Game Site Space For $$

Wagner James Au writes "Thought y'all would be interested in part two of my 'Preview Ho' series for Kotaku -- in it, a media buyer tells me how Gamespot and Gamespy sells editorial space on their sites to big publishers for thousands of dollars. In other words, the games you see on the front pages of those sites are often there because publishers paid for that privilege. In their defense, Gamespy's Vice President of Content Publishing tells me the practice is 'pretty common both in print and online'." Nothing surprising here, but it's interesting to see it laid out like this.

Comments

Re:Reviews

[Ford Prefect]

My favourite game reviews site is probably Eurogamer - surprisingly, it's Europe-centric (conveniently for me), and I've found that the reviews (and previews) are usually well worth reading. It's helped get me to broaden my gaming horizons a bit, too - I bought Darwinia on the basis of the Eurogamer review, and found it to be one of the best games I've ever played.

As for GameSpy, someone from one of their sub-sites recently asked if they could make my MINERVA mod the level-of-the-week, or something. Unfortunately, there was a corporate-mandated requirement - that in the review, there had to be a Fileplanet download link.

To their credit, they did ask (the MINERVA terms of distribution coincidentally forbid mirroring on subscription-based download sites without permission) - but awkwardly for them, I said no. Citing a sheer distaste for Fileplanet, its queues, its Win32-Internet-Explorer-only download system, etc.

I never got a reply. And I've yet to see a review!