Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by eropple » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 10:00 PM UTC

tpxl wrote: post #185

eropple wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a content and branding perspective, I wouldn't touch PeerTube with a thirty-foot pole. It is fundamentally untenable unless you want people able to take screenshots of your content being featured next to literal-not-figurative Nazi shit. Yes, that's the point of federation, and that the watcher is the one who has those settings to put them next to one another. No, it's not your fault. Yes, it looks awful and it'…

You can self-host and un-federate PeerTube, such that the user isn't even aware they're on a PeerTube instance. If I had a website where I'd host my videos as an alternative to YouTube, I'd probably go with PeerTube and have people support me by seeding videos for me.

Ehh. You totally can, but at that point you're still stuck with a pretty bad model of shipping video in the first place, namely relying on having peers and dealing with PeerTube's bad failure modes when peers leave the swarm. I am not a fan--the sibling comment about those failure modes tracks with my own experiences, and I think it's scary enough to avoid. If the choice is "mediocre to okay perf based on geography, consistently" or "mediocre to okay perf, mostly based on geography, with very bad performance for some users in ways that cannot be reliably predicted", it would be pretty bad to recommend the latter for most use cases.

I tend to think that, since you're already foregoing discoverability by not federating with other PeerTube instances, you might as well also just build your bootleg CDN off of Hetzner nodes or whatever and have points of presence in places you care about. It's not that expensive and it's likely to be more consistent in perf. (You could say "well, run PeerTube and register your pops as peers", but other peers falling out of the swarm is the problem, not your own.)

I just don't really see a point to doing so as a small/individual creator or as a brand/channel.

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

#192

Post by bombcar » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 10:03 PM UTC

giantrobot wrote: post #190

bombcar wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I recall correctly, the amount of streams you could support with a cheap VPS + Cloudflare + similar things is pretty impressive. The reality is most people don't need to be able to handle millions of simultaneous views, and so a basic setup with "p2p on top" might work exceedingly well.

Modern HLS/DASH streaming off a VPS/CDN combination is extremely fast because it's just HTTP as far as the servers are concerned. If you've got a fast HTTP serving system you can serve tons of clients without many problems. Storage however is still an issue. You need enough storage for your content at the distribution edges. My point is the P2P on top is very difficult to actually build and have work well. Like HTTP…

But what's the cost for storage? If nobody is watching your "back catalog" you can serve them off your server (maybe not a VPS, maybe a dedi, but you can get 1 Gb/s and 2 TB of disk for like 130 euro: https://hostslick.com/dedicated.php )

Then you're just down to what the CDN cost is for the "active" video, maybe the last two?

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

#193

Post by SleepilyLimping » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 10:11 PM UTC

hnburnsy wrote: post #118

insane_dreamer wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think subscription-based instead of ad-based is the only way to monetize good content. It doesn't scale nearly as big (which is why companies like Meta will never go for it) and won't make any unicorns, but that's OK. An ad-based model will eventually pollute the platform no matter what esp as companies try to extract as much revenue as possible from it.

I wish instant, frictionless micropayments was a thing, would love tip blogs, journalists, and other content creators directly without entering credit card info and risking my finances.

Brave Browser's BAT infrastructure is good for this; even if you don't want to manually tip people, you can set up auto-contribute amounts that deduct from the amount of BAT you earn from seeing ads monthly.

I think the habit of doing so (manually or automatically) sadly isn't there yet, because most conversations I see about Brave/BAT are "how much money can this make ME by earning BAT."

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

#194

Post by SleepilyLimping » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 10:16 PM UTC

bentcorner wrote: post #162

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GameFaqs should probably go back to its original owner. I remember when that sale first happened and the owner announced everything would stay the same. He would be running things, his stance on advertising wouldn't change, and so forth. I'm not sure if anyone actually believed that, but from what I recall the original owner (forget his name) said he was making $80/year and the stress levels were way too high. No o…

> What I'll tell you is that I used to be a huge fan of gamefaqs and I still visit it from time to time, but after gamespot bought them I started using them less and less Same thing here. I wonder if it's just a change in my gameplay habits and getting older. Also modern games are for the most part very hand-holdy. And I usually have used Youtube to find clips to help me through difficult sections of games. I think G…

>I think Gamefaqs is a relic of its time and today doesn't have a lot of relevance for a large portion of today's popular games.

