14 ms·

Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic

184 points by haunter 4y ago

CM30 4y ago
Oh god this is worrying. Fandom has already made Wikia an absolutely unusable, ad ridden nightmare, to the point many communities set up their own wikis to avoid dealing with it. I hope they don't apply that same monetisation to GameSpot, GameFAQs, etc. Otherwise those sites will die almost overnight.
- 24t 4y ago
  Agreed, though somehow fextralife manages to be even worse
- mjr00 4y ago
  > to the point many communities set up their own wikis to avoid dealing with it. 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.
  - CM30 4y ago
    True. Wikia's existence meant things like the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance and Square Enix Independent Wiki Alliance could put out some actually good wikis about the games they cover. Stuff like Mario Wiki, Bulbapedia, the Super Smash Bros Wiki, etc are significantly better than their Wikia/Fandom counterparts, and have proved you can defeat the service in the Google rankings by providing a better service. 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.
    - iamacyborg 4y ago
      > Bulbapedia 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.
- bdw5204 4y ago
  GameFAQs has already been dying for the last 10-15 years. Its amazing how most of their user reviews are from 2000-2005 or so and how frequently they don't even have guides for games anymore. Their message boards went from being notoriously overmoderated with tons of silly rules like a ban on profanity to notoriously undermoderated with very few rules (but what few they have are still enforced bureaucratically) and lots of trolls. 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.
  - the_lonely_road 4y ago
    I was a heavy user of gamefaqs for many years but had almost forgot they existed. The YouTube let’s play completely replaced it for me and I’m guessing for most of their userbase as well.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      YouTube only replaced it for me only in the sense that sometimes it's easier to wade through a 10-minute video to find one tiny piece of info than deal with most of the non-GameFaqs faq sites that come up in search. 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.
    - 1980phipsi 4y ago
      YouTube is great for those situations where a written explanation just doesn't quite cut it, but I prefer it more as a supplement to than a replacement of a good gamefaq.
    - 4y ago
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  I casually end up on a fandom wiki every now and then. What's the main criticism?
  - Macha 4y ago
    1. Autoplay videos done by fandom editors who may not have read the source material or even their own wiki article inserted at the top of pages just so they have video to justify video ads 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.
    - giantrobot 4y ago
      4. On mobile I can't get images to display without disabling my ad blocker. 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.
      - mynameisvlad 4y ago
        #5 is entirely dependent on the wiki itself, which is community-driven. Fandom only provides the infrastructure and platform, which support the feature.
        PaulHoule 4y ago
        But the platform affects the contributors. 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?
- Macha 4y ago
  Fandom is just rebranded wikia, for what it's worth
- dbingham 4y ago
  I feel like Fandom and Wikipedia provide a fantastic case study in the difference of outcome between non-profit, mission driven organizations and for-profit capital driven organizations. They were both founded by Jimmy Wales. They both have the goal of organizing information using crowdsourcing. And look at the difference in outcome.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    I had no idea Fandom/Wikicities/Wikia was also founded by Jimmy Wales. I agree, would be amazing to see a academic comparison between the two, one clearly had a bigger impact on humanity as a whole. 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.
    - antisthenes 4y ago
      > 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.
- coldpie 4y ago
  I believe the content on Fandom's wikis is all permissively licensed. I've often thought about making a read-only mirror of their wikis that just scrapes updates and serves the content without all the BS. Once it scales to the point where hosting is expensive, put up a donation jar. If it pays for itself, consider opening up editing and creating a fork with the end goal of killing Fandom's godawful wiki sites.
- reset-password 4y ago
  Today I am thankful for Kagi having a feature which allows me to remove or downgrade certain sites from search results. It has already saved me countless clicks to fandom and can be easily expanded to include other sites as the fandom cancer grows.
