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GameFAQs Acquired by CNET
Gamefaq addict writes "GameFAQs has apparently been sold to CNET. The operator says it will stay free for now, but premium services may be introduced later." Looks like a good deal all around. CNET gets the first site most people turn to when they need to get past level two of the dungeon, and GameFAQs gets an added boost. Makes me curious what premium features they have in mind, and how useful they'll be.
Nothing good has come from commercial game sites that I have seen. Witness fileplanet et. al., charging money for the convienience of downloading promotional material for a game. I am anxiously waiting to be proven wrong, however.
__________
Love conquers all... except CANCER
I remember when SegaSages got 'acquired' by IGN, and it turned into some lame, half-assed attempt at going 'legit' at making it a business... You know--keeping some of it free, some of it pay, tons of annoying ads (I say that, but I don't see them thanks to Mozilla--I assume they are there.), and the usual things going FUBAR during the 'change of ownership' for the first few months afterwards.
And now this is going to happen to GameFAQ's too? *Sarcastically* Great--another site that I'll have to ignore from now on, and rely on other fan-sites for the info I need.
Uh... the content on that site is made by a horde of volunteer gamers. How on Earth can you charge for access to a site whose content isn't yours?
Are they going to charge ME for access to the very FAQs that *I* made?
I think I liked the internet much better when information was listed on websites for the use of everyone, not to sell to a large company to make a buck.
Just one of the many reasons I hate the internet more and more everyday.
There used to be tons of free content regarding every subject I could imagine. What happened?
Why is it when I do a search for anything, I have to include "free" only to be given lists of websites that say they are, only to outright lie.
I don't care about having to do a few extra searches, it just seems to me that the more and more content that is online, the harder it is for me to find legitimate information without someone wanting to take money from me.
Grr. GameFAQS will be the same way. They will charge just like IGN, and they will fade as well.
What happened to, For the love of the game?
http://use.perl.org
Maybe the premium services will just be what we've had for free the whole time.
I guess this means going back to searching on google and other search engines for info on games.
I don't care if they charge.. no matter what the info I want will be out there for free somplace.
GameFAQs has apparently been sold to CNET. The operator says it will stay free for now, but premium services may be introduced later.
In this case may be means definately.
http://use.perl.org
Remember folks, while we all know that information wants to be free, "premium membership" deals are not necessarily a bad thing. Admit it, you never click the ads anyway, so you should be able to feel OK about directly supporting a service that's actually useful.
What comes to mind is stratigic delaying with the FAQs, giving paying users a chance to get them sooner, partiuarly for news games.
Also perhaps there may be a move towards adding things like detailed maps as premium content. While other sites do have them, a central resource is something that a few folks may pay a bit for.
This isn't to say that you won't be able to reach your Diablo walkthrough anymore. Only new info/features will be affected as they are added.
That said, here's hoping the optimism of the original post is found correct.
Their premium features will be the same as everyone elses. You will now have to pay for what you are used to getting for free. As soon as it is no longer available for free anywhere else it becomes special.
What I wonder about though is all the faqs. They aren't owned by gamefaqs. They are written by others for everyone else for free. If cnet tries to profit off the faqs written by random gamers, can't the gamers sue them for mad cash? This will surely be intersting. I hope the gamefaqs poll doesn't go away though, it is high quality.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
From the FAQs to the Message Boards, everything you see today for no charge on the site will be free tomorrow. While we may someday introduce new features that require payment, nothing you see today is going to be turned into a premium service.
So what's the big deal? I'd be worried if he was bowing out completely, but he's not. It's a labour of love & there is no indication we'll have to go elsewhere to find our FAQs.
If you could be anything you want, I'll bet you'd be disappointed.
They'll probably do Premium like IGN. Look up the walkthrough on, say, Toy Commander for Dreamcast and you get the 'main' levels (required to advance). Subscribers get access to the walk-throughs for the 'extra' levels.