Part of this is because there's monetary incentives to produce walkthroughs (SEO farms, or even just random peoples' YouTube channels). The altruism of writing a .txt guide is gone.

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

#195

Post by Sohcahtoa82 » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 10:31 PM UTC

buscoquadnary wrote: post #82

thrillgore wrote: post #59

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 pol…

> Game journalism has been dead for a long time.

The way I often put it...

Gaming journalists are neither gamers or journalists.

High-quality, factual content is usually boring. Gamers won't read it. So for a journalist to cover gaming, they'll have to resort to making clickbait and ragebait, and at that point, the quality is so low that I don't think it's fair to still call it journalism, as it would be an insult to the word.

Then there's the multitude of journalists that just simply don't understand games. They're so bad at games that you start to wonder if they're even capable of completing 1-1 in Super Mario Bros.

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

#196

Post by JoeAltmaier » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 10:37 PM UTC

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #195

buscoquadnary wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pol…

> Game journalism has been dead for a long time. The way I often put it... Gaming journalists are neither gamers or journalists. High-quality, factual content is usually boring. Gamers won't read it. So for a journalist to cover gaming, they'll have to resort to making clickbait and ragebait, and at that point, the quality is so low that I don't think it's fair to still call it journalism, as it would be an insult to…

That speaks very poorly of games I guess. Not interested in anything but bait...

Makes sense if they're all 12-year-olds (or the emotional equivalent)

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

#197

Post by Nextgrid » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 10:47 PM UTC

zeroclip wrote: post #180

mrtranscendence wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say my bread and butter is making video essays. What do NFTs bring to the table that would make it so I don't have to rely on the revenue model of a major tech platform? Somebody has to host and serve my videos, and it's probably going to be a major tech platform. I could make an NFT that points to my video once it's hosted, I suppose, but I'm not sure that's a sustainable revenue stream ... I'm still going to…

Hypothetically: if an audience is paying for your digital content or paying to support you on Patreon, they could instead pay for your content through crypto - if they are so willing and have it at their disposal. Aside from the lower fees you’d also be your own payment processor - more resistant to censorship, less platform lock-in, ability to self-host your content. Same applies to selling digital assets on Bandcam…

But that’s merely cryptocurrencies, not NFT. What does NFT bring to the table that just using cryptocurrencies doesn’t?

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

#198

Post by tmtvl » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 11:23 PM UTC

klibertp wrote: post #161

moomin wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would have never soloed BG2 with a Sorcerer if not for a very detailed and funny guide on GameFAQs. I didn't quite believe it's possible, but decided to check it out. Oh boy, one-shotting (almost, ie. in a single turn) dragons and eventual Wish-spamming, that was really nice. Another guide allowed me to finish "Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader" with pure-mage, again, I wouldn't have believed it's possible but the…

With apologies to... I think it was Groucho Marx? Lionheart is a very educational game, I finished all of Moby Dick while playing it.

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

#199

Post by P5fRxh5kUvp2th » Mon, Oct 03, 2022, 11:32 PM UTC

astrange wrote: post #184

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ad…

No, it’s not a general point, they’re making a specific joke about a specific video by a specific guy. Who isn’t one of the liberal arts degree blogger types who wants to replace game reviews with leftist politics lectures either. He writes for a business journal.

no, THEY made a specific point, _I_ made the general point.

There were plenty of people AT THE TIME talking about the hubris of the gaming media in thinking they could attack their audience. They did it anyway.

so now we're seeing people talking about how the reason gaming journalism is in a race to the bottom is that their audience doesn't trust them and trust is the only real value they had so they're being squeezed from the top and bottom.

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

#200

Post by rchaud » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 12:07 AM UTC

blast0rama wrote: post #147

drannex wrote: post #145

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? How can it be audience driven instead? The answer that every other entertainment vertical/industry figured out 100+ years ago (thousands?) -- merchandise sales.

But do we all need another t-shirt for [thing]? My drawers are full, my walls are covered in art. What next?

The problem is that most Youtuber/Patreon/Twitch creators are extremely lazy when it comes to merchandise and just clicks a couple of buttons to spin up some template logo t-shirts on BigCartel or someplace.

Looking at merch from the music world, I believe there's a market for would pay for merch that's thoughtful and creative like a mini-book, custom playing cards or posters that do a deep dive on something that streamer is interested in.