nathanaldensr 4y ago
Fandom has absolutely ruined all the GameSpot and GameFAQ wikis and resources I use while gaming. Their left-side nav with flyouts that don't disappear is so goddamned annoying. Fortunately, uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and Pi-hole kill all the ads.
- navbaker 4y ago
  It's definitely a shame. GameSpot was one of the first gaming websites I found when I really started using the internet seriously in the late 90s. One of my fondest memories around gaming is Greg Kasavin replying to a question I submitted for a weekly Q&A he did where I asked about Baldur's Gate 2 and if I, as a newbie PC gamer jumping over from consoles, would be good to go starting there or if I needed to play the first one :)
- klausa 4y ago
  Given that you're commenting on a press release announcing Fandom buying these properties, I think you're misattributing the blame here.
hajhatten 4y ago
I recognize some old Whiskey Media companies on that list. Have not followed them much after the CBS acquisition and Ryan Davis' passing. Hope they're all doing well over there.
- runevault 4y ago
  If you didn't know Jeff Gerstmann is out at GB and he was the last of the original guard (Vinny, Brad, and Alex left like... a year ago?).
- ascagnel_ 4y ago
  The founding GiantBomb staff members have all left since the sale to Red Ventures: - 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-nextlander-and-abby/2300-18077/ https://www.giantbomb.com/videos/splat-off-giant-bomb-vs-nex...
- MartinCron 4y ago
  It was when Ryan Davis died that I realized just how intimate the podcasting medium could be. While I also loved the rest of the crew, I couldn't listen to Giant Bomb without him. It was just too sad.
manuelabeledo 4y ago
For a second I read "GameStop". Headed directly to r/wsb. The fact that they weren't losing their collective mind made me realise that I read it wrong.
- NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
  Did the same thing. For anyone else reading Gamespot: video game publication Gamestop: brick & mortar store used video game reseller of wallstreet bets fame
ubertaco 4y ago
I wonder if any internal rumors of this were part of the sort of "exodus" from Giant Bomb a while back. Even Gerstmann left and is now just doing his own thing solo.
- MajimasEyepatch 4y ago
  I would be surprised if acquisition rumors made it that far down the chain so early, but I’m sure that Jeff saw the writing on the wall with how RV management was approaching things.
- runevault 4y ago
  I would be shocked if the Nextlander crew knew a year out. Jeff MIGHT have heard something around the time he left/was ousted (no clue which).
  - djhworld 4y ago
    Nextlander guys did a podcast about this, I generally got the impression they were just burnt out from years of building giant bomb and wanted out, this wasn't long after the RV acquisition.
    - runevault 4y ago
      Sure, but if they did know they'd have been NDA'd into not talking. Again, I don't think they did because I doubt this deal was in the works for a year, or if it was I doubt even Jeff G/B knew about it let alone anyone else, but them not saying anything in and of itself doesn't guarantee it. Logic mostly says no though.
onychomys 4y ago
I've been an active gamefaqs user for over 20 years now (I actually have more GF karma than HN karma, and you only get 1 GF karma a day!), and I'm honestly kind of okay with it. Yes, Fandom's sites are filled with terrible ads and autoplaying videos and all the other things that make the internet lousy. But I'd much rather have owners that are at least somewhat related to the content than be owned by some acquisition company or giant megacorp like CBS. It just seems like Fandom will be less likely to randomly shut us down someday.
- AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
  Another 20-year GameFaqs veteran, and all I can say is, no. Dear god no. The last thing I need is a freaking autoplay video with an impossibly-tiny 'x' button in the top-right corner obscuring display of my plaintext walkthrough.
- unethical_ban 4y ago
  I haven't been active for about 17 years, but I got on GF in 2002 for the Final Fantasy VII walkthroughs. Then I fell into this weird roleplay community of "factions" that existed on some old game boards for Atari 2600, I was part of Z-Tack. Then there were some people who build clones of the message boards, mostly in PHP. Outboards, Darkside Legion, Magician Type 0 were some of their names. I built my own clone largely from scratch (and with some help staring at leaked source from Outboards) and that's how I learned PHP3, MySQL, XHTML and CSS while listening to Red Hot Chili Peppers and techno. The boards now look like shit, but then, the Internet has changed in 20 years. All good things come to an end.
