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Penny Arcade - Comic - The New Kids
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - The New Kids
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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I guess they mean youtube and internet "celebs" who have hundreds of thousands of followers?
Makes sense. I'm far more likely to check out a game I found out through someone like TotalBiscuit than Polygon, Kotaku, or IGN.
Just the current batch of Youtube superstars and the clout they hold with the 'kids today'.
I mean we're all in the wrong business. My 4yo girl watches Youtube vids when we need her to be still while brushing her hair or as a reward to kill 15 mins if she's ready to leave the house early in the morning, etc, etc.
The things she watches are awfully amateurish toy reviews and badly acted stories with disney dolls and people unwrapping kinder eggs and similar nonsense. Can't have cost the creators anything significant to make at all. She just surfs from recommended vid to recommended vid to switch between them, and she's clearly not the only one as these things have literally millions of views each.
Times that by the ad revenue no matter how small it is per video.
What am I doing working for a living like a chump?
It's definitely telling. Personally I think traditional games media has seriously jumped the shark when it attacked it's own audience, and began to focus more on the "problematic" content of games and less on the mechanics and fun of it. They single handedly alienated the people who read them, and the developers they rely on for access. Who wants to give Polygon an exclusive when there is a 50/50 chance they are just going to tar and feather your game as being sexist or racist? Plus, surveys increasingly prove that reviews on traditional media sites barely influence sales at all. It's almost entirely advertising and word of mouth generated by let's players.
I'd wax nostalgic about how reviews were better back in my day. But I've been reading through some of the old Computer Gaming World issues from 1993-1997 for nostalgic purposes. And to be perfectly honest the reviews are just as amateurish and ham fisted. Just with less moralizing, more forced enthusiasm, and more awkward complaints about there not being enough polygons. Well, that last one may not have changed much.
I'm going to miss written reviews though, even if the quality has almost always been lacking.
Buh? Written reviews will always exist. Loads of people prefer reading to video for various things. Magazines will get rarer though.
Different people though!
Specifically smaller scale reviewers consisting of just a few people or even acting solo to provide people info on stuff.
They couldn't explicitly pay off the reviewers in the "traditional games media" because it caused uproars and perceptions of injustice when they did it.
But the youtubers are where the real audience they want is, and where that money pays dividends. In fact, paying off a youtuber for them to hawk a product is seen as genius and smart business sense, making the viewer respect the youtuber even more, because they perceive them as smart and capable for making a living the way the viewer would want to make theirs.
As a consumerist, capitalist whore. I mean, that's what we're really talking about anyway.
The apex of existence for the majority of the human population.
Woo.
Well, let's not get too high-and-mighty on our video game webcomic forum. We're all consumers through and through.
The best chance anyone has is actually getting familiar with specific reviewers so they know who has opinions and preferences similar to their own.
It certainly is a race to the bottom. Or perhaps a race for confirmation bias. It's super easy to find a youtuber who will tell you exactly what you want to hear about any given game. Some youtubers value having an appearance of objectivity which their audience cares about. Other youtubers don't, and neither does their audience.
I will miss print though. Because print almost force fed you opinion you might not agree with, and exposed you to games you would normally overlook. I specifically recall it was the glowing review of Might & Magic 6 in CGW during a dry spell of first person shooters that finally got me into RPGs.
Erm, not that I'm speaking from experience or anything. Err...
Now, if you're good at your job and popular, you might hit that in a month or two, maybe a little more or less. But that's probably not gonna be what happens for most people.
And believe it or not, most popular shows (even Pew Die Pie... *shudder* nice-guy-and-everything-but-that-voice!) have a decent to professional production value. So the volume you have to produce is pretty substantial. Most of these guys are working 50+ hour weeks for not as much scratch as one might expect.
There's no such thing as an "objective" review. Different people care about different things in games. The increased variety of reviewers means odds are there's someone out there covering what you personally want to know about a game. And that's a good thing.
I agree in theory, but there seems to be a razor thin line between catering to the needs of an audience, and pandering. And when I see so many youtubers talking so frankly about which videos made them the most money, it's obvious what motivates them. And how could it not? They are acting as a perfectly rational agents in this arrangement. The metrics available to them give them instant concrete feedback about everything they produce. It would be foolish to not act on it.
Although you see a few talk about the value of cultivating a reputation that can weather the ups and down of metrics, as opposed to pandering for views which can be short lived. But even they constantly talk about the siren's song of trying to boost metrics by whatever means work.
