The Broken Model of Video Game Blogs
I'm slowly starting to wean myself off my RSS reader. Being a blogger and a podcaster has really taken its toll on me as I try to find a good work/life balance. Whereas in the past I thought it would be cool to be a pro blogger and get shipped around to press events and be wined and dined by major game companies, now it's starting to look a lot less appealing. For today's rant, I'm going to tell you how the basic model for the video game blog is broken and useless.
There was a time when I was subscribed to as many game and geek blogs as I could find, and I was motivated to keep up with them. That was when they still all had original content. Remember those days? The culture has shifted now to the point of over saturation, where there is very little original content and in order to fulfill quotas and sound like "real journalists", game bloggers have ensconced themselves in the echo chamber. Here is the usual process:
1. A press release is sent out by a game company stating that their new game has gone gold, released new screenshots or gameplay video or has hit store shelves. 90% of the time this is non-news that the normal everyday gamer shouldn't care about. These press releases are sent to every single game blog in existence.
2. Game blogs who thirst for pageviews/popularity/money/whatever republish said press release and attach a cleverly photoshopped header image.
3. Every single other game blog republishes the already republished non-news press release, either citing the release proper, or whatever other game blog got the press release first.
Only occasionally is there ever original content on a game website, and it's usually poorly researched and lackluster. If you're lucky it ends up being an intelligent rant, but these rants are more blog than news (see: this website). In the rush to get their post numbers up, these blogs allow egregious journalistic mistakes such as spelling and grammar errors and publishing rumors as fact without researching them first. We see articles about bland industry-related facts, such as NPD numbers or sales statistics. Why should gamers give a shit about on what console a cross-platform game sold better? Why not just enjoy the games?
We, and by "we" I am referring to the hardcasual early adopter gamer, have lost our way. We are being dragged around by the games industry PR machine and to what end? Bloggers are hurried through media events and fed data which they are expected to digest and spew to their readers without coming up with any original ideas. We're expected to review games and promote them in order for the game company to make enough money to release the next one and the next one and the next one. And this is the culture. It's a sea of early adopters catering to other early adopters who obsessively read these blogs.
Take a look at Kotaku, one of the web's largest and most popular gaming websites. Kotaku must publishing something like 70 articles a day. Just keeping up with Kotaku is a full time job in of itself. There are literally people who sit all day on Kotaku, waiting for the next article to be posted so they can comment. Kotaku publishes so fast I imagine their editors don't even edit the content before it's pushed live.
We're geeks, I get it. We are passionate about our "hobby" and our lives revolve around it. We eat, drink and breathe video games and fail to realize that the rest of the world doesn't. The rest of the world is content with bringing out the Wii Fit every time company comes over, showing off the shiny new gadget and putting it away until the next chance. We're stuck in a loop, an echo chamber. We don't need all these PR blogs, we don't need gamer's day events. We don't need companies showing us brand new screenshots every week until a game release. The PR blogs are being driven by the needs of the game companies, not the game consumers. Here's what we should do to fix it:
1. STOP POSTING EVERYTHING A GAME COMPANY SENDS YOUR WAY. We don't need 500 websites all posting new screenshots for the Hulk game at the same time. We don't even need one. The PR company should just post new content on their own website and allow the game blogs to research and notice on their own.
2. DO RESEARCH. If a friend of a friend of a friend told you that Gamestop posted a release date for Starcraft II, it's most likely not true. Don't post a "Rumor" post to your blog just for speculation sake. Do some research. Reporting on rumors is like telling your readers you're too lazy to give them accurate information. Anyone can say they heard a rumor from someone. You're not providing content, you're just adding to the chatter.
3. STOP POSTING ARCANE INDUSTRY NEWS. Do your readers really need to care when an exec from EA steps down? How does this have even the smallest bearing on whether or not the games you play will improve or decline in quality? The games industry is so obsessed with its shitty minor celebrities, it will pretty much post anything. These people are not celebrities. They are normal people. Please start treating them as such. Sales numbers aren't amazingly interesting.
4. POST LESS. I like reading blog posts about video games. It's the reason why I have my own blog. But when a blog posts 70 times a day, there's no way to filter out the mundane from the high-quality. Focus on quality. Post less frequently and not only will you improve the level of discourse, you will save the sanity of people who actually have other things to do during the day than keep up.
What would you guys add? Have you been feeling the same frustration I have, or is this limited to people like me who run their own blogs?
What say you?!