I still remember the launch of The Escapist. It was so different with its styling and content, sort of an online version of the Edge magazine. Alas that didn't last long.
I want to comment on and lament the loss of the "good old days," but I'm biased; I wrote several articles for them. They paid more than pretty much any other online only publication and were not only receptive to, but outright encouraged cold queries.
It was odd to watch them do a hard turn from applying more thoughtful analysis of games and gaming culture to hopping on the GamerGate train. I assume that didn't pan out for them as they'd hoped.
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?
It's funny because in retrospect their paginated, dual-column, tiny-viewport UI is the sort of unresponsive skeumorphism that we make fun of today. At the time though it absolutely did lend it a certain air of professionalism, by deliberately styling itself after magazines to elevate it above the emerging gamer-blog tabloids (one of which, in full disclosure, I was paid to populate).
Reminder that Something Awful could have had Yahtzee / Zero Punctuation and remained somewhat relevant, but Lowtax gave him an insultingly low offer amounting to something like $40 in forum credit per episode.
The strength of SA isn't their public content, it's the community and the forum. But if you do want their public content, I find that the main important output is LPs.
I mean, for me it's not quite as outright laugh-out-loud-funny as it was several years ago (Only part of which I find is to do with the vibe of it), but it's still amusing to watch if you have some time to kill outside of a project.
There seems to be a serious contraction going on right now with the mass media surrounding games, and I'm alright with it. We're heavily saturated right now with an echo chamber of websites that parrot each other endlessly about video games, game culture, streamers and their various screwups, etc.
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.
As far as I can tell, games "journalism" has been a cesspool of corruption and wink-wink kickbacks since the "old" E3.
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.
The games press has always had one central problem: their main source of revenue is advertisers of games. When a bad game gets a bad review, the advertisers pull their ads, and the outlet goes down. I was fired for exactly this type of bullshit back in 2001.
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 is, there are three kinds of things people want from games journalism:
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.
I remember reading, in print, when print was still a thing, an article explaining that the single biggest revenue driver was exclusive reviews, and that to get them you negotiated a review score.
I remember realising slightly later than something similar was true for most magazine reviews. It still is.
Rock Paper Shotgun[1] is really good for the most part, co-founded by the writer of The New Games Journalism[2]. Their reviews don't have explicit ratings, which neatly sidesteps the fooforaw over giving things the "wrong" rating. They're on GamerGate's hit list (because somebody's girlfriend allegedly slept with one of their writers), which is another point in their favor. They're PC-specific, though.
Any other good gaming sites out there I should check out?
That's kind of the failure of Deepfreeze - GG wanted to prove that their claims about journos held water, but when they provided and standardized their data it's so off-putting and clinical that it's hard to not dismiss as a little creepy.
The GGers who genuinely thought it was about ethics in journalism were completely missing the point though. I want you to imagine we were talking the defence industry. Imagine it was public knowledge that billions of dollars were being skimmed by defence contractors. Then imagine someone shows up and says “Hey, this guy’s been telling people to go to gun store A and getting $20 store vouchers.” Then imagine that turned out not to be the case.
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.”
But it's not clinical. It's splitting hairs and in some cases clearly biased against him. They literally call a piece he wrote as "agenda driven" and "proofless" based on their own personal opinion. Also just because someone knows someone doesn't mean that they have a "personal relationship". That's like saying every time one recommended software to their boss they should discuss everyone that they know in the company because you couldn't possibly deliver a valid review of a product if you know someone there. They also don't provide any context, don't provide how many "non-biased" reviews the person has done for contrast, in short, it's nowhere near clinical or data-driven. It's written like a high schooler out to prove to their love interest the reasons that they should drop their current significant other and date them instead.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun also used to run a regular column called Saturday Morning Crapshoot, which covered a lot of old, weird, and less than stellar games. I think they stopped, but the archive is good for a chuckle every now and then
Used to love RPS, before most of its best writers left. Now it's a not particularly exceptional group of writers and the most whinging, entitled EiC/owner I've ever seen. There's nothing quite like seeing John Walker act like a 2 year old in every comments section.