  - sbarre 4y ago
    > I got on GF in 2002 for the Final Fantasy VII walkthroughs You and 75% of the rest of us. ;-)
nottorp 4y ago
Hmm. Is there a mirror for the old gamefaq faqs or should I start now?
- horseAMcharlie 4y ago
  There's a collaborative effort ongoing here: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/xuhbv1/psa_fandom_has_acquired_gamespot_gamefaqs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/xuhbv1/psa_fan...
barbariangrunge 4y ago
I heard on Reddit that those gamespot shares were red hot! Joking aside, I wonder what the end result of all that on their share price was years later I do use metacritic and gamefaqs from time to time. I wonder what will happen to them
- oaththrowaway 4y ago
  Gamespot and GameStop are 2 different things...
- jacooper 4y ago
  I think k you are confusing GameSpot and GameStop.
snide 4y ago
OG founder of Giant Bomb / Comicvine / Whiskey Media here. I was also at CNET during the acquisition of Metacritic and helped build large portions of Gamespot and TV.com. I'm 10-years removed from these properties so I feel OK talking about them. 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.
- progrus 4y ago
e61133e3 4y ago
the font and branding they use makes the website unreadable
- bongobingo1 4y ago
  Might be a side effect of firefox x linux but it sure is something. https://i.imgur.com/ChAsRaA.png https://i.imgur.com/ChAsRaA.png
bertman 4y ago
This might be a good time and place to recommend "BreezeWiki", which I recently stumbled upon. It's an alternative frontend for fandom.com. https://breezewiki.com/ https://breezewiki.com/ edit: source code is here https://gitdab.com/cadence/breezewiki https://gitdab.com/cadence/breezewiki
- dcchambers 4y ago
  Wow this is pretty awesome, thanks for sharing. Would love to see this packaged up as a browser extension so that it would automatically 'fix' any fandom wiki I happen to load up. 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/
  - bertman 4y ago
    >Would love to see this packaged up as a browser extension so that it would automatically 'fix' any fandom wiki I happen to load up. https://docs.breezewiki.com/Automatic_Redirection.html https://docs.breezewiki.com/Automatic_Redirection.html
    - dcchambers 4y ago
      Awesome, thank you!
  - haunter 4y ago
    Liquipedia also worth a mention for archiving competitive game history (runs on a trimmed down version of MediaWiki) https://liquipedia.net/ https://liquipedia.net/
runevault 4y ago
Seeing this just a couple days after the latest ZA/UM (creators of the game Disco Elysium) news feels weird. The DE situation was already ironic since that game mocked capitalism and now the people who helped fund the studio have wrecked everything to the point even the creative group that was technically separate dissolved. Now we see three very significant sites in the video game space continue to get handed around like a joint on a cold night.
socialismisok 4y ago
Fandom wikis are terrible, here's hoping they don't meddle with gamefaqs.
- 63 4y ago
  I've found they're pretty manageable with liberal use of ublock's element zapper. Obviously the average user doesn't do that though so I have no idea how anyone else manages to use the site
thrillgore 4y ago
Wow. WOW. I didn't think Red Ventures was this quick to exit the market. This is not a good sign for the future of game journalism. Disclaimer: I worked at CBS Interactive/ViacomCBS Streaming during the original properties sale to Red Ventures.
- buscoquadnary 4y ago
  Game journalism has been dead for a long time. No one who is serious about games pays any attention to it, and they routinely mock everyone in games journalism, making constant comments about "journalist mode" that plays the game for you, etc, because they hold them in such low respect. Beyond that it seems like half the articles coming out in "games" journalism these days seem more interested in pushing specific political positions and discussing identity politics than actually discussing games exacerbates the problem. 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.
  - astrange 4y ago
    > making constant comments about "journalist mode" that plays the game for you 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.
    - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
      No, this is the fallout for gamergate. 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.
petarb 4y ago
As a long time GameFAQs user I feel like the service will be destroyed by ads
rickreynoldssf 4y ago
