By now you’ve all seen the whole Gerstmann Controversy. I’m not going to go into details about it, if you want to know what happened just Google it and you’ll find the millions of entries. These events really have brought to a boil something that has been happening for years, that is the changing state of the games industry and their relationship with the ever changing media. In fact, N’Gai Croal of NewsWeek has a pretty excellent write up regarding it.
We all know the internet has changed since the late 90’s. After the great bubble burst at the end of the century, the uses of the internet began to change. Slowly over the next 5 years terms like MySpace, IM, Blogs, and social networking became mainstream and common place. The buzz of the internet wasn’t necessarily the information itself, but rather the sharing of said information with each other. As the accessibility of creating your own pages became easier, more and more people began posting thoughts, articles and opinions on the internet in various forms. This was the first time the Joe and Jane Smith could read actual direct thoughts from a large scale of consumers on wide scale about products and services. That’s not to say it didn’t happen before, but the way the blogging network was built it now had a trickle down effect that mere minutes after some piece of news happened, that hundreds if not thousands of sources of that information were available.
So what does this have to do with one guy getting fired over a bad review of an advertiser’s product? The point here is that for years people haven’t been trusting corporate sources for their information. There was always the shadow of a doubt when reading a review posted alongside an ad for the same game. When this whole controversy broke, people immediately jumped to conclusions and assumed it was publisher pressure that caused Gamespot to fire their Editor-in-Chief and employee of 11 years. The fact remains we’ll never know exactly what happened, why it happened, or if it will happen again. What we DO know is that in 1 day Gamespot became one of the most hated and distrusted sources for game information on the internet.
It’s a fact that sites like IGN, Gamespot, Gamespy, etc all have huge corporate backings with lots of big bucks. They get some insane traffic. Even the most popular gaming blogs today like Kotaku and Joystiq don’t do 1/10th the traffic of a Gamespot. But that also doesn’t change the fact that there’s a shifting trend from publishers and developers to put some serious marketing and other resources behind Blogs and Community Oriented sites. In the past 2 years these companies have finally realized that social networking can be used as a tool to further promote their product. One that most likely gets them more bang for their buck than paying some huge marketing campaign on an IGN. They’ve realized that the word of mouth from trusted personalities becomes more important than a faceless author at a magazine or website.
Here is a quote from the NewsWeek article linked above.
One would have to be naïve or foolish not to understand that there has always been a mutually beneficial relationship between journalists who cover consumer products or entertainment and the manufacturers or publishers of the goods in question. The journalist and his or her outlet gets a story that is of interest to their readership, while the company gets exposure for whatever they’re trying to sell, and this remains true today. The Internet, however, enabled the metrics generated by that longstanding process to evolve from indirect measurements of how readers were engaged with a magazine (i.e. circulation and pass-along) to direct ones of how viewers were navigating a Web site (clickthroughs, page views, downloads and the like).
It’s pretty odd to think of it like this, but it’s true. To promote your website and to gain traffic you need to promote someone else’s product to gain them traffic and exposure. It’s free advertising for the publisher, it’s free content for the website owner, and it’s a way to gain paid advertising for the website owner. It’s an incredibly dependent chain that if any one piece breaks, the rest falls apart. This is why something like the Gamespot controversy is so visible and vocal. It affects a fine balance that everyone has enjoyed for quite some time.
I’ve had a lot of people talk to me about this entire C|Net/Gerstmann controversy. I can’t deny that I’m in a unique position, having a prominent role on a fairly popular gaming community and news site. I won’t pretend to know anything about what it’s like writing for a major gaming site with corporate backing. But what I can tell you about is what it’s like to write for and manage the content of a site that is supported by it’s own people. I’ve been writing and posting news for Evil Avatar for almost 5 years now. This will be my 3rd year in a role where I manage the content on the entire site. I’m sure my experiences dealing directly with publishers, developers and PR folks differ vastly than that of say, a writer for IGN.com. This doesn’t mean though that these companies put any less pressure on myself or our site.
For us, we simply write what we want to write. We aren’t a site that is solely funded by advertising, in fact the majority of our income comes from user donations which in turn goes right back into the site itself. What we do get from publishers are games and swag. We’ve also gotten invites to events from time to time, and sometimes these events are even paid for by the company. Some people think these kind of things are bribes and bring into question the integrity of what we do. And while it IS nice to get these things, go on these trips, and meet all these people it doesn’t change the fact that what we want to do at Evil Avatar and what I do is talk about games. My philosophy when writing a review is to write the review as if I’m telling a friend about the game. If a game excites me and I want to excite my friend. If a game bores me, I’d want him to ignore it. The fact that I get some $50 game for free doesn’t change the fact that my friends and our readers (the same ones that keep the site running) still need to purchase said game. And those people trust me. In a fall when 300+ games are released they look to their social network for recommendations on where to put their money. That’s a big responsibility for me to have, and it’s a much stronger relationship than one I have with any company.
So do we have publisher or developer pressure if we come out with some low scores for a game? Honestly, for the people I’ve dealt with… not at all. In fact, most time it’s been the opposite. A lot of times after sending the link to the appropriate person that we’ve posted a review I’ll get a reply with them admitting that it might not have been their best effort, and to look forward to GameX or GameY from them. Look, for the most part, people KNOW when they have a bad game on their hands. They’ll admit it, they’ll move on. I’m also sure these companies get pissed when they read a bad apple review. You know, one of those reviews that give a game a low score just to go against the norm, to drive up site traffic. I know I’d push back if I was in their shoes.
So was Jeff Gerstmann fired because he wrote a bad review for a poor game that was advertised predominantly on their site? Probably not. Did it play a role in it? Was it the catalyst for it? Probably so. All of this is probably better for Jeff in the long term. The hardcore community knows this guy has integrity now, and he can use that to his advantage. He can start his own Gerstmann Game Reviews.com Blog and tell it how it is without fear of repercussion. More so though, Jeff has made visible (inadvertently) the shifting trend in the gaming media. I’m really curious to see where things stand around the time of E3 this year. Things are going to get very interesting in the next few months, and I hope I’m right in the middle of it.
