Adverjournalism - The Role of Ad Dollars in Media

Gamer 2.0 writes "The Gamer 2.0 site has a look into the role of advertising in gaming journalism, with a few reflections especially topical given the Jeff Gerstmann controversy. From the article: 'It should come as no surprise that just about every gaming forum on the internet is ablaze right now following the news of GameSpot's termination of long-time editor, Jeff Gerstmann. This article, however, is not an exposé or look into what really happened at GameSpot this week. Rather, consider this a look at the direction of gaming journalism, advertising, and how this all plays a role in the content you read.'" There have been a few more developments in the situation since Thursday night, with rumours, scuttlebutt, analysis, and cynicism reigning on every message board from here to C|Net. There has even been a spontaneous act of solidarity from elsewhere in the games journalism field.

Comments

Let's stretch that a bit, damnit...

[Penguinisto]

No, really - let's include all of tech journalism in the pile. I've lost count of how many articles that are more than obviously bought-and-paid for either by a vendor, or because the whole damn site is nothing more than a front for the vendor and its buddies (yes Microsoft, I'm looking in your direction when I say that).

While we're at it, how about a solution to the other two big problems on tech and game journalism's part? Even The Register is starting to show cracks of laziness (and occasionally outright fanboyism) in their articles nowadays.

The dead tree media may not be perfect, but at least they do have one thing they can rightly claim over most tech and gaming journals online: they have and at least halfway adhere to a code of ethics and diligence.

There's a couple places online which still do at least some due diligence and hold onto their ethics (hexus.net comes to mind), but they're getting rare. Question is, how do you fix it (short of hunting down the paid-for/fanboy shitheads like, oh, Rob Enderle, and subjecting them to a public stoning)?

/P

Re:Let's stretch that a bit, damnit...

[Penguinisto]

Agreed for the likes of those particular pubs (and others similar to it), but they were usually outnumbered by a cadre of smaller yet honest (and more probing) sites which didn't give a damn about who got their panties bunched-up about what they wrote. That's what I'm increasingly beginning to miss these days.

I think I might have found a partial solution to it, though it wouldn't work for everyone: If you run a games review site, only accept advertising from hardware vendors and the like, but none from games publishers, or businesses which sell games (this means, for instance, no MSFT money, since they sell xboxes and games for it). Hardware review sites could happily take ad money from app and games publishers, but none from Intel, AMD, etc etc. At least this way you can get some related ads still put up and money coming in, but at the same time you don't end up with the dilemma.

Re:Let's stretch that a bit, damnit...

[VertigoAce]

"Blog Reader"? Of course Microsoft employees read blogs and other tech sites. It's not like we disappear off the web once we're hired (I'm a dev in Windows Server). Sure, some people do it as part of their job: gathering customer feedback, analyzing product launch coverage, watching for security issues or other bugs, etc.

"Commenter"? Honestly, MSFT employees would be lost in the noise. Teams at Microsoft tend to be incredibly small compared to the number of people using the product or its competitors. Take Windows, for example. The number of people that are fans of Windows (yes, they exist!) and the number of people that hate Windows both far out number the number of people that actually work on Windows at MSFT. So if you're suspecting astroturfing, chances are you're just seeing a legitimate fan/supporter of the product. That said, many of us consider it part of our jobs to post online where appropriate. If I see somebody with a question on a product I work on or am familiar with, I'll answer it or point them toward somebody who can.

Re:Let's stretch that a bit, damnit...

[Penguinisto]

Nice... you assume automatically that I meant the entire industry fully does it. No... just most of them. It doesn't take much more than reading the articles half the time, and then checking said against the relevant vendor's press release. It's frightening how often the two items mate up in tone and tempo. It's even more frightening how quickly it is to disassemble a lot of the articles for the barely-masked marketing bullshit that it is.

Also, note that there are still good sources of tech journalism out there, just that they've become rarer as time goes on. The reason hexus.net stands out clearly enough to mention is because a year or so ago, they exposed a flat-out attempt of extortion on a vendor's part. From a big-name gamer rig vendor, no less (IIRC Alienware, but I'd have to dig around and check before I'd say for certain).

