Blog FeedGaming Media: The Suits March On
The latest controversy over on GameSpot is simply the most recent example of why I no longer visit large all-encompassing game media sites. Back in the day I was a frequent visitor of GameSpy and GameSpot - so much so that I’d often end up typing “gamespoy.com” in to my address bar in a subconcious attempt to go to both at the same time.
I’ve thought about writing this piece for a long time, because I have a lot to say about the current state of the gaming sites I used to love. I didn’t, however, want to drag this site down in to an out-and-out bitch fest. Given the latest happenings on GameSpot, however, I can’t help but let everyone know what happens to a gaming site when the establishment goes from being passionate to being corporate.
There is of course far more than what I have written below. I am keeping it brief, however, because any more detailed and it would just be too long winded and difficult to understand for those who weren’t there.
After being a reader for a year or so, I decided to sign up to GameSpy’s forums. This was back in March 2001, when their latest forum system, ForumPlanet, had just entered a beta testing phase from which it never escaped. At the time it was all pretty good. GameSpy wasn’t the biggest gaming site out there, but the GameSpy Grudge, comics, and decent media was what made me prefer it over the others. There was a fair amount of interaction between the GameSpy staff and the community.
As such, my impressions on what happened next are all from the view of a community member. IGN’s merger with GameSpy was the real turning point (at least that I witnessed) in the 6+ years now that I’ve been a registered member. It’s certainly been long enough…
The Community
In the months following the merger, the changes to the community began to rear their ugly head. Previously the man in charge of GameSpy’s forum, shaithis (also GameSpy’s web designer and veteran grudge matcher), left the company. At the same time, GameSpy staff made their own visits much more seldom. This wasn’t a huge deal in itself, as the community was strong enough to essentially keep itself afloat.
Issues soon cropped up regarding the moderators and admins of the forums. These were users who volunteered their time and effort to keep the place in order. In typical circumstances, users who had problems with these mods would contact shaithis who would generally take care of it. With him gone, the contact moved straight on to IGN’s overzealous customer service department. Initially (and when I was a moderator), mods were simply considered users who had some extra powers to keep the peace. According to IGN however, they were now IGN representatives, and had to act accordingly.
One mod was fired for making a post about an awkward (but not explicit) experience in a public restroom. No regular user would have had such a topic removed. The user admin was then fired by IGN for refusing to fire the moderator himself. Another admin was fired for using colourful language in a private message to someone who was being a genuine pain in the ass (and admitted as such later on). Another moderator had the same fate for swearing at spammers who had signed up to the forums for no other reason that to advertise their crap. As it stands, GameSpy’s main boards currently have no active user moderators at all, and it shows.
The place is now a husk of it’s former self with barely a fraction of it’s former posts per day being made. Who wants to be on a forum with no active moderators? And who wants to be an unpaid, volunteer moderator if you can’t act like a regular user anymore and have fun? When the corprorate feel seeps down to the core community and extinguishes it, you know you’ve gone too far. Well done, IGN.
The Network
In 2001, I essentially viewed every GameSpy “Planet” site as being one of the best places for coverage on that particular game. PlanetDiablo was always my first stop for Diablo II information, PlanetCnC was always where I went for news on Command & Conquer. The same went for almost every other game I played - with the exception of StarCraft because for some reason, there was no Planet for that. I actually found it rather odd that such a popular game had no Planet.
Given previous planet creations, I was under the impression that a fan site which joined the GameSpy network and did really well could eventually become a Planet site if it were financially viable. I do, in fact, believe this is how it originally was. My time viewing the hosting department’s staff forum showed something a bit more disturbing though, with the head of the hosting department saying, on new-Planet criteria:
Some of this is simply based on our judgement of popularity/potential of a game/franchise, and the quality, consistency and level of traffic on the hosted site can also be a big factor. Our relationships with the developer/publisher also play a role.
That final relationship role certainly proved one thing. Useless Planet sites such as Planet Stacked and Planet Nile could only have been created out of that final criteria - a publisher deal. I was there when both of these planets were first created. No-one could figure out why they existed at the time. The credibility of a “Planet” has ever since been in tatters.
While a good mix of useful and useless Planet sites were popping up, I can’t forget the declining nature of others. Planet Civilization has long stood as a disaster of a site - being unable to hold a candle to either of the two main Civ fan sites. The original forums on PlanetCiv were also completely unmoderated, and for years just stood there with automated spam barraging the boards and rendering any real user activity on there completely pointless. They have of course now been replaced entirely, with the spectacular dud that is ForumPlanet v2 - a reskinned and tweaked version of IGN’s horrible forum system.
