IGN Are Damaging Gaming
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 ก.ย. 2024
- Mass consolidation of media is bad! IGN Entertainment - the entity that own IGN - have gobbled up many of their competitors.
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Using TH-cam's search bar is fucking nightmare. Half of them aren't related to your search at all.
Try searching for something "recent event" ish and marvel at mandatory 20 pages of nothinh but shitstream news media.
It’s ridiculous, it’s like the Tik Tok algorithm and it’s always recommending awful skin rash videos or pimple squeezing. It’s disgusting.
ADs...
There's extensions that filter out all the shorts, ads and related searches. I personally use Improve TH-cam because of all the cosmetic stuff it comes with
block the "for you" and "others watched" shelves in adblock
Googles search engine fuckery has impacted my business ( wine industry) customers cant find our website unless we give them the direct link google is burying small businesses and giving us no way to make a living. How else are we to advertise, we cant just send stuff out in the mail or go bother businesses in person that comes across as low class.
Makes it tough.
Remember this name: Prabhakar Raghavan. He did this.
There are other search engines which aren't (yet) Google bedmates. Try Brave, DuckDuckGo, etc.
Yeah it sounds impossible dude, you should probably just give up and cut your losses.
I believe there is an ongoing lawsuit against amazon by the ftc (or some trade us group) for something very similar with product listing in the search (and a few other things).
You may be able to talk to someone with more legal expertise on the matter and perhaps even get somewhere.
Are you paying for ads? You don't? Well see the problem?
It ain't good on you, but it makes sense from Google standpoint. I don't advocate for this behaviour, but you can see the argument, right? All in all, faceless Mega Corp doesn't give a fuck about the small folk, more news at five.
Society has too many fucking monopolies
its why Indie brands are so valuable.
@@Sniperbear13before they get acquired, which they all eventually will.
@@Shinkajo then new Indies pop up and the cycle continues.
I love end stage neoliberalism
In USA? Yes.
I hate that my gaming 'news' feed is just articles about Reddit posts.
Seems like most "news" nowadays is just reporting on social media post trends
Every single one in my feed is about a youtube video lol so I just scroll down and click watch later on the video being talked about and exit the article without even reading it.
Either that or a "Brand new DLC" that just ends up to be a mod.
At some point TV just became reactions to internet content too. Social media is inescapable and passes for being journalism itself now, apparently
TH-cam basically replaced all my game media consumption
Remember people, ya can't spell ignorant without IGN!
Thats an old one but a good one
ignoramus
The same people who complain everytime an IGN review doesn’t follow the popular opinion no complain that IGN has decided to do censorship to avoid any review from that isn’t following the popular opinion.
Basically gaming journalist were not allowed to have an opinion different from the opinion of the average games or they would receive a lot of hate by gamers who thought it was some sort of personal attack against them
Or koktaku
@@HaunterVKektaku and IGN are the new "Karens" of gaming journos
"organizing the web" nobody asked for that google.
That's not quite true: especially back when they still cared about the quality of their work people quite liked their efforts on that score.
The more recent "chew up the internet and regurgitate the bot spittle into our mouths" stuff? Aw hell no.
You're wrong and right at the same time.
Let me elaborate.
SEO/ Search Engine Optimization has ruined the vast majority of the internet as a whole.
Most of us want that to change. It's why when you search for something specific, you have to run through lines and lines of stupid poorly translated text just to find the 1 thing you were looking for, like for example, the release date of a new series, this is made to boost their websites to the top and spam it with ads, you have to cross through a stupid website plagued with ads and cookies and popups if you use an adblocker IT'S OBNOXIOUS.
This needed fixing. I don't know if AI will fix it. Maybe it will, staying optimistic.
However, I personally think things will somehow get even worse and more misinformation, fraudulent sites and straight up fake news / information will pop up.
Like, you could search for the average lifespan of a gorilla and they would say you something oblivious and silly like they live 90 years because it's AI based and the information gets corrupted.
Sorry, but we have. Everyone who uses Google Search, everyone who uses Google Chrome and the dozens of other services. All of this has given Google its power.
The only thing we can do is ban Google from our lives as much as possible. Switch to alternative search engines, switch to Firefox, etc.
