“For quality games media, I continue to believe that the best form of stability is dedicated reader bases to remove reliance on funds, and a hybrid of direct reader funding and advertisements. If people want to keep reading quality content from full time professionals, they need to support it or lose it. That’s never been more critical than now.”
The games media outlets that have survived, except for Gamespot and IGN, have just about all switched to this model. It seems to be the only way it survives.
Um, that’s how it always should have been. That’s how journalism in general works, going back since pretty much the dawn of newspapers: readers pay for copy, and advertisements subsidize it.
Is it turbulent though? This article goes over video game spending by year, and it has largely plateaued since 2019. There was a pretty big jump in 2020 due to the pandemic, but the market seems to have returned to a normalish trajectory and mobile revenue seems to be plateauing (I guess it’s saturated?).
I think what happened is that people are shifting where they get their information from. Instead of relying on game journalists, who seem to be paid by game devs (hence why any big game rarely gets below 7/10), they rely on social media, who theoretically aren’t paid by game devs (there’s plenty of astroturfing though). The business model where they’re not paid by game devs should always have been the case, since when people are deciding what games to buy, they clearly would prefer a less biased source.
IMO, games journalism should have multiple revenue streams, such as:
They can get very far before needing to run ads. Produce quality journalism and have some additional revenue streams and it’ll work out.
I don’t consume much gaming journalism because it’s largely BS that praises big AAAs and generally ignores indies unless they get viral. I want honest opinions about games, not some balance between sucking up to who pays the bills and mild criticism.
Games media worked under an ad-supported model for about 20 years though. As those in that business will tell you, the payouts from advertisers have fallen dramatically. The ones keeping themselves afloat now have pivoted to your first, third, and fifth bullet points, as well as ads on the free content that subscribers typically get to opt out of.
But weren’t game reviews essentially ads paid by the publisher? Because that’s what it looks like from the outside, since the reviews are increasingly poor quality that largely focus on positives and ignore negatives. Some games that completely flopped due to technical issues got glowing reviews by journalists, probably because they were paid handsomely for that review.
I think game journalists should avoid advertisements as much as possible because once they rely on it, the temptation to allow their content to be colored by whatever attracts advertisers is too much. They should be solely focused on attracting readers, which means they need to be reader supported.
It’s a symbiotic relationship that advances goals for each, but no, they’re not paid ads, and it’s been debunked over and over again. Some game reviews higher than someone feels it should, and they conclude it only could have been paid off, but it wasn’t. Here are a few things that do happen that influence review scores though:
This makes a lot of sense.
It would be nice if multiple people reviewed each game, and then they discuss before publishing a review. That’s one thing I really like about Digital Foundry, though they focus way more on technical details than overall gaming experience, but it’s very fun to see what each reviewer has to say about a given title.
That’s often a matter of resources. Staff sizes are only getting smaller at these outlets, and there are more games released each year than ever before; and they’re trending toward being longer on top of that. Being able to get multiple people to review a single game is a luxury, one that Digital Foundry can afford when they just need to benchmark a typical scene in the game.
In America, they are legally required to disclose paid reviews. If the company pays for the review they legally must disclose it
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/ftcs-endorsement-guides-what-people-are-asking#ftcactapply
Is that actually enforced? If so, what’s the explanation for reviewers giving suspiciously high reviews to AAA games?
Surprisingly so. There’s a huge difference in online advertisements pre- and post-Fyre Festival.
They liked the game more than you. I promise you it is that simple.
I’m not talking about my personal preference on rating, I’m talking about broad community reviews.
For example, Cyberpunk 2077 is a notorious example. It got generally favorable reviews from reviewers, and the public release was a completely broken pile of trash on console. Reviews didn’t even get the console release, yet still gave it a positive review because the experience on PC was decent. How can we trust reviewers if they don’t actually try the game? The terms of the review embargo alone should have pushed reviewers to give it net negative reviews since they’re not able to actually try the game.
For strict review differences, look at Starfield, which got 85% by Metacritic, and Steam reviews are more like 55-60%, and it got hit hard by independent reviewers shortly after launch. That’s a pretty big mismatch.
GTA V was pretty close to a perfect score, but actual reception was a bit lower (80% or so on Steam right now). That’s not a huge difference, and it could be due to frustration about not having a sequel for over a decade, but it does seem that some studios get more favorable reviews/more of a pass than others.
That said, a lot of the time reviews are pretty close to the eventual community response. It just seems that reviewers overhype certain games. I haven’t really seen much evidence where critics review a game much below where the community reception is, but I have seen cases where reviewer scores are quite a bit higher than the eventual community response.
Maybe there’s nothing suspicious going on, it just sometimes feels that way.
Reviews will typically mention which version they were, but in general, there are very few differences between them these days, unlike back in the 6th gen or early 7th gen. Games like Cyberpunk are outliers.
Starfield is not a bad game. In a lot of ways, it’s a very good one. My biggest complaints with it, personally, are all the ways that it should have been modernized but refused to, falling back on what worked over a decade before it came out without turning an eye toward its contemporaries and the improvements they’ve made to the same formula. I find Steam reviews to be a valuable data point among plenty of other data points, but user reviews being that much lower than the critic average doesn’t mean the critic score is a problem.
For an example of a game where critics reviewed it less favorably than the user score, see Mad Max or Days Gone, which might be explained as games where the initial sales weren’t strong, and people who found it later, often at a discounted price, were pleasantly surprised compared to its reputation. There’s also the likes of SkillUp’s review of Ghost of Yotei. That game has largely reviewed very well by other outlets, but he found his review to be out of sync with his audience. If you’re a reviewer who plays dozens of games per year, your opinion of a formulaic open world game might be very different from someone who plays 3 games per year and hasn’t gotten sick of it. Both are valid points of view.
As someone who’s done this before, let me tell you it’d be much easier for Toby Fox to pay me to give Undertale a good review than it would for Ubisoft to pay me to give Rayman a good review.
Are you talking from a regulatory standpoint or from an “I like indies so I’d give it a pass” standpoint?
I’m talking about how easy it is to deal with a singular party than a developer/publisher duo and their rotating marketing and engagement departments.