I'm an Ex-Engineering Manager at GameSpot & Giantbomb at CBS (2013-2016). All the stuff Dave mentioned was very much the same when I was there. The unit was always in trouble losing money quarter after quarter and focus was always on the ad sales. E3 was the biggest time for revenue and it was stressful in the lead up to it hoping we'd sign enough to keep things going. It got progressively worse each year. Towards the end of my tenure they were inflating video views given to ad buyers by including video views on other platforms like Facebook where we received no revenue at all and could place no ads. Also at the time Facebook considered a view when the video was visible on the feed for a second. The numbers were wildly inflated. And we were running ads from sketchy networks all the time, some of which were malicious. 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.
- ASalazarMX 4y ago
  > Towards the end of my tenure they were inflating video views given to ad buyers 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.
- Trasmatta 4y ago
  > I assumed Jeff would peel off with most of the Giant Bomb guys and start something new by now. Not sure if you saw, but Jeff did leave several months ago, and started a solo Patreon.
ravenstine 4y ago
Why TV Guide? Is that relevant in some capacity? They were considered obsolete when I was a kid and only the elderly would still use them. Seems like an interesting purchase, but I quit watching TV a long time ago. Is there something TV Guide does that people still pay attention to?
- coldpie 4y ago
  There's a lotta elderly people out there.
  - ravenstine 4y ago
    Maybe. I can't imagine my parents using TV Guide when they reach their 80s. Though I'm sure they'll still be using a DVR and intentionally deleting recordings to "save space" even with 80 petabytes of storage.
- fckgw 4y ago
  TV Guide is (and always has been) a general TV entertainment website. It still generates a lot of content.
- phone_book 4y ago
  I still use TV Guide to check what is on for sports, but only a few times a month. I don't normally watch TV and I just have an antenna directly hooked up to my TV. TV Guide is faster than the guide on my TV and I can look beyond the next hour.
kweingar 4y ago
Something I’ve always wondered: 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.
- RheingoldRiver 4y ago
  MediaWiki is pretty technically challenging to self-host. It updates frequently and the updates are nontrivial to do especially if you have a large userbase. Also, if you want an extension like Cargo, SMW, DPL, etc, that lets you query data from one page to another, your server demands will go up a lot and hosting can get quite expensive. There's a new competitor though for gaming wikis that's started hosting some forks & some new original wikis, https://wiki.gg/ 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).
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Someone needs to offer mediawiki-as-a-service (apparently https://miraheze.org https://miraheze.org tries to do this) similar to Wordpress. It's much easier to do "free on fandom" and so lots of them move that way.
- sbarre 4y ago
  Because the hosting costs are the cheapest part of it? 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.
dailyplanet 4y ago
I'm still mad that Fandom killed LyricWiki. I spent so many hours and hours adding the lyrics to my favorite songs from obscurer music, and all that effort and work got wiped.
ipmb 4y ago
Any idea where this ranking comes from? > Fandom Will Now Rank as the #14 Ad Supported Site in the U.S.
ryanwaggoner 4y ago
My first job after college was back in 2006, working as an associate product manager at GameSpot on this flash-based download manager. Another era, lol. 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.
NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
Ugh. Fandom has the most obnoxious auto-playing video ads on all their pages. This sucks.
languagehacker 4y ago
Fandom did this before right before tech markets really, really soured. It was Glam or Mode or something like that. Shortly after the acquisition they ended up doing a significant round of layoffs. Wonder if this will be another bellwether for worse tech market conditions.
EamonnMR 4y ago
Oh no, now GameFAQs will be turned into the bloated mess that fandom is.
NoGravitas 4y ago
I hate it here. I use a ton of wikis that are on Fandom, and it takes a lot of custom uBlock rules to enforce a bare minimum of usability. The worst victim, IMO, is Memory Alpha (the Star Trek wiki), which has a huge user base, relatively speaking, and used to be run independently.
intellix 4y ago
I guess I live under a rock because I've recognised of all the acquired companies but barely ever see fandom at all. Had no idea it was so successful
peanut_worm 4y ago
Wow, so all of those things are irrevocably ruined like Wikia was. I hope someone archived gameFAQs I am sure the text guides will be the first thing to go.