This is a problem in every industry, the corporate myth of infinite growth will consume and destroy everything good eventually.
It's not good enough to just make a good product or provide a good service anymore, the corporate mindset demands that large corporations aquire and destroy competition, because being the only game in town is the best way to assure relevance. At a certain point, the most cost effective thing to do is buy out competitors.
Seriously, Capitalism the way it used to be practiced is awesome. The problem is what we have now is Laissez-faire capitalism, which is not good. Its due to the change in how corporations are managed. They aren't managed to be successful companies that serve customers needs and continually turn a profit. Profit doesn't even matter anymore (shockingly). The only thing that matters is stock price and thus hype. Stocks are now little more than confidence schemes with prices more connected to good/bad news cycles than profit/loss or fundamentals. THIS is what requires continual growth, which is terrible for everyone except the short-term minded corporate execs with their stock options.
I accidentally stopped reading any games media a couple of years ago and to be honest my gaming life got a lot better over time. Suddenly new awesome games would just appear out of nowhere and I would not be stuck waiting forever.
Yeah. Gaming journalist hype has been leveraged by AAA. Now we have crappy releases at launches, all because preorders were high. All games are bad until proved good.
I don't think I've read "gaming news" since it was made of dead trees,
I want to do this myself, but really neat games I would never find out about come from gaming media.
Although this completely excludes anything ign or kotaku. The struggle to find decent gaming sites that aren't 98% ads and/or completely inflamatory artecles is nigh impossible lately.
@@shadow...8861 Well, there is one small site that I still use. Sort of niche, but I think it is quite good.
You might have heard about it, it's called Steam. :)
Also, TH-cam. Lot's of content creators focused on game news that are still competent.
Another thing that's tricky about digital media is that it's not bound by FCC ownership caps like legacy Media. And even those were neutered in 96 for the most part with the telecommunications act.
Oh boy… don’t get me started on the telecommunications act of 1996. Probably the single worst thing passed in the Clinton era and that’s saying something.
Good
@@andrewkerr5296why
@@chrislewis6030
So you want Government to Arbitrarily decide for you?
@@andrewkerr5296considering they control the curriculum taught in schools, i imagine you or your kids are homeschooled
Destroy, build, destroy isn’t just a whatever tv show from back when Cartoon Network decided not to have cartoons for awhile; it’s the mantra of venture capitalists everywhere
Copying MS recent ventures
build, exploit, profit, destroy, repeat.
When did cartoon network not have cartoons? My google search results just bring up piracy option lol
@@dekugon technically they never actually stop having cartoons but there was this period of time in between the mid 2000’s and the 2010’s where alot of the iconic stuff of the 90’s and 2000’s were winding down and CN started to really push for more live action stuff since they were so successful for other networks like Nickelodeon and Disney as well as being way more profitable since live action is just cheaper to make than animation. 2009 was a big point in time where 5 different life action show premiered and no new cartoons for Cartoon Network.
That all said, there were some shows that premiered around this period like chowder and Flapjack but they never were as super popular at the time the way the 90’s shows were or the Post-Adventure time cartoons of the 2010’s. It took a long while for those in-between shows like chowder to really get the love and respect people have for them nowadays.
@@vinnythewebsurferhold up live action is cheaper than animation?
"TH-cam is becoming a harder place to get noticed on" Bellular it has been that way for the last 8+ years if not more unless you got on TH-cam really early on and stuck with it you don't get the growth of some of big hitters Mr Beast, Pewdiepie, Markiplier & Vanoss they have all been on TH-cam since very early on 10+ years.
I f*cking despise Google's AI BS at the top of my search results.
I gave up on Google search, it's been unusable for years. And no Bing/Duckduckgo are not better either, I think maybe the internet as a whole has gone to shit and these search engines never managed to figure out how to combat all the SEO spam. Now they think AI can do that, but this is not a good start clearly.
Firefox OR/AND Bing Search?
Or just the other browser/search engine?
@@weltsiebenhundertbing is even worse and has been doing the annoying AI thing for longer.
Ecosia best compromise rn
It hasn’t been right once the tens of times I’ve used google and saw the ai recommendation lol it’s not doing anything different from the last “feeling lucky,” update, where they’d show the first or most relevant paragraph at the top.
