Fandom (via a former buyout of gamepedia).
A plea to game developers: If you aren't willing to create and host an official wiki, please help/enable your game community to create and host a wiki that isn't held hostage by a site like Fandom. Some of my favorites:
- https://stardewvalleywiki.com/
- https://wiki.factorio.com/
- https://runescape.wiki/
- https://www.bg-wiki.com/
- https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/The boards now look like shit, but then, the Internet has changed in 20 years. All good things come to an end.
You and 75% of the rest of us. ;-)
The fact that they weren't losing their collective mind made me realise that I read it wrong.
Gamespot: video game publication
Gamestop: brick & mortar store used video game reseller of wallstreet bets fame
Logic mostly says no though.
Hope they're all doing well over there.
- Vinny, Brad, and Alex left last year, and later re-grouped and started Nextlander, which is basically GB but without having to build their own platform (live Twitch streams, on-demand videos on YouTube, and Simplecast- and Patreon-hosted podcasts), and Brad works with another Whiskey alum, Will Smith, on a separate tech podcast and open-source specific podcast
- Jeff left a few months ago and is basically doing the same as Nextlander, only largely on his own
Nextlander has done a few things with GiantBomb, most recently a video around the new Splatoon game[0], but Jeff hasn't appeared directly yet.
[0]: https://www.giantbomb.com/videos/splat-off-giant-bomb-vs-nex...
I only lasted a year before I jumped into working for myself as a freelance developer, but I learned a lot at that job. And my favorite part was that I got the job because I posted my resume on Craigslist and my manager found it and called me to interview. I had basically no relevant experience or anything, and I'll always be grateful to him for taking a chance on me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/xuhbv1/psa_fan...
Disclaimer: I worked at CBS Interactive/ViacomCBS Streaming during the original properties sale to Red Ventures.
Games journalism is dead it's been dead for a while, anyone making money in it right now is just involved trying to make the last few bucks before it evaporates.
This is a bad criticism because it’s about Dean Takahashi, whose actual problem is he’s just kept around to give softball interviews to CEOs to make them feel good, but nobody actually noticed this so just remember he can’t play Cuphead.
People aren't stupid, that "game journalists" were basically in bed (metaphorically speaking) with the game publishers/developers themselves was a _very_ common complaint.
When it was revealed a reviewer was _literally_ sleeping with a game developer, it boiled over. Gaming journalism could have chosen to defend themselves by creating some sort of standard. Instead, they took advantage of the internet being vitriolic to try and turn this into a debate about misogyny.
What you're seeing now is the fallout of that decision. People don't trust them. Because it turns out, attacking your audience and labeling them as sexist assholes isn't a great idea.
Who isn’t one of the liberal arts degree blogger types who wants to replace game reviews with leftist politics lectures either. He writes for a business journal.
There were plenty of people AT THE TIME talking about the hubris of the gaming media in thinking they could attack their audience. They did it anyway.
so now we're seeing people talking about how the reason gaming journalism is in a race to the bottom is that their audience doesn't trust them and trust is the only real value they had so they're being squeezed from the top and bottom.
The way I often put it...
Gaming journalists are neither gamers or journalists.
High-quality, factual content is usually boring. Gamers won't read it. So for a journalist to cover gaming, they'll have to resort to making clickbait and ragebait, and at that point, the quality is so low that I don't think it's fair to still call it journalism, as it would be an insult to the word.
Then there's the multitude of journalists that just simply don't understand games. They're so bad at games that you start to wonder if they're even capable of completing 1-1 in Super Mario Bros.
Makes sense if they're all 12-year-olds (or the emotional equivalent)
Why don’t fan communities host their own MediaWiki instance?
I don’t imagine that the storage/bandwidth/compute needs of a niche fan wiki would be cost-prohibitive.
Then you could completely avoid all of Fandom’s ads.
There's a new competitor though for gaming wikis that's started hosting some forks & some new original wikis, https://wiki.gg/.
Disclaimer: I was a contractor for Fandom until they terminated me in August this year (I ran their esports wikis including Leaguepedia).
It's much easier to do "free on fandom" and so lots of them move that way.
The real, time-consuming work is building the site up front, then on an ongoing and perpetual basis: doing technical maintenance and updates, moderating the site for trolls and spam, monitoring and logs, backups, user support, community administration, etc..
It's also thankless work because wikis, unlike forums, are much harder places to build a critical mass of users who will be engaged and want to invest time and effort.
So you have a proportionally small number of people who maintain the content, and a potentially large audience of read-only drop-in users who are not invested in the community in any way, but just want answers so they can leave.
Finding people to operate this kind of site reliably and long-term, unpaid, is really difficult.
So instead, for better or worse people get it for free from Fandom, in exchange for ads.
> Fandom Will Now Rank as the #14 Ad Supported Site in the U.S.
I do use metacritic and gamefaqs from time to time. I wonder what will happen to them