Slashdot Mirror
Gamespot Goes to Subscription Model
-PS-Sangloth writes "Gamespot, arguably the best video gaming website will expand in July to a pay service(Gamespot Complete). It seems that while review scores will be free, the actual reviews for new PC games will cease to be available to non-payers 7 days after the review was written. This is a real pity, I suspect many PC Gamers, like me, don't have credit cards(or cash), and Gamespot has good, hard, objective reviews. Read what they said at
Gamespot Complete."
If you can't afford a couple bucks a month, how can you afford spending $40/50 a month on new PC games?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Gamespot has been one of the best gaming sites for a long time. It seems to an inevitable switch, since the (deserved) decline of advertising based websites. Isn't there any non ad based revenue that can work without subscription fees? I for one don't have money to waste just to read a website.
Learn to know, the dark side of the force, and you will achieve a power greater than any Jedi...the power to save your w
2. Unlimited high-speed downloads
3. Unlimited streaming video
4. A version of the site with no invasive ads--no banners, pop-ups, pop-unders, superstitials, prestitials, or interstitials
Hey, these are nifty features.
Let's hope they will offer more than just PayPal as their subscription service :->
...why they had to do this, as a business trying to stay alive in the "new economy".
I don't read GameSpot often, but I've enjoyed many of the reviews and walkthroughs that they've offered in the past.
The subscription costs ($4.95 a month) aren't unreasonable. I pay that without blinking various computing and gaming magazines whenever I'm in the newsagency browsing for some literature on the train.
I hope that they can offer enough subscription only services to make it worthwhile for subscribers, or they surely fade away.
Taffyd.
If this progresses, I can see broadband sales suffer. The only reason I got broadband in the first place was because of bandwidth intesive sites (like Gamespot's streaming video, massive MP3 downloads). If all the big-bandwidth things go "pay" then there'll be little reason to pay thru the nose for a breadband connection.
I'm already paying enough for broadband service; I can't justify the expense of paying for content.
Alot of gamers are in college or below, and have no money. I make 6$ an hour, there is no way I would even spend 2$ a month on this subscription service. And I am sure that 99.99% of others agree with me on that. Is that .01% of people who actually pay going to make them more money than the 100% of people that would otherwise just deal with the ads?
If gamespot charges, now I will just go somewhere else. Until it is a proprietary service, and gamespot only offers it, will I pay. And I still probably won't pay either! This is just like fileplanet. Either pay 50$ a year, or wait in line for an hour. I just run an internet search on the file and get it elsewhere, its not like they are the only ones with it.
Part of the issue is what the money is used for. Buy a game you intend on keeping, that's a good $40+ spent. Subscribe to a service you're not completely addicted to, that's a waste of $25.
I still have Doom on my computer and I don't have to pay yearly subscription fees everytime I feel like digging it up to play through it again.
True, but you could just share passwords...
Of course, there are ways to get around that too. (there are also ways to stop people from pirating internet-only games effectively, I shelled out cash for quake3 when it came out, and recently purchaced a 'real' copy of starcraft for the first time)
I wonder how long it's going to be before someone comes out with a nice p2p web content pirater, for reading all these new for-pay sites (total fark, salon premium, gamespot, the economist, etc)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
...if they manage to do something so ugly with ads that I can't make junkbuster filter it out. No reading old reviews? Sorry, but I can't say that bothers me. Many review sites suck bigtime. But read 3-4 reviews and the scores from the rest (well worth for the cash the game costs) and you'll have a good idea about what's good, what's bad, and if it's a game for you (not to mention who got the better lunch invitation). Now ads... I'm glad I'm a geek and block them out, surfing nekkid is hell, I do that at times at the university and things keep popping up and down and dance around the pages and whatnot. Not to mention the [BLINK]blinking ads[/BLINK]. How strange that it's disabled here ;)
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Easy start going to gamespy & their affiliates. The reviews are normally a little more in depth even, it's doubtful they'll ever want to charge you for reviews, & their is more than reviews you can access.
So why use gamespot if they want to charge you?