It’s surprising considering notebookLM is actually really impressive and accurate with smaller models.
So stop using Google
No offense and while this is bad(for the journalists mainly)... Most of gaming journalism is already crap and not really part of the Gaming experience anyway.
"Ex RPS editor Alice Bell"
Me with Pikachu face "so here is why there was no podcast last week" ...
So... we're just cool with monopolies in 2024? What's our congress , fcc, and senate doing every day if they arent busting these monopolies up?
Making up fake problems to try and fool voters into giving them power. It seems to be all they do now.
The Biden administration and numerous state AGs has started the ball rolling again on antitrust suits. The issue is that a lot of them have to be signed off by an activist and muscular judiciary that has never seen a merger they don’t like.
Getting paid by those monopolies? Lol
There are some antitrust lawsuits going on with Meta and Google. The problem is that the judiciary that needs to sign off on any antitrust action hasn’t seen a merger they didn’t like
Doesn't help that the most of the people in Congress are so old or out of date. They have no idea how tech works.
Remember few years ago when they were asking some of the CEO about how other platforms worked. And the guy have to repeatedly say. I don't know. That a different company. Or that 3rd party. We don't control that.
As a journalist not to do with gaming (local news). Ai and google will kill the industry. Our teams are barebones, Ai is being pushed and viewership is going down due to Google. Every year there are more layoffs.
I work for one of the big media companies, and we have similarly just seen a round of layoffs because the C-suite are too fucking dim to realise when they're being gladhanded by snake oil salesmen.
I honestly feel like big gaming journalism websites are kind of out of date.
..
Agreed.
Thank god that Bellular News exists.
Bellular completely missed the mark in not understanding this and the fact that channels like his and OTK and other are the future of game journalism. Look at Destin from IGN his independent channel is fantastic and still gets and does interviews and news there.
the old ways are really old fashioned and not really needed anymore, and thus we need more like Bellular News and other like minded channels.
They have been out of date for ages. I still remember when gamespot was good. I don't understand who when still goes to the big sites. Children? It's all insufferable.
I write freelance but have friends with salaried writing jobs. From what I hear a lot of publications are doing mass layoffs and replacing people with contract writers. Cheaper labor that they can fire at any time.
who would have thought that an overlord controlling the flow of information would be a bad thing?
If this hurts traditional games journalists, then it's a net positive for gaming, not a negative.
As far as anti-monopoly laws go, if a company is ALREADY the biggest in their field _(as long as the field is considered an established field),_ they should not be allowed to acquire more companies to make themselves even further above the competition.
* Established Field - as apposed to a niche field where you are the only one in it. It's not exactly "hurting competition" if no one is attempting to compete to begin with.
I thought IGN said acquisitions were bad??? lol
huh.... this makes way more sense why i stopped reading any game articles / they all became one and ign was always normally the last place i looked at because normally their articles were well... not helpful/ lots of ads etc (granted this wasn't the case when they started... but you were able to watch the transformation when moving to digital)
Sorry, I can't bring myself to care about the plight of games journos.
I'm not crying for game journos losing their jobs. The faster that industry burns the better, something will come to replace it.
Man its just so hard to care. "Games journalism" is by and large anything but journalistic and hated the audience its supposed to be informing.
Yeah, and whose fault is that? Look further up the chain. Journos aren’t exactly rogue agents.
Turnes out singularity was not about tech progress but about havng like 5 mega corps controlling everything
We're living in the cyberpunk dystopia that 80s authors predicted, but they got the country of origin wrong; it's not Japanese companies that own everything, but US ones who have continually lobbied to have anti-trust and monopolies laws changed in their favour.
And most people don't realise it, but capitalism and the myth of the free market are already dead.
This is techno-feudalism.
It's the year 2024. Who even gives a fuck about traditional "games journalism" when there are video essays from a vast pool of independent content creators?