184 points by haunter 4y ago

CM30 4y ago

Oh god this is worrying. Fandom has already made Wikia an absolutely unusable, ad ridden nightmare, to the point many communities set up their own wikis to avoid dealing with it. I hope they don't apply that same monetisation to GameSpot, GameFAQs, etc. Otherwise those sites will die almost overnight.

24t 4y ago
Agreed, though somehow fextralife manages to be even worse
mjr00 4y ago
> to the point many communities set up their own wikis to avoid dealing with it. 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.
- CM30 4y ago
  True. Wikia's existence meant things like the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance and Square Enix Independent Wiki Alliance could put out some actually good wikis about the games they cover. Stuff like Mario Wiki, Bulbapedia, the Super Smash Bros Wiki, etc are significantly better than their Wikia/Fandom counterparts, and have proved you can defeat the service in the Google rankings by providing a better service. 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.
  - iamacyborg 4y ago
    > Bulbapedia 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.
bdw5204 4y ago
GameFAQs has already been dying for the last 10-15 years. Its amazing how most of their user reviews are from 2000-2005 or so and how frequently they don't even have guides for games anymore. Their message boards went from being notoriously overmoderated with tons of silly rules like a ban on profanity to notoriously undermoderated with very few rules (but what few they have are still enforced bureaucratically) and lots of trolls. 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.
- the_lonely_road 4y ago
  I was a heavy user of gamefaqs for many years but had almost forgot they existed. The YouTube let’s play completely replaced it for me and I’m guessing for most of their userbase as well.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    YouTube only replaced it for me only in the sense that sometimes it's easier to wade through a 10-minute video to find one tiny piece of info than deal with most of the non-GameFaqs faq sites that come up in search. 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.
  - 1980phipsi 4y ago
    YouTube is great for those situations where a written explanation just doesn't quite cut it, but I prefer it more as a supplement to than a replacement of a good gamefaq.
  - 4y ago
spywaregorilla 4y ago
I casually end up on a fandom wiki every now and then. What's the main criticism?
- Macha 4y ago
  1. Autoplay videos done by fandom editors who may not have read the source material or even their own wiki article inserted at the top of pages just so they have video to justify video ads 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.
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    4. On mobile I can't get images to display without disabling my ad blocker. 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.
    - mynameisvlad 4y ago
      #5 is entirely dependent on the wiki itself, which is community-driven. Fandom only provides the infrastructure and platform, which support the feature.
      - PaulHoule 4y ago
        But the platform affects the contributors. 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?
Macha 4y ago
Fandom is just rebranded wikia, for what it's worth
dbingham 4y ago
I feel like Fandom and Wikipedia provide a fantastic case study in the difference of outcome between non-profit, mission driven organizations and for-profit capital driven organizations. They were both founded by Jimmy Wales. They both have the goal of organizing information using crowdsourcing. And look at the difference in outcome.
- capableweb 4y ago
  I had no idea Fandom/Wikicities/Wikia was also founded by Jimmy Wales. I agree, would be amazing to see a academic comparison between the two, one clearly had a bigger impact on humanity as a whole. 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.
  - antisthenes 4y ago
    > 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.
coldpie 4y ago
I believe the content on Fandom's wikis is all permissively licensed. I've often thought about making a read-only mirror of their wikis that just scrapes updates and serves the content without all the BS. Once it scales to the point where hosting is expensive, put up a donation jar. If it pays for itself, consider opening up editing and creating a fork with the end goal of killing Fandom's godawful wiki sites.
reset-password 4y ago
Today I am thankful for Kagi having a feature which allows me to remove or downgrade certain sites from search results. It has already saved me countless clicks to fandom and can be easily expanded to include other sites as the fandom cancer grows.

nathanaldensr 4y ago

Fandom has absolutely ruined all the GameSpot and GameFAQ wikis and resources I use while gaming. Their left-side nav with flyouts that don't disappear is so goddamned annoying. Fortunately, uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and Pi-hole kill all the ads.