Anymore I just use Gamepsy & Gamefaqs for all my gaming needs...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
I make 6$ an hour, there is no way I would even spend 2$ a month on this subscription service
That's $24 a year you are not willing to spend on the subscription. That's less than the price of one computer game and if you aren't willing to part with a fraction of a game's worth then IMO you don't buy enough games to make the valuable gamespot worthwhile to yourself. You may as well get the information elsewhere.
But if you are willing to pay a fraction of a game's worth a year to get a valuable service then that is what Gamespot is looking for.
Use all have to recognise the difference between buying a subscription and a tangible product. With the subscription you have fun for that year or whatever and then thats it, games over. Buying a game for $40 gives you the pleasure of playing that game ... forever. And don't give me crap about once you beat the game the fun's over, if you are selective the fun never stops. Good examples of old games still very playable would be Starcraft, Baldur's Gate, Diablo2, and others.
:). As a final point I just reinstalled X-Wing after like a year of not playing it. (This time I will beat it!)
Heck, Diablo 1 is still a great game to pop on a zip disc to play on a Uni computer when all you have is a spare second, just install it on the zip, crack it and truck it around
Paying $40-$50 on a great game is not a problem when you know you will be enjoying it for years to come. Paying $24 to read reviews that you can read elsewhere? Unless you have a great income, and personally love Gamespot, I would say the answer is a hearty NO.
"The fact that they are losing money atleast means one good thing and is they aren't accepting money from publishers for good reviews."
Let me educate you about something...
I'm a game reviewer. While I haven't written for Gamespot, I know Greg Kasavin moderately well and know many of the people who write for him. Personally, I have experience with one magazine and two other websites. So, let me clue everybody in on how this works:
The subject of gaming publications getting funny money for knocking review scores up just isn't true. It's pure speculatory myth. Game magazines make money by selling space for those big glossy advertisements in their magazine... that's it. Also, most reputable ones don't even allow game companies to fly their writers out to the office to see game previews... usually this is done at the magazine's expense - to avoid looking like they're accepting favors and obliged to give preferential treatment.
So, they sell advertising space. In my personal experience, the one time that a company was very displeased with what I had to say in a review they did try to threaten the magazine about it - because they claimed that my accusations of the unfinished state of the game were unjust. However, my editor told them essientially "No, he's correct and we're running it as it stands." Their only means of sabre rattling was to threaten to pull advertising money out and not run their ads... well, who does that hurt worse? Them. Ok, so at that point the argument is over, the ads stayed and the review kept its score.
Occasionally there *is* a situation where an editor will adjust the score you turn in with your review. That is usually going to happen when they've read your submitted text and feel that it doesn't jive with the rating you attach to it. It's like saying "This game sucked... I give it 5 stars!" You're going to get a phone call asking what you're smoking and to please reconsider the score. If it's real close to publication date, the editor may have to make the adjustment himself. The only time I've ever seen a review score adjusted in what I call an "unjust" manner was when a certain editor (who I won't mention because I've never written for him) changed a score because he thought it was WAY out of line with what OTHER magazines were giving the game... a 2 when everyone else gave the game a 4.5 or better. Well, the writer got quite pissed and told him he couldn't change it, and the story was published INTACT at another site - with the 2 rating.
So, there's everybody's clue about what's "real" in the freelance game review writing arena.
Now, if you want to actually hang out in a forum with the majority of the magazine editors and the game writers, I'd suggest a trip over to http://www.quartertothree.com and head straight to the forums. You'll find everybody from the industry there.
sigh... It's almost to the point where the comments can be written with only the headline.
:)
Myths:
1. Nobody will pay for content
2. People don't trust on-line transactions
3. "I'll never pay for anything on-line"
4. I don't have a credit card therefore I can't buy anything on-line
Colloquialisms for "pay" that ALWAYS replace the word "pay" when describing an actual transaction of less than $100:
1. Plunk down
2. Shell out
3. Fork over
Example: "Before I [colloquialism] [$amount] I want [impossible amount of value]"
The reality is that the economy of the Internet will include many billions of dollars of purchases, and that these purchases not only will happen but are happening already. If people want to have any influence on this, then they HAVE TO PARTICIPATE IN THIS ECONOMY. "Vote with your dollars" appears in almost every group of comments. Fine. Everyone should not abstain when it comes to electronic commerce.
The Internet costs money. It always has, and it always will. It was never, is not and will never be free as in soda.