So maybe the Zelda GameFaq will now say "here is where the items are. For a list of all mushroom locations and the secret faery locations, become a subscriber!" etc
A.
... everything you see today for no charge on the site will be free tomorrow.
Well, thats good. Now, I hope that we dont get flooded with pop ups or those in between comercials ala Ign.com Sure, Moz lays the smackdown on the pop ups, but the commercials in between pages... No thanks.
While we may someday introduce new features that require payment, nothing you see today is going to be turned into a premium service. I wonder what they could add as a premium service. I mean, you go there, post a message, see how to defeat Motherbrain in Metroid 1 and thats about it. I'm sure they'll think of something. Maybe pay to see the newest FAQs. Something like this:
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
s/Slashdot Story/FAQ for Zelda XII
What, me Tweet?
I (and most of us I think) usually visit GameFAQs to get those .txt files called FAQs, and those files are contributed by people around the world, if CNet is going to charge for those files, then people won't submit them anymore, so I guess FAQs will stay free, that's all what I need, I do't care about other services.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
Let's hope this doesn't turn out to be like another Gamecenter-Gamespot case.
Remember the days when we have a mature, well-written, not-on-the-big-gaming-companies-payrroll gaming site? I've felt at loss ever since Gamecenter was dropped in favour of more profitable Gamespot. Ohwell, let's hope this doesn't happen to GameFAQs too.
Txurlo
You all are paranoid nuts I swear. OK, quick, what other gaming site does CNET own? ...Thats right, GAMESPOT.
Gamespot is almost the opposite of IGN, where as IGN locks new content in a magic box of money, gamespot gives you the most up-to-date content for free, but charge you to visit the archives. Gamespot complete members ($20? $25? I forget how much I paid, *last year*) get other premium perks like professionally written FAQs.
Getting the idea now? Think: well produced gameguides by professional writers with a paid subscription. User written guides on gamefaqs have ranged from pure gold all the way down to horrid, illiterate drivel. You pick what you want to read.
Maybe they'll even have some sort of payback system for the authors...
I don't really mind double posts on
Not to mention, new faqs will likely become property of C|Net, thus allowing them to do whatever.
I think this is a good thing. Yea, I know alot of other sites just sucked after they were bought, but this one I think will be different. If you've read the whole article on GameFAQs website it says that CJayC will continue to operate the site and what is now free will stay free. Only something that will be added would be turned into service. Also The FAQs are still the property of the people who wrote them and not CNet of GameFAQs. You can remove them whenever. I say this is a good change, faster servers, moreupdates, and less backlog.
Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity.
"The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!"
"We'll reach that bridge when we find it" - Suzy Romer, prime minister Netherlands Antilles '98-'99
I use GameFAQ quite a bit, I always found it very helpful but when super-hyper-global-mega-corp's tend to buy these places up, it's not always for the best. CNET obviously know this is a popular site and there's money to be gained, otherwise they wouldn't have bought it. If they feel they can mnake a profit from it, it'll come at some loss to us.
Incidently, I was kind of annoyed to see you had to pay for IGN's content. I was looking at MGS3 screenshots and after the 5th or so was told to see more I'd need to subscribe. What was highly amusing was that I discovered deleting the IGN cookie reset the counter and I was free to browse again. wash, rinse, repeat.
"Dre don't get as high as me.... I'm Cheech and Chong" - Snoop Dogg
uhhh... is it just me or does c|net suck monkey balls now? I mean 2 years ago whenever i needed anything my first stop was download.com... but now i'd much rather puke all over their pathetic money grubbing site.
And here's why... all the content on gamefaqs was written by people sitting in front of their computer/PS2/XBox/Nintendo and writing down the information. It wasn't written by "journalists", but by fans. Fans like these despise ad-cluttered, overly-designed sites like GameSpot or IGN.
The result? The faq-writing "scene" will just migrate to a new site. All you people bitching, get off your duffs and get some hosting offering MySQL and CGI access. It's all plaintext, it's not hard to store. Recreate gamefaqs somewhere else. It's not going to be hard.
