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Unbiased Game Reviews Through Micropayments
a reader writes:"Fed up of games reviewers giving in to advertiser pressure to go easy on high-budget turkeys?
A group of distinguished British videogames journalists has set up an independent site called Digiworld. It's funded by an interesting micropayment system: you pay 50 pence (about 80 cents US) a week for full access, although new content is available for free on weekdays (details here).
For extra geek appeal, the look of the site imitates the 8-bit Mode 7 graphics of Teletext, a British system that uses spare TV signal bandwidth to transmit pages of textual information (some of the staff previously worked on a Teletext gaming page called Digitiser). Even if you're not a gamer, the bizarre humor and characters make the site worth checking out."
I don't know what kind of crack these guys are smoking, but Teletext is a horrible way for a website to look. The writing is pretty good too, I wish it was just a normal website where I didn't have to sacrifice babies to the Interface gods to read it.
The only time micropayments work is if everybody else in a niche uses some sort of payment. This niche can be either topic-oriented or language-oriented. The important thing is that it has a limited audience that is unable to reach quality free content.
80c per week is not a micropayment: it's just a low subscription fee
A micropayment is when a vendor charges an amount which is almost imperceptible to the purchaser. The example normally given is a teenager paying a few cents to listen to one-time-only Britney Spears single on their mobile phone.
Mobile phones are ideal for micropayments, because their fee structures are designed for charging lots of small amounts. Credit cards are not, and the fees merchants are charged reflect this, which is why this website uses Paypal and Nochex. Personally I wouldn't trust either: they are as fragile as any other internet business and when they go bust you are most unlikely to see your money again. (And, getting off-topic, it's scandalous that they are effectively acting as banks but not regulated as such - expect much wailing and gnashing of teeth when people lose money.)
Simply paying for content isn't enough to make it unbiased; I pay for subscriptions to Electronic Gaming Monthly and IGN, and that doesn't guarantee bias-free reporting.
The only thing that would help is to have ad-free mags, which means that the readers would have to pay enough to support the entire costs of the mag, and I don't see that happening with micropayments. And even at that, it would only be part of the puzzle--developers would still be able to hold out carrots like "privileged access to employees", "exclusive first reviews" and access to games and hardware to hold over the head of reviewers they don't agree with.
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$tar -xvf
It astonishes me how many people just don't get it. It is an emulation of Teletext, because that's where Digiworld's roots lie. Digitiser, it's Teletext-predecessor, was funny not only because it had excellent, sharp, honest writing, but because it had hilarious characters drawn using the teletext limitations.
If Digiworld did not use the teletext style it wouldn't be able to carry off the characters in the same way.
I'm just astonished that you guys can come up with all these excuses not to read it. Just how lazy are you? Disappointed that it doesn't run in 1900x10000000 resolution? What website does! You're all missing out on the best gaming journalism that exists out there at the moment, and the first professional ad-free gaming journalism venture, and you people won't read it because you have to click the right arrow button now and again.
Stop a moment and think about this, about what you are saying. Are you saying that you want truly independant journalism to die? And don't go plugging your website and saying you're independant and great, or whatever, because you're in no way professional, whereas these guys are award winning journalists.
Fine, whatever. Maybe you don't deserve it. Just go back to your Official magazines and realise that they are all funded by advertising. Did they score Enter The Matrix highly? Hmmm, I wonder why.
(Oh, and I'm not a staff member of Digiworld - I am a paying customer, though, and am of the opinion that everyone should be)
Consider this: You have a very limited audience, about 5.5 million people. 4 million of them don't understand any foreign language. You have a single magazine that catters to the political right, and thus its subscription base is relatively high - almost 10,000 people. The magazine sells about 50,000 copies per week. The readers have absolutely no alternative, mainly due to the language barrier. So if you put it on-line and charge 5% of the price per article, people may select to read only 5 articles, thus it costs them only 25% of the original price, but the overhead cost of the magazine is near zero, which means more profit for the publisher. Why would people pay? Because there's only one alternative (the printed version), and the publisher makes sure it's more expensive.
Now consider the world of game reviews. For the sake of argument, let's say that one of the reviews on the site is for Elder Scrolls III: Bloodmoon. That game has been around for roughly 2 months, so chances are that all hardcore fans bought it and now only more indifferent people remain, exactly the kind of audience reviews are aimed at. I, as a potential buyer, go to Gamerankings and find that there are 31 reviews of the game. Will I ever pay for one of them when all others are free? Of course not!
Now you may argue that the micropayments could be voluntary. For that, there are already two established services - Amazon Honors System and PayPal donations system. The site could've used those instead, and if they are really good, they would have received some revenue.
I personally wish you were right and micropayments were an accepted part of on-line life. I'm running several sites, and would like to turn them to profit some day. For now, however, all I can do is to keep dreaming.