These articles are almost always on the same page with "Quake|Everquest|Neverwinter LXVII Almost Here!" and "Will E-books work?" articles, both of which routinely contain at least 200 comments with something along the lines of "Ooooh GIMME! GIMME! GIMME!" and the electronic equivalent of waving a handful of cash in the air.
The truth:
1. Free on-line content is only free if your time is worth nothing.
2. Even on the Internet, you get what you pay for.
Having read through the information on their site, I think that's probably the best subscription model I've seen launched so far. The balance between "what you'll get for free" and "what you'll have to pay for" seems pretty much spot on, and by keeping ALL of their new content (with the exception of downloads and video streams) free to view for seven days there will still be plenty of reasons to visit their site without a subscription (and for new subscribers to see why they should sign up).
The price is right too - $25 a year or $5 a month allows dedicated fans to make a big saving but still lets new users try things out for a month or two before making a bigger commitment.
Provided they get their payment model right (there need to be alternatives to paying my credit card) I reckon they could be on to a winner. That said, I probably won't be signing up but that's because I hardly ever visit gamespot as it is. Hopefully GameSpot fans will react differently.
This type of model won't work. I have my own thoughts on the process. So lets say that we have decided to pay for GameSpot. Then we find that CNet has gone to subscriptions. Then New York Times. and on and on...
How many subscriptions are we going to pay for? It may only be a few here and there, but in the future (when more sites go the subscription route) its going to be tough to figure out which sites are worthy of subscribing to.
Thank God that MaximumPC is only a buck a month!
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Gamespot's reviews are crap. They always give top scores to games from their sponsors, no matter how bad they are. Try to find an Electronic Arts game that's under 60% - you can't. In fact, there are almost no games under 50% (which should be the _average_ score). The only good reviews (and honest scores) are the ones written by the readers.
If Gamesdomain had a section for reader reviews I wouldn't bother to read Gamespot at all.
ever used robots.txt? apparently not, you can block parts of the site. Enough said....
If I were you, I'd read this page. There are methods of blocking parts of a site, yes, but robots.txt isn't one of them, at least as far as Google is concerned.
My journal has hot
Either of those methods will cause Gamespot's entire Website to not be listed in a Google search at all [...] There are methods of blocking parts of a site, yes, but robots.txt isn't one of them, at least as far as Google is concerned.
Wow. Did you actually read the document to which you pointed another so snootily? You, sir, have no idea what you're talking about. I quote:
Emphasis theirs. But I'd like to repeat their use of the phrase "or a specific section" one more time: "or a specific section". Although the example on the referenced page is a blanket exclude, Google does partial excludes just fine, thank you -- through meta elements embedded in HTML or as the result of robots.txt rules.
Anyway, the real issue for Gamespot would be the yanking of snippets and cached pages from Google -- which is readily accomplished by following the instructions Google itself presents on that page. I've done it myself; it's *no big deal*.
I curse you for forcing my use of the +1 bonus to point out the wrongheadedness of your posting -- which seems to be stuck at +1 for each and every post, too. :p
Sure. I'd pay the same for an equivalently good gaming magazine, why not pay for GameSpot? GameSpot is even cool enough to give away their content for 7 days. I don't expect them to run their business as a public service; I don't run mine that way. Vince Broady's [GameSpot co-founder] announcement is well phrased and perfectly reasonable. And, unlike a game magazine I buy or cable TV I pay for, it won't be 50% ads... they're removing ads from the pay site.
I look forward to the new GameSpot.
-m
I read through comments on subscription stories and laugh. People bitch and moan about paying and give alternate places to go for the information. Worse yet, some people make comments to sound cool like "Man, another site I have to adjust Junkbuster for" or whatever. Those are the most irritating.
What I find is funny that I am annoyed by people who block ads or complain about having to pay. The irony of it is, I have a TiVo and I skip through commericals like mad. Makes me wonder if I should stop paying for online content too. (BTW, $20/yr is far cheaper than my subscription to Playstatioin Magazine. AND the information on Gamespot is far more up to date than what's on paper.)
Yes you can block robots using a robots.txt file from certain areas. MOST robots I've encountered do follow it also. (This is my job, I should know...) You will also want to specify the meta tags, but from my experience some robots don't care what you have in the meta tags due to abuse.