navbaker 4y ago
It's definitely a shame. GameSpot was one of the first gaming websites I found when I really started using the internet seriously in the late 90s. One of my fondest memories around gaming is Greg Kasavin replying to a question I submitted for a weekly Q&A he did where I asked about Baldur's Gate 2 and if I, as a newbie PC gamer jumping over from consoles, would be good to go starting there or if I needed to play the first one :)
klausa 4y ago
Given that you're commenting on a press release announcing Fandom buying these properties, I think you're misattributing the blame here.

hajhatten 4y ago

I recognize some old Whiskey Media companies on that list. Have not followed them much after the CBS acquisition and Ryan Davis' passing. Hope they're all doing well over there.

runevault 4y ago
If you didn't know Jeff Gerstmann is out at GB and he was the last of the original guard (Vinny, Brad, and Alex left like... a year ago?).
ascagnel_ 4y ago
The founding GiantBomb staff members have all left since the sale to Red Ventures: - 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-nextlander-and-abby/2300-18077/ https://www.giantbomb.com/videos/splat-off-giant-bomb-vs-nex...
MartinCron 4y ago
It was when Ryan Davis died that I realized just how intimate the podcasting medium could be. While I also loved the rest of the crew, I couldn't listen to Giant Bomb without him. It was just too sad.

manuelabeledo 4y ago

For a second I read "GameStop". Headed directly to r/wsb. The fact that they weren't losing their collective mind made me realise that I read it wrong.

NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
Did the same thing. For anyone else reading Gamespot: video game publication Gamestop: brick & mortar store used video game reseller of wallstreet bets fame

ubertaco 4y ago

I wonder if any internal rumors of this were part of the sort of "exodus" from Giant Bomb a while back. Even Gerstmann left and is now just doing his own thing solo.

MajimasEyepatch 4y ago
I would be surprised if acquisition rumors made it that far down the chain so early, but I’m sure that Jeff saw the writing on the wall with how RV management was approaching things.
runevault 4y ago
I would be shocked if the Nextlander crew knew a year out. Jeff MIGHT have heard something around the time he left/was ousted (no clue which).
- djhworld 4y ago
  Nextlander guys did a podcast about this, I generally got the impression they were just burnt out from years of building giant bomb and wanted out, this wasn't long after the RV acquisition.
  - runevault 4y ago
    Sure, but if they did know they'd have been NDA'd into not talking. Again, I don't think they did because I doubt this deal was in the works for a year, or if it was I doubt even Jeff G/B knew about it let alone anyone else, but them not saying anything in and of itself doesn't guarantee it. Logic mostly says no though.

onychomys 4y ago

I've been an active gamefaqs user for over 20 years now (I actually have more GF karma than HN karma, and you only get 1 GF karma a day!), and I'm honestly kind of okay with it. Yes, Fandom's sites are filled with terrible ads and autoplaying videos and all the other things that make the internet lousy. But I'd much rather have owners that are at least somewhat related to the content than be owned by some acquisition company or giant megacorp like CBS. It just seems like Fandom will be less likely to randomly shut us down someday.

AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
Another 20-year GameFaqs veteran, and all I can say is, no. Dear god no. The last thing I need is a freaking autoplay video with an impossibly-tiny 'x' button in the top-right corner obscuring display of my plaintext walkthrough.
unethical_ban 4y ago
I haven't been active for about 17 years, but I got on GF in 2002 for the Final Fantasy VII walkthroughs. Then I fell into this weird roleplay community of "factions" that existed on some old game boards for Atari 2600, I was part of Z-Tack. Then there were some people who build clones of the message boards, mostly in PHP. Outboards, Darkside Legion, Magician Type 0 were some of their names. I built my own clone largely from scratch (and with some help staring at leaked source from Outboards) and that's how I learned PHP3, MySQL, XHTML and CSS while listening to Red Hot Chili Peppers and techno. The boards now look like shit, but then, the Internet has changed in 20 years. All good things come to an end.
- sbarre 4y ago
  > I got on GF in 2002 for the Final Fantasy VII walkthroughs You and 75% of the rest of us. ;-)

nottorp 4y ago

Hmm. Is there a mirror for the old gamefaq faqs or should I start now?