Giving the final blow, just recently, was the long awaited creation of Planet StarCraft. The desolate message boards on this site prove that it is too little too late. Unable to match the excellent timeliness of established sites such as StarCraft.org and a fantastic newcomer this year, the StarCraft II Armory. Planet StarCraft offers nothing more, and plenty less.
The entire network of Planets, at least for the games I play, are completely obsolete.
The Other Site
I used 3D Gamers a fair bit back in the day, as an alternative to FilePlanet for downloads. Once I got broadband, I was pleased to see that my own ISP, Internode, provided a mirror of 3D Gamers files, which means top speeds and no download limits (a scourge of Australian broadband).
After seeing what became of the GameSpy acquisition, I was dismayed to see that the same thing was happening to 3D Gamers. It wasn’t long before my fears proved justified with the departure of the site’s main man, Frans. His departure seemed to signal the onward march of the suits, with the site’s own community now only getting a few dozen or so posts in a whole week. My ISP was even forced to remove it’s file mirror, and had to announce it on their forums because they couldn’t get in contact with anyone who was running 3D Gamers itself. Assuming anyone was.
Afterthoughts
When the IGN-GameSpy merger first went through, I didn’t quite understand it due to the immense content overlap. It still doesn’t make much sense - I can see the desire for IGN to own GameSpy’s software, and FilePlanet, but there’s not much else they didn’t have already. It’s no wonder that GameSpy.com is now left out as the unwanted little brother - it always seems to attain new screenshots, videos, and other media a few days after they go up on IGN.com.
It’s a shame to see the same corporate mentality has now taken over at GameSpot. It now seems assured that for my gaming news and media, I’ll be sticking to the dedicated fan sites for the franchises I care about.
3rd December | Reply
There was a time I read all these sites, the daily web crawl included trips to gamespy, IGN, Gamespot, hell even Daily Radar before and after Penny-Arcade’s merciless savagery of that site.
And then little by little bit by bit those sites got worse and worse, and worse. Gamespot was the last of the old guard that really remained on my bar. Like all the other sites it had gotten worse and worse the amount of op-ed content had slowed from the weekly torrent of awesome that was Gamespotting, perhaps their one saving grace was their podcast which was quite funny because of Mr. Gerstman’s sense of humor.
And for me the solution hasn’t so much been fansites but a lot of smaller sites. 1up has been fantastic with the podcasts, and oddly enough blogs from very mainstream outlets like Wired, Newsweek and MTV had some of the most interesting reading of anybody about the games industry at large.
3rd December | Reply
I’m going the same route as Vermouth. Nowadays I don’t bother going to those places. Blog-like gaming news is fine for me, with sites such as Shacknews, Kotaku and Joystiq giving me my fill. If I need a review I’ll go to Metacritic, and probably only read Eurogamer or 1UP’s review.
GameSpy stopped having anything worthwhile when they slaughtered the humour department. FilePlanet was terrible 4 years ago, and there are plenty of mirrors acting as faster, more accessible alternatives. IGN I’ve never liked.
Their whole Planet/ForumPlanet community thing failed a long time ago, and they’ve just carried on making more Planet sites with no pull. Most other community-made sites are well ahead of the curve. One look at their main message board, the GameSpy forums, will show you how much they’ve fallen from grace.
9th December | Reply
I’ve stopped visiting all gaming websites with the excpetion of Eurogamer. I used to go to Gamespy regularly, which is why, like most of us, I ended up on Forumplanet but like Hardflip said, when the humour went, I went.
I also used to be a lot more prolific in various areas of Forumplanet, partly probably to do with the fact it was ‘new’ (for me) but eventually I have limited myself to just one or two of the forums, purely because I feel an attachment to the community. The Main forums I never visit anymore, and haven’t posed there to a serious extent for about a year and a half. It has just completly collapsed there, and I feel no desire to visit.
As for the planet sites, I am quite friendly with the Admin (or used to be Admin, I’m not sure what his situation is nowadays) of PlanetWarcraft, and he told me how noticable it was when IGN took over. He would regularly tell me about things Gamespy/IGN were doing that were killing his site, and therefore not giving it a chance to compete with other sites. One time they even put someone with no Warcraft knowledge at all in charge.
So i’m just going to stick with Eurogamer, here, and the couple of Forumplanet forums; I can’t see myself running back to Gamespy any time soon.
13th December | Reply
Until recently I, much like Thornhillboy, had sworn off all general gaming websites aside from Eurogamer for anything but in-depth specials and interviews. But in recent months, that site also has dropped from my radar entirely due to poor/inaccurate reviews (and reviewers). After scoring The Witcher (RPG of the Year, easy) a measly 7/10 for minor flaws and Unreal Tournament 3 an 8/10 while including dozens of inaccurate and plainly false statements… well, that understandably threw me off from the site alltogether.