Utter and complete bullshit. The only places a debit card like the cobranded ones my bank issues don't work are for things like rental car deposits. Hell, the thing looks just like a Visa card, and has a valid (4xxx xxxx xxxx xxxx) Visa-style number, so why the hell would any sentient retailer turn it away as long as there are funds in the account to cover the purchase?
I never look at their reviews anyway -- I go to http://www.gamefaqs.com/ instead. Those are user-provided reviews. For each game, they give you a table of reviews, reviewers, and scores. The scores are from 1-10. Before buying a game, I generally read the review with the lowest ranking score, the review with the highest ranking score, and a few reviews around the average. Folks there aren't afraid to say "this game sucks!".
Here's to that: I used to read gamecenter (which ended up owned by the same people when CNET/ZDNet merged). I was shocked when they shut down the clean, easy to read site, and kept open the ugly, hard to use, generally crappy site. As I'm still bitter about that, I certainly wouldn't ever pay them any money.
Also, most of the stuff they want payment for I couldn't care less about -- downloads, movies etc. The only thing I use gamespot as is an archive of reviews, and it's a shame they're going to disable (free) access to this one useful feature in order to make money to pay for the bandwidth to host an ftp site with a bunch of pointless game demos and movies that you can get elsewhere.
You might check out ign.com. I used to use it to keep track of dreamcast games. Don't know how it is for PS2.
Great, so we get to see all the 8.5 scores for games, even though the tone of the reviews usually indicate the game should have been like a 6. Ever notice how even a horrible game never goes below 6 or 7 something?
My experience with GameSpot has been that a) reader review scores of a game have been more accurate than the score given by a professional game reviewer, since most of us aren't as hung up on minor details if a game plays well, and b) most all of the salient points of the official reviews are repeated many times in the reader reviews.
I know that *I* won't now or ever be sending any money GameSpot's way. As others have said, the content is available free on a bazillion other sites, so why pay?
Not to mention that this is turning into a general trend on the internet, paying for content that was previously free. Just yesterday it was announced that a game I've been playing for free over the internet for the past couple of years is going back to a subscription model. I won't be paying, because there's just too many other good games out there that are free (and, frankly, more important things I really should be doing with my time, like finishing up my master's degree, not spending untold hours on a game).
Plus, they say the GameSpot cost is only $4.95/month. Slashdot is roughly $5/month. Salon premium, $6/month. On and on. When they say "it's only $5," that doesn't account for every other site that you visit wanting your $5, too. It adds up. I won't be paying for any content, because I believe in the essential "free-ness" of the internet (which I'm already paying $25/month to access). There's too many folks out there who would like to be competition for these sites that are willing to do it at no charge.
PayPal charges a business or PayPal Pro payee either 2.2% or 2.9% + 30 cents for each payment that is received. So, if you sent a business such as Gamespot a 10 cent payment via PayPal, you'd cause them to have to pay 33 cents to PayPal if they wanted to accept it, leaving them 23 cents in the hole!
(I don't know about Amazon or any of the other e-pay services, but I wouldn't be surprised if their fees were similar.)
It will take the formation of micropayment services that are able to accept fractional/flat rate fees on transactions (such as a flat 10%, at least on transactions of under a dollar) for micropayments to become viable. And it will take a lot of people being willing to use micropayments for that to become economical. So, micropayments present one of those "chicken or the egg" problems so common to new advances. Not insurmountable, perhaps, but tricky to get started without a boost from someone.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
I usually buy 1-2 games a month. I'm really stretched for time, there are games that I've bought in the past few months that I haven't played.
With IGN, I don't buy Gamecube games that suck. I avoided Spy Hunter because of their review. I later played it at a friend's place, I'm glad I didn't buy the game.
If you avoid 1 bad game purchase every 2-3 years from a subscription to a online gaming mag, it's paid for itself.
Alex
It has been shown over and over again that most sites can not survive on purely advertising revenue alone. It just doesn't work.
So I would assume that Gamespot has been losing money and they decide that they need a way to remedy this. They create a very fair model that does not take away all features from non-pay users and is basically just asking the high end users to pay a nominal amount (compared to the costs of games and magazines).