It reminds me of the Patton Oswalt bit where he talks about this show he did in Vegas, which was shorter and with infinitely less effort than any gig he's done before, but paid orders of magnitude more. And they wanted him to come back regularly. And now, every actual show he does, he needs people to understand what he turned down to stay true to his art.
It makes me see the wisdom behind a well structured journalist outlet which keeps the metrics, money, and advertising walled off from the editorial. Not like it always, or even most of the time, worked out that well.
On the plus side, at least Youtube gets the advertising revenue away from industry specific streams that can be held over a youtuber's head. That was the eternal bane of print. The only people willing to advertise had products reviewed in the magazine, unlike almost every other industry.
Though no matter who provides it games media is always going to innately have biases out the ass. Their companies run by enthusiasts getting access to content granted at the whims of the industry.
That's not really a bad thing honestly. I don't think there's much value to hobbyist reviews provided by people who don't care for the hobby and realistically content creators can't make a living buying all their games independent of the review copy infrastructure.
Also 'I remember when games reviews didn't talk about all those nasty political issues that aren't important to games because they don't effect me!' is kinda gross guys.
it's not like the sites/publications that would be upset about this are even in that game though; they're just mad that somebody can apparently do a better job of being a surrogate for publishing than they can
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
It's also kind of ridiculous to bemoan how much reviewers peddle to readers but also demand they peddle to one's own views.
I don't see how labeling things you personally don't like as "icky stuff" is particularly useful.
*"The game reviewers are bringing enlightment to the gaming masses" falls flat when you consider Polygon's utter failure (that I'm still not convinced that it wasn't on purpouse) to condemn Hatred and Gawker Media's complete lack of morals, as a start.
"Look, sometimes in this job you gotta cover games you don't really give a stuff about. I played some Guitar Hero ten years ago and I thought it was kinda stupid."
"Some of the journos on stage are as old as I am and, frankly, no more rock-star-ish than a bag of spuds. This is a game for everyone. Except me."
"All video games are stupid, of course."
The entire post is basically about how the guy is too cool for games, and especially Rock Band. Feels like something you'd read on LiveJournal.
And for the record, nobody has a problem with discussing "icky" issues. What's obnoxious is the "sexy = sexist" ham fisted click bait 1920's era moralizing you see getting pushed. The nonsense they are pushing has been so debunked it's the equivalent of them using Freud in their "critiques" of gaming. It's like if I read "Man and his Symbols", Carl Jung's layman's book about psychology (which is a great read but crucially outdated), and suddenly declared myself a psychologist. It's like if I read Aristotle and decided I knew everything I needed to know about the atom. It's like if I read Dworkin and decided I knew everything there is to know about all male-female relationships being a patriarchal system of oppression.
Oh wait...
But like I said, it's not like reviews didn't like to put on airs of sophistication before. Except in the 90's it was pretend scrutiny of the "graphics". Always about the "graphics". That old meme "We need to tighten up the graphics on level 3" and the commercial it came from? Totally inspired by the reviews of the day. So I get that graphics have plateaued and now it's easier to put on airs of sophistication of sexism. But I'd at least appreciate if they handled a topic as inflammatory as "Your game is sexist, the developers are sexist, the players are sexist" with more subtlety. Especially with respect to the Polygons of the world.
And if you think they are responsibly addressing "icky" issues, you are out of your mind.
If those things are inherent in WORKING in the video game industry (which several industry veterans such as Amy Hennig, Roberta Williams, etc said they haven't experienced), and perpetrated on individuals.... that is unfortunate.
However if a video game is somehow forcing racism and misogyny on you, that sounds like a personal problem.
And if a game has those things in it it's perfectly fair to criticize the game for its content. It's not an attack on anyone.
Indeed, it's perfectly fine to criticize a game based on your personal opinions of its content. Sadly, many journalists and "critics" are conflating that with an attack on the developers and audience.
Also, charging your critiques with political rhetoric, or what have you, can cause gamers to abandon you for less biased sources of information and reviews, thus prosumers take the stage.
The really big ones that E3 exhibitors are going to want to invite out directly make a lot of money.
A lot.
And that was back in 2013.
Yeah, you've got to put a lot of content out to get paid like that, but a 50+ hour work week where you basically play video games and edit the videos is not too bad. By contrast, I work a 55 hour work week between three jobs and pull in... significantly less than that.
Lemme just see what this person does. Random video annd I quit. I want off this planet.
Take me with you.