Finally, there's no way you can sit there and say with any honesty that a large (or even moreso a medium-sized) outfit wouldn't at least give pause towards giving vendors editorial/review leeway when said vendor is spending a metric shedload of cash to advertise on the same site. No. Fucking. Way. Even in dead-tree land, Consumer Reports stands out specifically because they accept no advert dollars of any kind, which gives them the perfect freedom to call crap/overprised products for what they are.

/P

Article is lame apologism.

[ZombieRoboNinja]

I actually read TFA, and it's basically the guy saying, "This happens all the time!" over and over. I'm not even being reductionist here:

"And let me be the first to come out and say that what happened to Jeff Gerstmann happens all the time." (Hmm, let's see. You're not "the first" by a long shot; Penny Arcade said the same thing days ago, and even then it was just reiterating a point they'd been making for YEARS, which was in fact so self-evident that ANYBODY paying attention to the industry was aware of it.)

"And if you look outside of the world of gaming, you will see this is not an isolated event; it happens in more mainstream forms of journalism, and I might add that this could be even seen as a sign of growth for our industry."

"As the industry grows, more money is circulated, and money begets corruption. It's a fact of life and it's a fact of capitalism; this is America after all."

Such ridiculous BS. Your "industry" is "burgeoning" at the exact time when it's becoming redundant and useless. If I want fluff-laden previews, game trailers, interviews with developers, and press releases, I have the friggin' Internet at my fingertips here; I don't need Gamespot to aggregate that stuff for me. In fact, the ONLY thing sites like Gamespot have to offer that I can't get somewhere else with far fewer annoying ads (and at least one less layer of crappy-journalistic obfuscation) is their professional reviews. That's the ONLY content worth having, and Gamespot just screwed it up.

I like the complaints about how things getting "big business" is inevitable. Why? A review is a few pages of plain text with a couple JPEG screenshots; hardly a bandwidth hog. To create that review, you need ONE guy who can string together legible prose and is willing to play a wide range of video games for hours on end. Is that really a hard niche to fill on the goddamned INTERNET? All this could easily be paid for with AdSense ads, which (by their very randomness) would pretty much prevent any kind of coercion, unless Google started making games.

I'm just waiting for the Penny Arcade guys or someone else with enough "e-credibility" among gamers to start pimping a site like that. A huge influx of gamers would at least check it out, along with plenty of linking from reputable sites, which would lead to a high Google rating, and before you know it, LegitGameReviews.com is the top hit every time you type "$gamename review" into Google. Hell, there are probably a dozen sites like that around already that I just don't know about - anyone wanna help me out here?

Re:Article is lame apologism.

[rpillala]

I recommend Quarter To Three, and I would recommend Old Man Murray and fatbabies.com but those two no longer post new material. It's worth reading Old Man Murray anyway, especially their interview with Croteam, developers of Serious Sam.

These days I tend to pirate everything to decide who deserves my money. Then I try and skip as many layers of retailing as I can to buy it. Somehow I think the developers get a bigger cut that way. I'm probably wrong.

I knew the jig was up

[xx01dk]

Actually a long time prior to this--I wasn't really all that clued in; I just had a vague suspicion that magazine reviews were skewed somewhat. And then a few months ago I received my copy of PC Gamer that had Valve's "The Orange Box" plastered on the front cover with an exclusive review inside. I'd been anticipating this title for a while and I pretty much knew it was going to be pretty good based on Valve's track record. I got around to reading the review a few days later and figured that if it was already in a printed magazine then the game surely must be out on the store shelves. I decided I would go out later that day and buy the box. This was October 8th.

Guess what! When I went into the store looking for the game, I learned it wasn't due out yet for another couple of days! With a slow sinking feeling I realized that there was no way a magazine that is planned months in advance would be able to review a retail copy of a game when the game's ship date is later than the magazine's. Had I known the ship date I probably would have spotted the disparity right away, but alas-- I knew it was some time in October and that was all. Hmmph. Anyway, in my mind, review = available for purchase while preview = early build not available to public. Since the game shipped on the 10th of October and I got my magazine on the 6th, the mag was probably finalized at least ten days earlier, say September 26. That "review" was written at least two whole weeks before the game was available for purchase, and I'm a damned sight sure that Best Buy hadn't been sitting on it since the end of September.