I do. It's certainly true that there's a wealth of critique and insight from independent creators on youtube, but that doesn't wholesale dismiss the existence of more established media outlets. The work done by Jason Schrier for Kotaku, for example, is widely regarded as some of the best investigative work out there, and I personally value the work of Digital Foundry very much. It's also clear through the success of Second Wind that people liked what the writers at The Escapist were doing so they followed them to their own indie venture. Beyond those examples, even things like those guide pieces mentioned have helped me every once in a while, and any extra variety of reporting and sentiments towards topics is valuable when trying to get a bigger picture. Squashing these outfits would only reduce the variety and complexity of discourse around videogames and the industry, and that would inevitably be a net loss for all of us.
People use these hack sites? They were mediocre when they actually did care about games. Now they just make outrage bait for clicks. I dont know who has been getting "served" by these sites but its certainly not anyone I like.
The whole point of reviewers is to give their unbiased opinion and a genuine verdict of a game with a system unimpacted by higher up parent companies pushing the thumb down.
A conglobated gaming press into one umbrella can now easily be influenced with bs narratives and ingenuine reviews.
These companies are now blacklisted by me as a consumer as my opinion of IGN is of a company who is not a credible authority and certainly not trusted.
"Unbiased" "opinion".
Its much easier to accept that everyone is biased to some degree. Pick the reviewers wich have the same values as you.
@@MoreImbaThanYou Not to mention all of these websites being _in bed_ with each other to begin with.
A more accurate term is probably "uncoerced". I'm fine with journalism having some bias as long as it's genuine and not diluted by a company controlling their statements.
Except this has been going on for years and years. If it's not corporate coercion it's political. It's been a shitshow for a while now. People still think gamergate was originally about harassment and misogyny. Instead it was cartel behavior by video game "journalists".
Well, let's take Kotaku, for example. There was that stink about 12 years ago when somebody noticed they always gave high scores to people who advertised on their website. Only after being criticized did they occasionally slam a game being advertised. journalists have been bought for years.
Google AI is bullsh*t and I wish there was a freakin disable toggle, it's giving myself and a friend two different results for the same search and neither one is even accurate. :|
IGN seems desperate that we are heading for a gaming industry crash.
lol
You had me there about the fandom the wiki site, and tbh I noticed there are dozen of ads on their webpage, but what’s frustrating is that they are harder to get rid of even when you try to close them off. I don’t use my laptop that often since I’m mostly on my iPad, but yeah the ads on the fandom site are getting annoying to be honest.
It's so much worse on mobile. Dang near 70 of your screen is just ads at any given point
I avoid Fandom websites whenever possible because they take too long to load, they get stuck when I'm trying to scroll, and occasionally, they'll just crash the browser. I have decent internet and a relatively speedy PC, too. Their websites remind me of the days of Geocities when everyone had too many animated gifs and autoplay midiplayers.
On PC at least, I recommend Ublock Origin with some custom filters.
This is just more of the death throes of "games journalism." You have to have some form of integrity to be considered a journalist but, "game journalism" never had any integrity to begin with. They were just middlemen for gaming ads.
We are already in and heading towards a future when information is pay walled to everyone. When I was in university (4 years ago mind) trying to find some reports and sources etc for my final module was a paywalled mess. Eventually it will be "ign +" service to view content
Yeah, trying to find newish academic reports that aren't pay walled is an absolute nightmare.
This is actually a GOOD THING. This is how the Internet used to be before it started raping everyone of their data and privacy because the content stopped being the product and the readers became the product. Having to pay for things you find valuable makes the content itself have value instead of just being click bait.
Streaming is becoming TV, and online rags are becoming tabloid rags. It's all come full circle, and it's because of the unavoidable cancerous scourge of corporate advertisers
IGN is garbage...I guess they figure that since they lost all credibility this is the best course of action.
IGN is the nothing but the National Enquirer of gaming and a contributing cause of where gaming is today.
Many, this one hits hard. RPS was absolutely my go-to for good and above writing with several actually distinctive voices; along with coverage that managed to include a lot of worthwhile but lower profile stuff I wouldn't otherwise have heard of, all at a pace and scale that was organic and pleasant rather than Dickensian content mill. Hell, even the comment section was civil and often actually interesting.
I'd like to delude myself into believing otherwise; but just surprise-terminating Alice Bell before the ink on the deal was dry suggests that IGN's interest in what makes the site worthwhile is roughly the same as its interest in ethical labor relations.
It all seems so senseless. Nuking something special that they don't do for what? A domain name whose audience probably won't stick around because if they wanted IGN they could have gone there at any time?
