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

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101–110 of 219 posts

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

#101

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 th…

> 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.

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

#102
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?

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

#103
post #12
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.

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…

It started when you googled cheats for a game, this was one of the top results, and it spit things like these:

- In super Mario you can gather 100 coins for an extra life!

- There are no currently known cheats for Civilization VI. If you know one, tell us!

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

#104
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.

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

#105
post #12
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.

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 loved GameFAQs and even wrote a couple guides for it back in the day. As limited as it was, I think the plaintext format had a lot going for it in terms of simplicity, searchability, and avoiding spoilers. The alternatives today seem to be either 100-page web guides laden with ads, YouTube videos with spoilers in the title, or incomplete wikis. GameFAQs did add the ability to make HTML guides with pictures (although as far as I know they're all multi-page), but by then it was too late.

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

#107

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 th…

> 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.

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

#108

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 th…

> 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.

Oh... I did not know that. I don't follow the site any more. A week or two ago I saw what I thought was a recent clip with Jeff in it. Good for him!

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

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Oh... I did not know that. I don't follow the site any more. A week or two ago I saw what I thought was a recent clip with Jeff in it. Good for him!

I've been listening to his new podcast, and the move seems to have been really good for him. Giant Bomb seems like it had been really weighing him down for a long time.

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

#110
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…

Liquipedia also worth a mention for archiving competitive game history (runs on a trimmed down version of MediaWiki)

https://liquipedia.net/

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