I do occassionally find an old game I'm intersted and would like to access the archives. I have to pay for access to old stuff? That seems contrary to the business model of charging for new stuff.
a pdf of the manual for console games. Renting games from blockbuster requires a trip to gamefaqs to figure out what all of the buttons do. It'd also be cool to get some old 8-bit manuals too.
Please remove all trolls from the GameFaqs discussion board.
Love,
Me
GameFAQs presents an interesting business dilemma. The proprietars don't own the resource people come for. GameFAQs consists of FAQs which are written by amatures and whose work the authors retain the copyright upon. As an author of several pieces on that site, GameFAQs has no more right to sell my work than any other publication.
So what is being sold? A well-respected name, first of all. The rights to control which directions the site takes. The ability to more tightly integrate with Gamespot.
Is GameFaqs going to change? I tend to doubt that. As a community-driven site, I would expect that major changes would cause a backlash, and a backlash on community sites means that you not only have less visitors, but you have less authors, which in turn reduces the visitors even further, and so on.
Why would C-Net, the company that bought news.com, gamespot.com, zdnet.com, and just about every other techie site out there, buy GameFAQs? Because GameFAQs is both a good property and is profitable. The owner actually makes a living with ad sales, enough of a living to go on vacation. It's profitable, it's shining, it's relied upon by many, many gamers... It could be used to drive traffic to Gamespot, it could serve as a gateway to Gamespot's paid professional FAQs, or it could just have been bought because it was shiny and well loved, and C|net loves to buy shiny things.
I'm not too worried here. Good decision, GameFAQs guy.
The ______ Agenda
Since all the submitted faqs are copyrighted by the author, not any particular website, they could be hosted elsewhere. Perhaps a "tip jar" system to help the cost of hosting, or a distrubited server system where documents are on a series of mirrors all over, and a php or cgi script redirects the reader to a mirror...?
"Jesus saves, but everyone else in a 10 foot radius takes full damage from the fireball."
I have a strong feeling the volunteer submissions will thin out, as C|Net will bring on paid guide makers so then they can easily have a reason to charge for the guides. Or, the guides will be free, like the downloads at C|Net, but you'll be forced to look at 5-6 intersitials, eye-blasters, floating DHTML, etc ads just to get to it, and god forbid you hit "Back" in your browser.
Or, they'll make the guides free, but every other type of content imaginable will be "pay to play." Lots of little lock icons (a la IGN) will start appearing.
Or failing that, here are the relevant parts:
"GameFAQs will still be free.
We're not cutting off any part of the site and making you pay for any of it. From the FAQs to the Message Boards, everything you see today for no charge on the site will be free tomorrow. While we may someday introduce new features that require payment, nothing you see today is going to be turned into a premium service."
"You still own what you've submitted to GameFAQs.
If you've submitted FAQs, codes, reviews, or other content to GameFAQs over the years, it's no more CNET's than it ever was mine to own. You still have the right to remove anything you've submitted to the site, although naturally I'd be more than happy to try and talk you out of it. Your work was not sold to CNET; in fact, it was specifically excluded."
http://s3.cgi.gamefaqs.com/boards/genmessage.asp?b oard=4&topic=8340244
Looks like the sky may not be falling after all.
You mean that giant blob of hyper links and advertisements that's impossible to use, compared to something that's elegant like PlanetGameCube?
Granted, Gamespot covers more (I think), I just don't have time to decipher the alien interface.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
GameFaqs has a really great selection of FAQs but its problem is that it does not 'own' any of the FAQ submissions. GameRankings mainly owns a database filled with statistics and although not easily replicated there are alternatives.
I prefer GameTab to GameRankings (and to a lesser extent MetaCritic.com). GameTab is not owned by a large company like CNet and has a much nicer design and set of user features. It also uses quotes in its review summary pages and quotes help me decide much more easily than raw numbers whether or not a game will be to my liking. So for now on I'll be supporting GameTab (but I'm sure I'll go to GameFaqs because as of yet there is no nice alternative to that site.)