Losing the few remaining vestiges of truly extant games journalism that ACTUALLY do the leg work everyone else relies on is SO damaging to the viability of verifiable information for the whole industry (not to mention all the Google and other things piling on top of this issue which spans across journalism struggles in multiple industries).
I've stopped visiting these websites (including IGN) years ago because they didn't provide anything worth reading/listening to. Not a huge loss as far as I'm concerned.
Remember back when Blue's News was your homepage and you were excited for news about what Quake 3 was going to be like?
Yeah... I'm old as dirt, too.
They have been for a decade with their divisive activism.
“People aren't average, so when you try to appeal to the average you end up appealing to nobody."
Solid!
Who said this again?
I'll be honest: The results we're seeing now were the inevitable result of choices made 15 years ago.
While I personally think journalism has been continually eroded with the rise of more subjective gonzo journalism. The internet just turned that up to 11 when they realized the more subjective and spicy the articles, the more clicks the articles get and thus more ad views.
The journalists getting hired nowadays aren't ones with journalistic ethics, but rather are SEO savvy bloggers. So, why is it a shock that the companies literally built on adtech platforms would seek to maximize?
My hope is that this will lead to the diminishing of those old sites and the rise of services like substack or other independent channels.
I completely ignore mainstream gaming news outlets, and IGN in particular, I have avoided like the plague for 14 years now. I've been better informed about my gaming purchases ever since.
Gameinudstry biz isn't a review site
And nothing of value will be lost...
Here's an idea for all you folks putting each other down in game media: make a video or article titled How I'm Helping Gaming where you explain in detail how your content helps gamers, games, or game devs. I think all of you should do that. From IGN on down. Make the case for yourself with facts and evidence to support your claims. Because if you aren't Helping Gaming and you can't prove it then who are you to point fingers at your peers and cry foul
The lack of investigative journalism (not just gaming in variety) in favor of low-effort head-grabbing has been a problem that has lacked the corporate motivation to solve for decades now. AI is not the cause of this problem, it will just result in the next phase of the problem.
I feel no pity, only schadenfreude.
They've all gotten pretty bad lately. I don't think it really matters. No serious amount of people are going to any of those outlets or IGN to actually get informed on whether or not they might like a game.
Would be more upset about what ign are doing if gaming journalism wasnt a complete joke already. Nothing of value appears to be lost, shall not be missed.
The idea of all the games journalism sites rolling themselves into one, failing due to lack of interest, and all imploding at once sounds great to me ngl. I'm down for this. Helps more than hurts gaming.
I haven't consumed "videogame news" from these pages in years since they all express a bland and always contempt opinion of every game and new in the market
This is great, now is a great time to start a competitor since IGN has depleted itself and cleared the field
I honestly don't know why people still have any faith in corporate gaming media anymore as they are really not that different to the corporate mainstream media.
I remember when this guy defended Kotaku. Oh wait, that was just a month ago... awkward....
Gaming studios is destroying gaming more than anything else
I stopped visiting IGN back in like 2003 or 2004, something like that. I kind of saw through how shallow a "review site" they were. I remember that super annoying flash ad that had the hulk smashing through their page shoving a mountain dew in my face. I remember they had a "hot babe review" section for a bit, which is exactly what it sounds like. I remember how their reviews never broke out of the 6-10 range for their numbers, and their articles themselves barely touched anything.
WHY are they still around?!
Journo's did this to themselves with all those anti-gamer articles. People wouldn't have left if they weren't pushed out by their staff.
Asmongold is what youtube pushed on me over and over.. Just no!
Yeah, they really did push him on all of us, quite a red alert sign
2014 showed us that there is little to no value in games journalism.
Let it all drown in their filth.
The gaming journalist websites are pretty bad in terms of content
They sold their souls long before they sold themselves to IGN.
A there's another down side in this story:
Since 2010 IGN has the credibility of a 33 dollar bill 💵
So we face a drop of quality in the content of this pages in the future...
Alice Bell... Wonder if that's any relation to Michael Bell.
What stories now a days are like anthem? The majority of the stories now are click/rage bait.
i just pissed on my wall
Golden.
nice
I don't know if the word "good" has been applicable to the games journalists for nigh on two decades....