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.
Man, I was subscribed to EGM for years, from my childhood to the end of their publishing it on paper. Since then, I haven't really seen any publications online that I really trust or like a whole lot. It's a sad state of affairs really.
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.
Games themselves are going through some interesting times. Several AAA single-player games are rumoured to have sold poorly (notably the Bethesda games Dishonored 2, Prey, and The Evil Within 2), and I've seen talk that publishers are now reluctant to fund those types of games. That would certainly explain why EA just closed Visceral Games and 'refocused' their single-player, story-based Star Wars game.
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.
If video games weren't so utterly dominant as a medium I'd think that a 1983-esque crash was around the corner. I'm blown away by the bald-faced, not-even-trying-to-hide-it, grab-a-quick-buck shitware that's choking Steam these days. And the entire mobile gaming industry, having long since won the race to the bottom, appears to be a glut of thinly-veiled Skinner boxes banking on bored whales and financially-unsupervised children.
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.
I don't think we're going to see a crash, but a correction is definitely in order. Companies producing AAA games have been doing design by committee for a few years now, trying to distill its essence into a factory line product the same way movie studios give us the same Joseph Campbell plot in different skin over and over.
Still, you're probably right about the golden era and the difficulty of discovery. It's a shame game journalism is so corrupt.
I'm not sure what corruption in games journalism has to do with any of it. For example, the old Nintendo Power magazine was as theoretically corrupt as it is possible to be, being a propaganda rag owned by the video game company itself. And yet each issue featured tons of games that I'd have never heard of otherwise; its capacity for discovery was great.
The problem is games are so expensive and there are so many of them you can't try them all, so it's not enough to know a game exists - you need some indication it's worth buying. That's the purpose of a review, and if you can't trust the reviewer to be reasonably unbiased it's of no value.
There are an impressive number of companies attempting to cash in on the loot-box phenomenon in more and more blatant fashion. That's probably not sustainable in the long term, even apart from the possibility of regulatory gaze turning upon this form of gambling.
It seems even Twitch is dipping its toes in that water at the moment. They've been displaying a message at the top of the chat telling people that they can get a random temporary emote for every 250 bit "cheer" (about $3.50) - collect all six to get a permanent emote. It's effectively a version of the good old kompu gacha except with a limited-time deadline: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-10-25-twitch-hallowee...
Nevertheless, I could browse steam for hours and not find a game that I would really liked (and be disappointed whenever I bought some). If they were there, they were well hidden or expensive for something that had big change that I won't actually like it.
There is stuff for me to play on mobile and I was able to find it by myself. And much cheaper overall.
A lot of big games are also turning out to be so compromised by microtransactions and related mechanics that the only sane response is apathy. Look at how a modern Ubisoft game is structured... it's really ugly. I have a friend who plays For Honor, and that game is truly half-assed, with wretched netcode. It's also a massive time-grind, with "loot boxes" to boot.
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 - which was funded by the developers remortgaging their houses
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.
> Cuphead was funded by Microsoft. The whole "mortgaging the house" story is just a marketing stunt
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.
That dude was not marketing stunt. He posted video because his friends thought it is funny, he had no idea gamers will take it personally and harras him for that.
Games are good, but culture of gaming is oftentimes quite crappy without any need to organize it by marketing stunts.
I'd like the add that I don't think they will fail because they can't make something as good or better then PUBG but rather just like startups there is a lot of luck and timing involved.
I think the growth of social media (and consumer reviews such as Steam) is a simple explanation.
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.
I suspect in part this had to do with them losing some of the early series that brought people to the site and not finding any good replacements. I mean yes, Zero Punctuation is still based there. But stuff like Extra Credits isn't, nor is the Jimquisition or MovieBob or god knows how many other past series.
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.
Confusion over these sort of terms is pretty common. One that really grates for me is that the UK media use the word "refusenik" to mean "someone who is stubborn and refuses to do something" (originally it referred to those denied permission to emigrate from the Soviet Union).
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...
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.
