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

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41–50 of 219 posts

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

#41

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.

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?).

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

#43
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isnt this why subsets of creators are excited by web3/nft sales? Theres huge backlash from their communities but most community members don’t directly pay the creators. I suppose this only solves the Patreon piece though - distribution of content takes highly skilled labor (engineers) and capex (server infra). Had you ever tried using something like AWS MediaLive?

NFT is bullshit and doesn't address any of the problems that surround content creation. Creators who push NFTs do so either because they are sponsored in the background (paid a lump sum in fiat to engage with NFTs) or have direct involvement in the market and would like to benefit from the (temporary) speculation bubble. That bubble has now died and so will NFTs.

Im discussing in good faith here (and used to watch Giant Bomb religiously back in high school, and remember how the Gamespot \ Giant Bomb schism occurred). There are many creators who use NFTs perfectly well to raise money for their work (like the guy that creates the excellent Blender donut tutorials), and use simple fixed prices to monetize (not auctions, so speculation has nothing to do with it). Please dont be rude.

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

#44
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

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.

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.

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

#45
post #21

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 variou…

Dave, website's down.

Sorry if that old joke is now annoying! On a serious note, thanks for all your work on Giant Bomb back in the day. That site meant a lot to me for a long time.

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

#46

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

Gamespot and GameStop are 2 different things...

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

#47
post #2

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.

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.

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.

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

#48
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

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.

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.

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

#49
post #21

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 variou…

I think video streaming is now way easier to setup, since CDNs like cloudflare now offer dedicated Video hosting services.

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

#50
post #21

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 variou…

Hey Duder! Hope you're doing well these days. Thanks for all you did at Whiskey Media, and thank you for dark mode in Kibana!
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