People arent average...have you been around people
Buy up the competition, then, no more competition.
Are we really losing anything of value? Frankly all I want are game reviews, walkthroughs, guides.
None of that editorial bullshit about gender, race or cultural representation. We play games to escape real life, not to bring RL crap into our games.
Well no matter what happens I am glad you people have been here covering these news articles that bring light to them
I don't think this is a simply topic right now. I can't see a any good side of gaming journalism past 10 years. Or at least, the toxic enviorment that they create pushing exreme left political nad social agenda far much surpass anything they do for a video game industry. Ther "reset" or "dead" maybe what we need to get back to "fan channels" and "amateur gaming jurnos (born from passion to medium)" right now. Just look what is going on with Kotatku at this very moment. It's batshit insane.
"Will actually impact you directly"
You sure about that? I know some of them, but i don't read or watch any of them really. I maybe watched 3 Digital Foundry Videos in my life. Reviews? The last review i really watched/read was maybe 10 years ago?
So I don't see this affecting me.
When all of the competition dies and AI generated articles are all that is left, and the lack of accountability sends game quality down even further, it will certainly affect you. You don't live in a bubble, stop and think for a moment about the bigger picture.
IGN taking out its competition? Probably for the best; a lot of the sites listed have produced...less than stellar content for many years. Not a fan of monopolies of any sort, but this is more like IGN giving them the Ol' Yeller treatment.
Not to mention they were already all under an umbrella and different from my HS days anyways. Save for maybe RPS.
And whose fault is that? The people writing these articles and making these videos aren’t rogue agents, they’re being forced to make stuff they don’t agree with making because SEO is God.
Eurogamer, digital foundry, and RPS are “less than stellar”? What’s stellar?
@@apollodingo3583 Poorly researched, low quality, rage-bait, repetitive/regurgitated opinions from other websites, etc. Not to say that IGN is any better in this regard (it isn't), but that's generally what I mean by "less than stellar". I was putting it 'nicely'.
@@LionbladierThats not how I would described "Digital Foundry"
A soulless mega-corpse eating companies to protect itself from another soulless mega-corpse... sounds about right in this day and age...
I wonder if this is why Luke left. It would make sense to me.
Luke from Oxtra? It`s possible, but it does "seem" a lot of the old guard are moving on and he did say he wanted to focus more on making music. Still if Oxbox, Dicebreaker, or Eurogamer get axed they could get a "Second Wind" of their own if they have the business sense to do so.
Boycott all IGN owned entities!
imagine thinking "good game journalism" exists to be able to lose it.
its*
Game magazines have not been game magazines for a decade.
All these site where already bleeding money and we’re going to have to shut down if they couldn’t sell IGN bought them for pocket change.
IGN is pretty bad, but the idea of Google essentially monopolizing the entire internet kinda overshadows them. God damn.
In the video of the dude who makes videos about GAMING...there's VASTLY more about it, in common with ADVERTISING, than GAMING--he simultaneously criticizes OTHER outlets, for concentrating more on advertising, than gaming...while in the middle of making a video MORE about advertising...than gaming. Almost impossible 2 figure out why women have taken over nearly the ENTIRE world all of a sudden...isn't it millennials?
(Did you ALSO notice, of ALL this gingers' videos...I cannot remember ONE that did NOT contain in-video advertisements for products...EXCEPT this one, the one criticizing advertisements...gee, I'm utterly shocked).
Hahaha yeah "better and more reliable content"...I'm sure PLENTY of kids will buy that, but in reality all that ACTUALLY means, is "I want as many revenue streams as possible". I mean I get it, it's a "material world" 🌎 and you are a "material girl" 👧 but when it starts gettin around to:
1) youtube ad revenue
2) Patreon
3) "in-video advertising" aka "ad-reads" for Ball-Shavers, Skillshare, Web Browsers, etc.
When your mostly CHILDREN "target audience"...(sure adults also play games, but who do you think is the largest "sector" for games? That's right...kids)...it becomes a bit disingenuous, for the guy with a MINIMUM of 3 avenue streams, to criticize OTHERS for THEIR greed. Kinda the Pot callin the Kettle Black...ain't it?