As for IGN… their recent CoD 4 and Crysis reviews once again proved their incompetence: scoring Crysis low in an all-negative review focusing on the 3-4 minor flaws it had, while scoring CoD 4 extremely high in an all-positive review completly ignoring the dozens of major gameplay-destroying flaws it has. Yeah… sure.
Personally I just read reviews to correct/laugh-at them nowadays - and then write a more accurate one myself. As for what I use to gauge whether I want to buy a game? I look at previews, interviews, videos, play demos and betas… and then decide on my own. The few times I’ve tried purchasing games based on reviews alone have turned out so miserably that I simply refuse to do so now. I’m not buying another Civilization: Call to Power (9/10? More like 3/10), Doom 3 (84/100? More like 5/10) or Star Wars: Battlefront (8/10? More like 2/10).
It’s also interesting how many of these ‘professional’ reviewers have plainly obvious double standards. First they go and review Hellgate London, give it a 7 or even an 8 (neither being grades this ‘game’ deserves), stating the reason for scoring it high is that patches will sort out the hundreds of bugs and issues.
Then they go and review Unreal Tournament 3 and rate it 2 full points lower for having a couple of minor ‘issues’, which have already been fully resolved in beta patches and are so minor that even modders had temporary fixes out in a matter of days. Why not brush over these tiny issues, stating it will be patched (as they have been by now), like you brushed over the thousands of bugs and issues plagueing Helltrash London?
Granted, the whole mass-market approach of just about ANY reviewer nowadays is part of what puts me off. They’re all fawning over vehicles in shooters like Unreal Tournament 3… when it’s TDM and CTF that interest me. They call games like Call of Duty 2 and Battlefield 2 “tactical shooters”, but far more tactically challenging games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Unreal Tournament 3 CTF are classified “arcade” and “brainless”. They take off points from games for being “complex”, “challenging” and “too difficult online”, like X3: Reunion, EVE Online and Unreal Tournament 3. They follow the hype, scoring a hyped up but disappointing game like Hellgate London or Doom 3 high, and an underpromoted but awesome game like The Witcher or UT3 low. Or they plainly state their ignorance of an entire genre or game series, by making false comparisons… like saying UT2003 is almost identical to UT in terms of gameplay (in exactly this respect there’s not even a remote resemblance) or stating that World of Warcraft takes up 80-90% of the mmorpg market (in reality, it’s not even 30% and quite likely to be less than 10%).
No
18th December | Reply
I have to agree that the standard of Eurogamer doesn’t seem as high as it used to be, but in general I still feel I prefer them to the others.
It might just be a loyalty thing now, as I don’t even buy that many games any more.
18th December | Reply
I haven’t thought about Planet[game] sites in years. I stepped off of that train, and for that matter, stopped visiting Gamespy & Gamespot, years ago.
For me though it was never as much about the forums as it was about the news/blog style coverage. I’m not that surprised that my beat seems to be Kotaku for news and blogs like this one for opinion.
I loved PlanetHalfLife way back when because that front page was a mishmash of all the cool mod ideas cropping up in the community combined with links to essential patches, screenshots, and of course, a funny screenshot every day.
I don’t think we’ve really found the next way of gaming media yet. I don’t think that even straight blogging is the right answer. Be interested to see what it is when it gets here though, and it will almost certainly come from people like you and me, not from the suits at IGN.
22nd January | Reply
I agree with Cyrris. I’ve only been here since 2004 or so, but I’ve witnessed much of the same. The Planet sites are a joke of what they once were. When Halo 3 was close to release, I visited PlanetHalo to see if there was anything good, and the site didn’t really have anything worthwhile to show.
A couple years ago, I wanted to try running my own ads on my hosted Mario Kart site, but since Gamespy’s policy only let me run their ads, I quit my relationship with them and went to my own hosting. Being hosted by them gave me a great start though, and it was the reason I joined Forumplanet.
22nd January | Reply
A few years ago IGN offered to host this site. In fact, the manager in question was really quite enthusiastic at getting us on board, saying the increased exposure would be fantastic.
I wasn’t prepared to deal with their ugly-ass banners on every single page though. In any case, I am not so much concerned with traffic quantity as quality. 5000 visitors without one of them leaving a comment just doesn’t mean much to me. All that excessive traffic does is open up the possibility of making more money off a site, but that’s not something I care too much for. As long as it makes enough to cover the hosting bill, I am content. And we are doing that now without massive banners.