19 ms·

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 wit

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.

anonemouse145 9y ago
Quote unquote journalists who now write articles about being flown out to Vegas on the dime of a game maker they're intended to review, given food and lodging and parties, and saying it's all so garish and boring to get paid to eat caviar on a rooftop. No really that article happened. If some of these wealthy idiots could lose their jobs, that would be great. They're going to end up taking down some of the lesser people who are trying to reform the system as they go, that's not so great. But I'll take it.
anonemouse145 9y ago
Hold on, it was Santa Monica. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.polygon.com/platform/amp/2015/6/1/8687867/rock-band-4-preview https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.polygon.com/platform/amp/20... "I'm standing at a safe distance, drinking fizzy water, eating puff pastry canapes and chatting to another colleague about politics in the Philippines. I'm having an OK time."
ethbro 9y ago
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.
- googletazer 9y ago
  right on all counts
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  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? [1] https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ [2] http://gillen.cream.org/wordpress_html/assorted-essays/the-new-games-journalism/ http://gillen.cream.org/wordpress_html/assorted-essays/the-n...
  - megaman22 9y ago
    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
  - sprafa 9y ago
    rock paper shotgun used to be amazing, but a lot of the early staff left to make their own games I think
    - taohansen 9y ago
      they are still amazing. see any of the recent articles on Observer or playing a spacefaring race of tortoise in Stellaris.
  - Uhhrrr 9y ago
    I think Nathan Grayson writing about his friends is pretty well established at this point: http://www.deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=nathan_grayson http://www.deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=nathan_grayson Although he now writes for Kotaku, not RPS. techraptor.com and nichegamer.com are pretty good.
    - abritinthebay 9y ago
      Well established amongst the GamerGate crowd, yes (which is what deepfreeze is all about). Though you know that - after all the two sites you mention were leading on that trash-fire of a movement.
- yborg 9y ago
  Video game journalism peaked too soon with Old Man Murray. It's mostly been a vast wasteland of shilling since.
  - VonGuard 9y ago
    This is absolutely the best comment on HN in years. OMM turned game reviewing into a SCIENCE with TTC ratings.
- VonGuard 9y ago
  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.
- rjbwork 9y ago
  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.
- moomin 9y ago
  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. That’s why I read Which.
- pjc50 9y ago
  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. (+) "Soccer"
spatulon 9y ago
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.
- sgarman 9y ago
  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.
- kibwen 9y ago
  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.
  - gozur88 9y ago
    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.
indubitable 9y ago
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.

anonemouse145 9y ago

Quote unquote journalists who now write articles about being flown out to Vegas on the dime of a game maker they're intended to review, given food and lodging and parties, and saying it's all so garish and boring to get paid to eat caviar on a rooftop. No really that article happened. If some of these wealthy idiots could lose their jobs, that would be great. They're going to end up taking down some of the lesser people who are trying to reform the system as they go, that's not so great. But I'll take it.

anonemouse145 9y ago

Hold on, it was Santa Monica. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.polygon.com/platform/amp/2015/6/1/8687867/rock-band-4-preview https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.polygon.com/platform/amp/20... "I'm standing at a safe distance, drinking fizzy water, eating puff pastry canapes and chatting to another colleague about politics in the Philippines. I'm having an OK time."

ethbro 9y ago

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.

googletazer 9y ago
right on all counts
PhasmaFelis 9y ago
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? [1] https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ [2] http://gillen.cream.org/wordpress_html/assorted-essays/the-new-games-journalism/ http://gillen.cream.org/wordpress_html/assorted-essays/the-n...
- megaman22 9y ago
  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
- sprafa 9y ago
  rock paper shotgun used to be amazing, but a lot of the early staff left to make their own games I think
  - taohansen 9y ago
    they are still amazing. see any of the recent articles on Observer or playing a spacefaring race of tortoise in Stellaris.
- Uhhrrr 9y ago
  I think Nathan Grayson writing about his friends is pretty well established at this point: http://www.deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=nathan_grayson http://www.deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=nathan_grayson Although he now writes for Kotaku, not RPS. techraptor.com and nichegamer.com are pretty good.
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    Well established amongst the GamerGate crowd, yes (which is what deepfreeze is all about). Though you know that - after all the two sites you mention were leading on that trash-fire of a movement.
yborg 9y ago
Video game journalism peaked too soon with Old Man Murray. It's mostly been a vast wasteland of shilling since.
- VonGuard 9y ago
  This is absolutely the best comment on HN in years. OMM turned game reviewing into a SCIENCE with TTC ratings.
VonGuard 9y ago
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.
rjbwork 9y ago
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.
moomin 9y ago
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. That’s why I read Which.
pjc50 9y ago
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. (+) "Soccer"

spatulon 9y ago

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.

sgarman 9y ago
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.
kibwen 9y ago
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.
- gozur88 9y ago
  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.

indubitable 9y ago

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.