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

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

#81
post #72
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey now, it should be readily apparent that most of us didn't sell out that cheaply :P

[flagged]

MTG?

Edit: Ah, Marjorie Taylor Greene. I kept wondering what Magic the gathering had to do with anything. lol

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

#82

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.

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.

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

#83
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some of the content was beyond excellent, though. Like, a text file with a guide to the entirety of Baldur's Gate 2 with location co-ordinates to every single item and interactable object.

For real. The dedication and detail involved in some of those guides was just unreal.

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

#84
post #29

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/ edit: source code is here https://gitdab.com/cadence/breezewiki

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/

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

#85
post #68
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the hard, honest answer is getting people to pay for things. Netflix, Prime Video, etc. have leap-frogged TV in terms of audience enjoyment by optimising for being a good product that people will pay for. The hard thing is getting people to recognise the options in front of them: pay for the thing you enjoy, or have it slowly turn to shit as it desperately morphs to optimise for ad money. Patreon is in a simi…

Netflix has gone completely down the shitter in the last decade. Ruined the UI, got rid of all the good content and replaced it with C-tier series that get canceled before concluding anyway. Oh, and have basically doubled prices. I canceled a year ago and haven’t missed it in the slightest - and I had it back when it was still dvds by mail.

And it's still better than terrestrial TV.

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

#86
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…

> 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.

From the outside, it seems like a lot of people bring their audiences to those platforms and make an okay living at it — not becoming millionaires, but making a "grown up living" — and that they can be relatively audience-driven as opposed to advertiser driven, or following the dictates of a distant corporate directive. That's what it seems like. Is that hopelessly naive of me to believe?

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

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? The problem I see is that there's just too much supply compared to demand, thus the price of content is literally zero. Even the monetization models that are (still) available are on borrowed time. Ultimately there's no easy way to profit off something that is already ple…

> there's a never-ending stream of passionate people happy to produce said content altruistically out there This is the concept that is most frequently left out of otherwise thoughtful analyses on the topic at hand. Although I would not label the motivation as purely altruistic, what many people fail to realize is that people who create art of any kind, and have honest motivations for doing so, are going to be doing…

I'm interested to know, if it isn't too personal, what kind of work do you do to bring in income?

There's a few passions that I have/have had, but I've found it hard to devote the time to any of them because I tend to feel very drained after doing work on things that I don't particularly care about.

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

#88

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

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

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

#89
post #29

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/ edit: source code is here https://gitdab.com/cadence/breezewiki

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…

>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

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

#90
post #68
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the hard, honest answer is getting people to pay for things. Netflix, Prime Video, etc. have leap-frogged TV in terms of audience enjoyment by optimising for being a good product that people will pay for. The hard thing is getting people to recognise the options in front of them: pay for the thing you enjoy, or have it slowly turn to shit as it desperately morphs to optimise for ad money. Patreon is in a simi…

Netflix has gone completely down the shitter in the last decade. Ruined the UI, got rid of all the good content and replaced it with C-tier series that get canceled before concluding anyway. Oh, and have basically doubled prices. I canceled a year ago and haven’t missed it in the slightest - and I had it back when it was still dvds by mail.

Netflix has consistently made the cut for me to keep it. I'm happy as long as my household uses it 6-8 hours each month. Same goes for Hulu and HBO Max.

Other streamers I find myself starting and stopping as I find stuff to watch. For example, I've started and stopped Disney twice. The first to watch Mandelorian and the second to watch Get Back. It's one reason I really like subscribing through Apple. Subscribe-unsubscribe is a single click away.

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