horseAMcharlie 4y ago
There's a collaborative effort ongoing here: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/xuhbv1/psa_fandom_has_acquired_gamespot_gamefaqs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/xuhbv1/psa_fan...

barbariangrunge 4y ago

I heard on Reddit that those gamespot shares were red hot! Joking aside, I wonder what the end result of all that on their share price was years later I do use metacritic and gamefaqs from time to time. I wonder what will happen to them

oaththrowaway 4y ago
Gamespot and GameStop are 2 different things...
jacooper 4y ago
I think k you are confusing GameSpot and GameStop.

snide 4y ago

OG founder of Giant Bomb / Comicvine / Whiskey Media here. I was also at CNET during the acquisition of Metacritic and helped build large portions of Gamespot and TV.com. I'm 10-years removed from these properties so I feel OK talking about them. 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.

progrus 4y ago

e61133e3 4y ago

the font and branding they use makes the website unreadable

bongobingo1 4y ago
Might be a side effect of firefox x linux but it sure is something. https://i.imgur.com/ChAsRaA.png https://i.imgur.com/ChAsRaA.png

bertman 4y ago

This might be a good time and place to recommend "BreezeWiki", which I recently stumbled upon. It's an alternative frontend for fandom.com. https://breezewiki.com/ https://breezewiki.com/ edit: source code is here https://gitdab.com/cadence/breezewiki https://gitdab.com/cadence/breezewiki

dcchambers 4y ago
Wow this is pretty awesome, thanks for sharing. Would love to see this packaged up as a browser extension so that it would automatically 'fix' any fandom wiki I happen to load up. 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/
- bertman 4y ago
  >Would love to see this packaged up as a browser extension so that it would automatically 'fix' any fandom wiki I happen to load up. https://docs.breezewiki.com/Automatic_Redirection.html https://docs.breezewiki.com/Automatic_Redirection.html
  - dcchambers 4y ago
    Awesome, thank you!
- haunter 4y ago
  Liquipedia also worth a mention for archiving competitive game history (runs on a trimmed down version of MediaWiki) https://liquipedia.net/ https://liquipedia.net/

runevault 4y ago

Seeing this just a couple days after the latest ZA/UM (creators of the game Disco Elysium) news feels weird. The DE situation was already ironic since that game mocked capitalism and now the people who helped fund the studio have wrecked everything to the point even the creative group that was technically separate dissolved. Now we see three very significant sites in the video game space continue to get handed around like a joint on a cold night.

socialismisok 4y ago

Fandom wikis are terrible, here's hoping they don't meddle with gamefaqs.

63 4y ago
I've found they're pretty manageable with liberal use of ublock's element zapper. Obviously the average user doesn't do that though so I have no idea how anyone else manages to use the site

thrillgore 4y ago

Wow. WOW. I didn't think Red Ventures was this quick to exit the market. This is not a good sign for the future of game journalism. Disclaimer: I worked at CBS Interactive/ViacomCBS Streaming during the original properties sale to Red Ventures.

buscoquadnary 4y ago
Game journalism has been dead for a long time. No one who is serious about games pays any attention to it, and they routinely mock everyone in games journalism, making constant comments about "journalist mode" that plays the game for you, etc, because they hold them in such low respect. Beyond that it seems like half the articles coming out in "games" journalism these days seem more interested in pushing specific political positions and discussing identity politics than actually discussing games exacerbates the problem. 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.
- astrange 4y ago
  > making constant comments about "journalist mode" that plays the game for you 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.
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    No, this is the fallout for gamergate. 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.

petarb 4y ago

As a long time GameFAQs user I feel like the service will be destroyed by ads

rickreynoldssf 4y ago

I'm an Ex-Engineering Manager at GameSpot & Giantbomb at CBS (2013-2016). All the stuff Dave mentioned was very much the same when I was there. The unit was always in trouble losing money quarter after quarter and focus was always on the ad sales. E3 was the biggest time for revenue and it was stressful in the lead up to it hoping we'd sign enough to keep things going. It got progressively worse each year. Towards the end of my tenure they were inflating video views given to ad buyers by including video views on other platforms like Facebook where we received no revenue at all and could place no ads. Also at the time Facebook considered a view when the video was visible on the feed for a second. The numbers were wildly inflated. And we were running ads from sketchy networks all the time, some of which were malicious. 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.