Oh no, not Rock Paper Shotgun... what a loss for the world or something
It's 5am where I live, I'm six hours late for bed, I decided to watch the first few minutes before bed and will watch the rest when I wake up, but for now, I have 2 comments. First: an editor of Rock Paper Shotgun, the Jerry Springer of Gaming News, said that? And it wasn't an offensive assumption or was thinly veiled racist in nature in order to generate controversy and, thus, readership? Wow, this person didn't want to work there anymore.
Second: it's the gaming news outlets' fault. If they're available to be purchased, it's far more than inevitable that this will happen, you're encouraging it to happen. If you believe in the work of your company, then you NEVER sell it, and you keep it privately owned, preferably by the employees. If you're in financial straits and your only option is to sell or go public, both of those are essentially the same as having one of a work horse's legs removed, yet still putting him to work instead of letting it retire to pastures. You're still essentially killing the soul of your business because its first, second, third, fourth, and fifth priorities will become "generate most profit," with its sixth priority being, "Don't let the work culture, goals, or dreams of the company interfere with maximizing profits."
I comment on this shit all the time, knowing that it's pointless and it won't change anything, but I can't seem to help myself. The gaming industry is what it is cuz we made it that way.
Do you:
pre order games
pay extra to play a game 3 days early
buy the super special edition with an online artbook for twice the normal price
buy games on day 1 knowing they are unfinished and broken bug riddled messes
pay for loot boxes or microtransactions
buy products from companies that are running your favorite IP's into the ground
I could go on, there is so much more, but I'll leave it there. If you support these companies by buying their products you are the problem. YOU. Do you think Ubisoft or Activision would be doing any of this shit if it wasn't making them piles of money... My goddamn dog is smarter than the average consumer... and he's not really that smart... for a dog... If you hate what the industry has become but you still buy their products you are the problem. This isn't wrinkle brain shit here luvs...
My newspaper is part of a much bigger group. Remote management *only* care about SEO, subscriber growth, clicks etc etc - journalism, stories, The Content are utterly irrelevant to them. It will be the same here, too - smaller acquisitions will get axed when (not if, when) they fail to meet their now parent company's demands and targets. Platforms which had been quietly viable, established over many years, will now be at the mercy of Quarterly reports, four times a year. The Axe will hang permanently over them from now on.
TBH we'll probably just get IGN articles cut & pasted into the new IP they acquired, or short blurbs with links to the IGN article. We also might get these gaming press outlets essentially quoting themselves as an initial source for breaking info, leading to a huge conflict of interest and ability for them to manufacture news, instead of report on it. Oh, and of course, the choppy chop of jobs and imprints.
Seriously? Why is this even a problem? Most of the game "news" sites are pretty much garbage. Its kinda like movie critics - they stopped servicing the fans years ago. Now reviews from professional movie critics are either bought & paid for or are completely out of touch with normal people. Mostly the same with video game reviews and news sites. Good riddance. We'd probably be better off if they ALL shut down. Maybe then new sites that actually focused on players and not corporate agendas would pop up. If not there are plenty of you tube channels that doe a far better job covering games than professional journalists. Though sometimes I do kinda wonder about this particular channel. Often good, but sometimes feels as out of touch with the audience as game journalists...
All the " " " AI " " " stuff currently thrown on the wall is pathetic. It worsens the average experience of everyone. I was looking for a BIOS on Dell's site recently. Even though I knew precisely the serial number of the machine in question, there was no driver section to be found. I had to play games with their " " " AI " " " chat bot for nearly half an hour until I found the magic progression of questions that lead to the BIOS I was looking for. An absolute 💩 show.
I disagree. If IGN is shutting the door on firms that are going more and more extreme in order to create and cater to an audience, the more those can be terminated, the better for gaming as a whole. I get that as a studio, you can't really talk honestly about DEI and Inclusion politics for fear of retaliation by the cancel community - so that's why you should actually be thrilled by this - the less of an audience those extremist out there spreading their nonsense have, the less pandering and checkboxes you'll have to be concerned with.
Simple questions:
1) Do you think DEI has made gaming better or worse?
2) Has it made studios more financially stable, or unstable?
I rest my case.