So if the current crop of content always remains free, how long until they slow the servers down to make readers subscribe to faster servers. How hard will it be to wade through all the "subscribe now!" ads on the site to get to the info you need? Are we going to have to wait in ficticious download queues to snag a 40k textfile?
;)
I really wish I could have talked to the guy who was selling it, and maybe convinced him to let me mirror the site first.
Jesus Christ you guys are blowing this way out of proportion. Think about this from a legal standpoint. If every single "FAQ" on that site was contributed with no credit to the author other than to share his "work" and to look "cool", there is absolutely no way that you'll ever be charged for that service. Do you think the current owner of that site, or CNet want thousands of legal threats? Stop worrying, it's nothing like IGN or GameSpot they hire people to write "professional" editorials and reviews for games, and get Koo "exclusive" media.
You know Ziff Davis? Well It's web company is zdnet. Remember them?
Cnet bought them a couple of years ago.
Ziff Davis also owns Computer Gaming World, Electronic Gaming Monthly , Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine, GameNOW, and Xbox Nation.
And you know what websites Ziff Davis runs? www.gamers.com and www.gamespot.com , the latter of which has implemented a pay system recently for people who want all the content.
Now they buy this, doesn't make much sense, they're already on top, why do it?
...for the message boards. Seriously, the number of illiterate halfwits has skyrocketed compared to six months ago, let alone when they were opened. Charging for forums seems to work pretty well as a filter, judging by the Something Awful forums (not exactly a bastion of intellegence either, but it's still a bit better).
Really, what I would like to see from these sites is for them to sell games and game related material through DOWNLOADS. I've heard before about the pros/cons of doing this, but take today for example. I'm home sick from work, and I wanted to check out shadowbane. After reading about the game (because it got hacked) the game itself appeals to me (PK friendly) so I would have liked to have picked it up since I have 3 days of spare time. However being that I'm sick I didn't want to go out to the store. Is there anywhere you can pay to download an ISO of a game (haha, IRC, right) but MMORPGS have keys :P and I like to support gaming companies.
I don't mind paying for games, I do mind paying to see AVI's of games that are promos (like gamespot and such) does
Is there any website that does this already?
as I can throw them. A couple of years ago, their builder.com had a free message board, The Builder Buzz, that was an excellent source of knowledge for all things related to web design/programming. All of the content was user created. Then, when CNet realized they were bleeding money, they decided to cut everybody off and charge for access to the Buzz. We could no longer access the posts that we had written, some of which we spent a great deal of time on.
Hopefully, this won't happen to gamefaqs, as it is another one of my favorite sites. I do think there is a glimmer of hope due to the fact that the licensing of the FAQs on gamefaqs is spelled out pretty plainly, but frankly, I would not put it past cnet to pull some legal trickery to get around it.
Were cnet the people who destroyed winfiles.com? Anyone know an alternative to gamefaqs?
Yup, that idea didn't scale well, now did it! Neither did Communism....
Sure in the beginning it was very cheap to host a site and post a ton of simple HTML pages (no graphics) but now that there is a much larger Internet using population it's become much more expensive to publish to all the users. If you succeed you get swamped and have trouble paying for it all.
I remember what it was like when the Net was new and everyone was migrating from BBS systems to the Internet. Once there were two ISP's in my state it effectively killed all the BBS's that didn't get a broadband T1 line and setup a Telnet Port.
Maybe we should create sub-Internet networks. i.e. branch it off into smaller communities with like minded folks. What about a GeekNet, etc. Filter out all the garbage and build smaller networks? i.e. when you're on GeekNet and you google, you only get Geek content. When you're on needpointNet then you only get Needlepoint/sewing/Martha Stewart stuff. Probably would be too expensive to manage and maintain though...