ASalazarMX 4y ago
> Towards the end of my tenure they were inflating video views given to ad buyers 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.
Trasmatta 4y ago
> I assumed Jeff would peel off with most of the Giant Bomb guys and start something new by now. Not sure if you saw, but Jeff did leave several months ago, and started a solo Patreon.

ravenstine 4y ago

Why TV Guide? Is that relevant in some capacity? They were considered obsolete when I was a kid and only the elderly would still use them. Seems like an interesting purchase, but I quit watching TV a long time ago. Is there something TV Guide does that people still pay attention to?

coldpie 4y ago
There's a lotta elderly people out there.
- ravenstine 4y ago
  Maybe. I can't imagine my parents using TV Guide when they reach their 80s. Though I'm sure they'll still be using a DVR and intentionally deleting recordings to "save space" even with 80 petabytes of storage.
fckgw 4y ago
TV Guide is (and always has been) a general TV entertainment website. It still generates a lot of content.
phone_book 4y ago
I still use TV Guide to check what is on for sports, but only a few times a month. I don't normally watch TV and I just have an antenna directly hooked up to my TV. TV Guide is faster than the guide on my TV and I can look beyond the next hour.

kweingar 4y ago

Something I’ve always wondered: 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.

RheingoldRiver 4y ago
MediaWiki is pretty technically challenging to self-host. It updates frequently and the updates are nontrivial to do especially if you have a large userbase. Also, if you want an extension like Cargo, SMW, DPL, etc, that lets you query data from one page to another, your server demands will go up a lot and hosting can get quite expensive. There's a new competitor though for gaming wikis that's started hosting some forks & some new original wikis, https://wiki.gg/ 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).
- bombcar 4y ago
  Someone needs to offer mediawiki-as-a-service (apparently https://miraheze.org https://miraheze.org tries to do this) similar to Wordpress. It's much easier to do "free on fandom" and so lots of them move that way.
sbarre 4y ago
Because the hosting costs are the cheapest part of it? 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.

dailyplanet 4y ago

I'm still mad that Fandom killed LyricWiki. I spent so many hours and hours adding the lyrics to my favorite songs from obscurer music, and all that effort and work got wiped.

ipmb 4y ago

Any idea where this ranking comes from? > Fandom Will Now Rank as the #14 Ad Supported Site in the U.S.

ryanwaggoner 4y ago

My first job after college was back in 2006, working as an associate product manager at GameSpot on this flash-based download manager. Another era, lol. 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.

NaturalPhallacy 4y ago

Ugh. Fandom has the most obnoxious auto-playing video ads on all their pages. This sucks.

languagehacker 4y ago

Fandom did this before right before tech markets really, really soured. It was Glam or Mode or something like that. Shortly after the acquisition they ended up doing a significant round of layoffs. Wonder if this will be another bellwether for worse tech market conditions.

EamonnMR 4y ago

Oh no, now GameFAQs will be turned into the bloated mess that fandom is.

NoGravitas 4y ago

I hate it here. I use a ton of wikis that are on Fandom, and it takes a lot of custom uBlock rules to enforce a bare minimum of usability. The worst victim, IMO, is Memory Alpha (the Star Trek wiki), which has a huge user base, relatively speaking, and used to be run independently.

intellix 4y ago

I guess I live under a rock because I've recognised of all the acquired companies but barely ever see fandom at all. Had no idea it was so successful

peanut_worm 4y ago

Wow, so all of those things are irrevocably ruined like Wikia was. I hope someone archived gameFAQs I am sure the text guides will be the first thing to go.