Monopoly rules apply in a healthy industry. Anybody believing games media is in a great state before this acquisition is taking some serious drugs. These were acquired very cheaply because owners wanted to offload the websites. I wonder if people would be happier if they were instead just shutdown for a tax writeoff instead?
If people wanted to keep these sites around, they should have dedicated their money to that. How much money do you think Bellular gave to these sites every year? I am guessing he wasn't willing to financially support them especially with him running his own game studio. Bet he would be happy if YOU gave your money to the websites though.
Man I wish there was more we could do about this. There isn't much of a product to boycott to show the upper management that this won't fly. Cuz even if we stop looking at their websites, since they SEO optimize for guides, some poor saps who don't even care about any of this stuff will just be googling and finding their guides anyway.
Disagree. Gaming journalism has been shit for so long and it’s bloated as fuck. Journalism in gaming has been so ignorant with an absolute lack of research. I get, you guys are still young, but FFS it’s taking a long time to see some real maturity.
Now I’ve got faith in you guys so I keep coming back and good video. I just disagree.mich ado about nothing.
Game journos were never good. At their best they were marketing and they were always hostile towards consumers. TH-cam channels like Gamer's Nexus are the future. No sympathy, sucks to suck, rip bozo, learn to code, cover something you don't hate, etc.
Yeah, the algorithm will be killing off a lot of sites, that much is clear. I think the problem started earlier though.
Initially the gaming journalists lost a lot of people due to reviews that were made to suck up to advertisement. It isn't uncommon to read a review that list a lot of problems with a new game only to give it a ridiculous score like 98% or 9.5/10 and of course the game is bad when people bought it. Things like that makes people doubting everything else the read at the site too.
Then you have the bunch of journalists that wished they worked for the New Yorker and write political articles that is game adjacent but not really about games. Us gamers don't care the least or get even annoyed. There are far too many sites like that and the people who actually care about stuff like that have better publications to read.
I do understand that writing a hit piece on how bad one of your top advertiser's game is might not sound like a great idea but that part have lead to gamers getting their reviews from TH-camrs who don't have that problem.
And some of the gaming journalist give the impression they don't like games and gamers very much which have lead to many gamers being less found of journalists in general.
The one big advantage of a games website is that guides are generally easier to read there for many games then to watch a vid but many of these sites are doing less and less game guides
It isn't something you can easily solve either.
I don't think writing for the "normal" people is a bad idea if we are talking about the average gamer, those are the likeliest people to actually be interested in a game site so writing about what they are interested in will also likely give you the largest audience. Writing for none gamers is pretty pointless on a games site and the smaller group you write for, the fewer people will read it.
But I don't think there is an easy fix for this. Fewer people bother to read articles in general and rather watch a vid about it instead. The people who reads articles at these sites have dropped for a long time now for several reasons. The algorithm is increasing this fast but if a site loose the confidence of their readers, they are basically doomed.
It isn't the 90s when people picked a physical copy of PC Gamer anymore.
The solution is not to troll people either, that might give you some hate reads initially. The only thing that works to some degree is to make interesting and well researched articles gamers like but I am not convinced that will be enough with Google trying to eat everyone's lunch (they started that since some idiot Canadian politician wanted Google to pay for each person they sent somewhere).
I do think IGN is playing a risky game here though, if Google get their way, buying up other sites instead of being careful with their money can backfire badly. The real competition is TH-cam, X and similar social media sites though and they keep bleeding most game sites for viewers since the way we consume media have changed.
It's tough staying independent but thoughts and ideas are free, actually it's priceless, and by standing alone you can preserve your thoughts and ideas. These are important in creating arts, video games are highly interactive arts.
For any studios out there who are still a standalone, you have the biggest opportunity to create something that will beat the AAA slob any day of the week. And if you go down, at least it won't be at the hand of heartless corpo that thought "Good game you made there, but it is not Call Of Duty numbers" and shut you down.
If you want to know what is happening at Creative Assembly, ask the TH-camrs as they have plenty of sources there. Isn't it funny that somebody like Legend or Grudges knows more of what is going on than the "games journalists."
IGN - terrible for over 20 years....
(Sorry, autism brain forgot the good part of the comment -- also PS: thank you for the focus and care you bring to your journalism!)