No easy answers but there are lot's of possibilities to improve things.
True Innovation combined with some spit and polish can be mind blowing. I forsee several technologies that have only scratched the surface combining into amazing feats of stunning accomplishment.
As a former employee of ZiffDavis, here's what happened:
late 1999: Cnet buys www.zdnet.com, not ZiffDavis publishers, which is owned in part by a huge japanese bank and by the ZiffDavis publishing house (e-news, pcmag, CGW, EGM, etc.)
sometime in 2001: ZiffDavis launches www.extremetech.com, to accompany www.pcmag.com. Both sites publishes news and tech reviews. Most of pcmag editors and analysts stay with www.pcmag.com and www.extremetech.com, while www.zdnet.com gets a new set of analysts, and some of them aren't even real journalists.
ZiffDavis does not owns www.gamespot.com, it was sold along with www.zdnet.com. Whereas zdnet.com has largely turned into an advertising board for microsoft, gamespot.com still is a very usefull gaming site, even in the free content side.
Why do it? they already have a pretty good contract with gamefaqs, why not expand it?
bad bad bad things are going to come of this.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
Speaking as a GameFAQs contributor (see my Metroid Prime FAQ under the name "Deflux"), I have to admit that this news had me worried at first. However, after speaking with several people and reading everything there was to read about this, my concerns have gone away.
CJayC, the guy who was running the site solo, addressed all of the FAQ contributors on a message board shortly after announcing the news on GameFAQs. Hereâ(TM)s a snippet:
First of all, let me re-iterate that none of your content has been sold. In the contracts for this deal, all third-party content (meaning everything you've submitted to the site) was specifically excluded. You have the same right to pull it off the site today that you did before, and you'll retain that right in perpetuity (unless you specifically give it away). I'm worried that some of you may be upset by all this and not want anything more to do with GameFAQs, and I'll respect your wishes completely, but I honestly hope that all of you will see how this is going to be better in the long run as well.
And just how is it going to be better? Well, aside from me having more time to add in contributions (just getting them up more quickly will be nice), there will be more opportunities for exposure for your work, and even opportunities for you to get more in return. Up until now, the tens of thousands of dollars I've given away each year in contributor rewards has basically come out of the profits of the site (i.e. my pocket). With a major company backing the site, that gets to continue and will hopefully expand to include even more contest prizes, plus the current contributor contests (FAQ Bounty, FOTM and ROTM) are sticking around (which reminds me, I'm already late for the May awards). I know that there are also companies that are interested in licensing guides for use on their own sites (for appropriate compensation, of course). Of course, we're not going to do anything with your work that you don't want done, so you'll still have full control over where your guide is posted. CNET fully understands that your work is yours to control, and since I'm not going anywhere, I'll still be the biggest advocate of contributor's rights I can be.
If he holds true to his word, then I don't think anyone will have to worry about the FAQs on the site becoming a premium service.
to go suck down all of the FAQs from there. They might not be free in a couple of months.
"What? You mean these people aren't PAYING for stuff they can find free elsewhere? We have to start charging them!"
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
That is an observable trend I see as well.
On Topic: Good thing that the faqs will still be free. But what I hope is that they don't pull a Download.com and make you register just to look at something. That would be a pain.
"I wonder what it's like living in a constant haze of stupidity" - Hiei, Yu Yu Hakusho
I got banned in march on the saturday after black LUEsday (March 8). I heard what dark cobra wrote about CJayC was hella funny.
I'd bet what they have in mind is making the entire site become a premium service. Though perhaps we MIGHT possibly get to see some reviews and ads (not to be redundant) for free.
That's right, kiddies, going on GameFAQs can give you the gay, pregnancy, AIDS or tiny little gnomes that live in your peepeehole and yank out your ballhairs while you're trying to sleep. Cjayc is a fag.
If any pay-to-access viewing is going to take place, I can guarantee you the intelligent writers of GameFAQs will be requesting some compensation of their own...