Sure, maybe PCG did get a pre-shipped retail copy reserved exclusively for the print media, and maybe it was all above-board in that respect, and thirdly yes I understand that "the big scoop" is what makes or breaks any periodical, especially those trying stupidly enough to compete with electronic media. But. This was just blatant, and I'm sure it wasn't the first time and won't be the last time something like this goes down...

Luckily for everyone involved, the game (or games I guess) turned out to be a smash success (and I have really grown attached to my weighted companion cube), otherwise we probably would have heard some negative press about this a while ago. Valve was lucky in that they knew that they were sitting on solid gold, and PC Gamer was lucky that they also knew this when they accepted Valve's big pile of cash for the review and magazine cover. This may all be obvious in retrospect, but I guess my cynicism towards "the man" is still in the growing stages (dangit. I've cultivated it for a number of years now, how didn't I spot this?) I'm walking away from this whole experience feeling kind of duped and disheartened and I don't think I'll be renewing my PC Gamer subscription again. Or GFW. Or MaxPC. Or, now, buying anything produced by Ziff Davis.

Growing up sucks. Disillusionment sucks. Rampant and obvious greed sucks. I guess I'm starting to fall in the demographic that has learned that all advertizing is crap so maybe, hopefully I'll be able to spot it more easily in the future when it masquerades as legitimate journalism. Time to tune my filters I guess; all the while it will be interesting to watch how this unfolds--I'm just sad to finally realize that I've been not only blind to it but also a part of it for so long.

Cheers~

Re:Mandatory PA link...

[Goldberg's Pants]

PA's coverage has been great. What I find amusing is the fact that anyone is remotely surprised by any of this. Perhaps it's my own experience in the industry (I reviewed games for a living for several years, and I too lost my job because of an unfavourable review I gave a particular title. This was five years ago), but the sheer surprise so many people seem to be experiencing over this is just staggering. How could people not see this is the case? In an industry that relies on whoring itself to the games developers and publishers, why is everyone so surprised that someone up and got pimp slapped? Is it just because it was such a notable name this time? Because that I could understand. But if it's shock and surprise at a writer losing his job because he dared upset an advertiser... Then you've clearly been living under a rock.

He was not the first (and I certainly wasn't either) nor will he be the last. The entire reviewing industry is corrupt. Anyone paying attention knows this. Some groups are more corrupt than others, certainly, but this is not news. Certainly no more so than "the sun rose in the east today".

Re:Shocking

[buffer-overflowed]

Gaming journalism isn't journalism. It's copying press releases and being shown things. Any old joe bloe can be a gaming "journalist", all you need is a bit of webspace and the right access. I'm honestly surprised companies don't just cut out the fucking middleman and post the shit we rely on "journalists" for.

Here's an example of a story that was pretty important, but reported on precisely 2 sites, and not accurately at either. IGN's direct2drive offered and advertised pre-orders for the game BioShock, including preloading to compete with Steam. This was advertised. They had a leak/accidental activation of their activation servers several days before release, thus breaking street and pissing off Take 2. News of this hit a number of forum communities after people who had used this service found they could activate the game early. A number of people then proceeded to order from Direct2Drive, only to find the preload link(preloading was *advertised* remember) had been delinked off the finished order page. A quick google(or alternatively you could use fileplanet's own search tool) revealed a link to the file, so it wasn't exactly hidden, just delinked off the order page. This was posted on those forum communities or found by those who had ordered. At this point the general consensus is that jig is up, but at least everyone can preload so they get it on release, hey, we weren't supposed to have it yet anyway, oh noes. People downloaded the preload. Some got it, but most didn't as they realized it was still there, and they pulled the preload(which they had ADVERTISED HAVING) off fileplanet.

Everyone(regardless of being motivated by a broken street date) who downloaded(or attempted to) the preload after it was delinked got a nasty legal letter from IGN courtesy Fox's legal dept(involving hacking, you dirty hackers, how dare you use google or our own search tool), and spent days not knowing if they'd even get their money back(IGN did refund everyone after a few days). Now that strikes me as a pretty nasty thing to do to paying customers, and something that would be of interest to anyone considering using a service like that. So yea, "journalists", pull the other one, it's got bells on.

Gaming also has basically no critical culture. Imagine if movie reviews were: 1/5 (Special effects), 1/5(Sound), 1/5(Rewatchability), 1/5(Story), 1/5(Acting). That's how game reviews are done. The whole thing is one big fucking joke.