Of course people here think it is outrageous but they aren't telling you to pay. If you don't use gamespot much, like me, don't pay... and you still will get something useful from them. If you use it a lot you can still decide to not pay but I would be interested to see your comments when the slashdot story reads:
"Gamespot closes down due to lack of subscription revenues"
The problem with subscription based sites lies in the fact that there would be to many for me to afford if all the sites I went to choose that business model. Lets look at a scenario. I pay $44.00 a month for broadband access. I have 5 favorite sites that I would hate to do without and at least 10 more I do like to visit occasionally. If each one went to a subscription model like Gamespot; I would have to pay $118.00 a month just to get my "basic Internet channels" that I like to visit. This doesn't even take into consideration sites that I may visit once every couple months or so for information. Take britannica.com for instance; I used to visit there very occasionally for information; but now you have to subscribe to see more that a couple sentences of an article. I can't afford this and I don't think there are enough people who can to make this a viable business model for web sites. I don't know what would work but I hope they find something cheaper than this.
"I miss the days when a simple banner ads could cover the bills."
They couldn't. That's why all the dot-coms went out of business.
Most banner ads pay 5 cents per click (or at least they did then). On average, 1 out of every 100 people visiting your site clicks on the banner. You do the math.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
See!! they're doing it too! they're going subscription, so why wont you bastards accept a subscription base slashdot?!? - Taco.
My biggest gripe about Gamespot (other then large flash ads that make browsing a bit slow) is their screenshots. They have by far the largest screenshot collection but NOT THE BEST. Their screenshots are virually worthless, because they are compressed to the point where they just look horrible. If I'm paying for reviews I want crisp and high-rez screenshots (read: FiringSquad style).
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Now they got streaming downloads and video reviews. Huh? Guys you're gamer geeks. You sound awful giving a video presentation, plus the sound editing is always way too low. And they have WAY too many screen shots posted. This can't be good for bandwidth costs, and plus it isn't anything I really want.
What I really want is just the info. Text pages of game reviews. The rest of what is on most web sites is unecessary.
"This is a real pity, I suspect many PC Gamers, like me, don't have credit cards(or cash)..."
:-P
Condolences Mr. Lebowski, your revolution is over.
The bums lost!
I suggest you do what your parents did. . . Get a job sir!
I think this definately applies to all you to poor to pay for a website that you love.
I think it's more a matter that you just don't want to pay, which I can understand, but come on man don't delude yourself if that's the case.
Someone justify to me why I should pay for no new content? I mean if the articles would read themselves to me maybe I would pay. Also it's only video game oriented information they provide. While maybe to some this information might be crucial to one's survival, to me its trivial and not worth really anything.
If you can't support yourself with ad based revenue then cut costs. I'm sure the person who reviews only fighting games can start reviewing some racing games. Fire some aritists and cut down on graphics, which in turn reduces bandwidth.
I can't find a reason why subscription based services will suceed when no new content is being provided. Why don't they instead decrease content, cut costs and stabilize themselves. Then provide new content to those who want to pay for it? Sell me something worth buying, not something that you first provided for free and now you deam worth my money since you can no longer afford to provide it.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
I think you are talking about a Visa check card, not a "debit card". Visa check cards still use the visa system to get money out of your account. I personally don't like the idea of them, since there is no buffer between the card and my cash, and considering the amount of visa fraud going on (my wife was dinged $200 in a russian charge-cash back scam. naturally, visa dropped the charge, but if that happened on a check card we would have been out the $200 until we caught it and may have bounced a check), I don't really like that idea (but then again, I can get a credit card).
Visa Check Cards can be thought of as debit cards, but they not all debit cards are visa check cards. Usually they are cards that use a direct connections or the plus network (interac in canada) to access the account and debit it. There is also no fraud protection or any of the other things that Visa offers, but they require a pin (the Check Card does not).
Or you may be thinking of a Visa credit card issued by your bank.
-no broken link
Didn't we just have a jillion articles about how crooked reviewers are? Didn't we agree that you'd have to be insanely gullible to buy a new game based on hype and a paid-for review of an early beta? That the best idea was to wait a couple of months, and purchase the (fully patched) proven best, based on reviews by (slighly more impatient) friends and family. What's the darned fire hurry to gamble on a premium priced pig in a poke?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.