Geek Bravado

The blown hard arrogance of Parallax Abstraction.

Tag Archives: game journalism

Can we have some enthusiasm in the enthusiast press?

Leave a Comment Posted by on February 19, 2013

Does anyone remember the good old days when there was actually enthusiasm in the so called gaming “enthusiast press”? In truth, it probably wasn’t that long ago but it certainly feels that way. It’s where you went to see people who were super passionate about games talk about games passionately. You expected criticism and to see things that were bad called out but you also knew you were going to a place where people took gaming as seriously as you did. Somehow in the last year or two, the enthusiasm seems to have been sucked out and replaced with a dark bitterness that really is making me wonder why some of the people who still write about this entertainment sector continue to bother. I speak in general terms of course that don’t apply across the board but something’s amiss and I don’t get when doom and gloom became the hot topic to latch onto.

I say this as someone who is a cynical bastard. I’m happy when positive things happen but most of my life, I’ve taken the stance that if you assume the worst, you’ll be disappointed less often. Even as someone with that point of view, I find it amazing just how obsessed with negativity the enthusiast press is becoming and how they seem to take a short-term event and milk it with every ounce of dread they can. The most recent example of this is the poor sales month Nintendo had in January with the Wii U. Poor is putting it mildly, it was a number that would have been disastrous for one of the current 8 year old consoles to have, forget a machine that’s only a couple of months old. The Xbox 360 which came out in 2005 and is in all likelihood getting replaced this year outsold it by more than two to one. It’s bad, real bad, even for when trying to launch a new console in a world still deep in a recession, much as the media tries to deny it.

That should be reported as such but what most outlets immediately leaped to was a quote from everyone’s favourite unaccountable hack analyst, Michael Pachter. He is saying that the Wii U was a misfire and that he’s basically put Nintendo on death watch, saying he’s doubtful they can recover from the poor launch and that the 3DS can’t sustain them as a company. Now, I can talk for hours about this twit’s horrendous track record with predictions and how the press touts his few successes while ignoring his many failures but that’s not even the point here.

The Wii U launched with a lot of software but most of it was uninteresting. And as a Wii U owner clamoring for new games, how thin the release schedule is until later this year is a worry for me. However, while there’s no doubt that Nintendo’s in a tough spot right now and has a lot to prove, when did one bad month equal total and complete meltdown? Does no one remember that this is a company that is over 100 years old and which until recently, had never failed to turn a profit? Does anyone remember how the Gamecube is called a failure to this day, despite it actually selling quite well and making Nintendo money? Nintendo is one of the most resilient, continually successful companies in the history of the world and just come off the Wii and DS, two of the most successful, profitable consoles of all time but they’re doomed because of one bad month of Wii U sales. When Apple’s stock started to drop and they failed to meet expectations last quarter, criticism was dismissed at hate and the press said they would “innovate out of their stock slump.” Even by the objectively obvious double standard that Apple operates in, they seem to be the only ones able to do right these days.

Oh yeah, did I also mention that Pachter now sits on the board of a Skinner Box social gaming company that has a direct interest in seeing the console business fail? Yeah, just when I thought the man’s commentary couldn’t get less credible, that massive conflict of interest enters the fray. I’ve yet to see that pointed out anywhere else.

Sure, the short-sighted, largely clueless investors that hold Nintendo stock won’t be happy with the launch. A lot of them wouldn’t have been happy unless it sold better than the Wii, something that was impossible and Nintendo knew. But as is always the case with this company, a couple of good first party titles can easily turn the platform’s fortunes around. I’ll be the first to admit that they should have had more of those titles at launch and that some of them are much further in the future than they should be but they will come and they will likely move hardware. This isn’t the Vita, Nintendo has some of the strongest IPs in the world and those IPs sell machines. All of this is trivially easy to glean by looking at the history of the company, yet I’ve not seen a single article discussing this, not a single reporter raising these points. All I see are inflammatory headlines like “Pachter puts Wii U and Nintendo on death watch” and “Is Nintendo doomed?” Not only is the “enthusiast press” ignoring history for convenient headlines, they are damaging the very industry they are supposed to champion by writing stories like this that scare potential customers away from the Wii U. Hell, tomorrow we’re finally supposed to get the reveal of the PlayStation 4, the first glimpse of the next generation that people have been saying is years overdue. Yet even now, I’m seeing stories questioning whether this is too little, too late and if consoles even matter any more. What the Hell happened to the excitement, to the interest in seeing the good the future may hold? Controversy drives clicks and writing stories they know will start flame wars is part of it but it goes beyond that. When did the press become so damn emo?

Nintendo is a company facing many challenges right now, of that there can be no doubt. Gaming’s changing is ways that have never been seen before and were not predicted by anyone. Many of these are not good changes either but more on that in the future. I’m also the first to admit that the growing scandal over Aliens: Colonial Marines is enough to blacken the heart of even the most naive gaming enthusiast. But seriously guys, if you can no longer write about the industry that is the sole focus of your job as if you actually enjoy it, step aside and let someone in who can actually see the glass as half full one in a while. And for the love of everything, please stop using analyst quotes as the basis for your doom and gloom pieces. These people just want attention and they’re playing you like a two dollar banjo. When even a jaded cynic is thinking you’re being too cynical, you have a real problem somewhere. Gaming is supposed to be fun, let’s start talking about it as if it’s not a burden, at least once in a while.

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Meet the new hotness, same as the old hotness

4 Comments Posted by on July 24, 2012

Remember when pretty much everyone in the games press and a good chunk of the industry said PC gaming was dead? Man, that seems like it happened so recently. That’s probably because it did. Only a year or two ago, you couldn’t look at a non-PC enthusiast site without seeing almost everyone condemning the platform as corpsified and one that would always play second fiddle to consoles in the home, saddled with half-assed ports of games that were designed for controllers and 720p first. Even with the huge rise of mobile and indie development, everyone said there just wasn’t a case for gaming on computers anymore. The usual bevy of nonsense excuses was offered: Piracy’s out of control! A computer than can run games is too expensive! PC gaming’s too complicated!

Then some time in 2011, the sentiment almost universally shifted and in the last couple of months, this seems to be the increasingly common viewpoint.

As a life-long PC gamer first and someone who also supports computers for a living, I’ve always thought similarly to Jim Sterling. I’ve owned every console since the PS2 and have a huge library of console games. I don’t dislike consoles at all, far from it. However, especially in recent years, the continued excuses I hear about why PC gaming can never be mainstream I always believed to be crap. Piracy is a huge problem on every platform from Xbox 360 to iOS, it’s just whined about more on PC. Virtually any computer you buy now can run games to some degree and even something as low as $500 can run AAA stuff decently if you don’t care about having all the settings maxed. Most reasonably equipped PCs can easily be plugged into a TV if you want to game on the couch and almost every new game has native controller support. And with the lessening frequency of driver updates and well as drivers, games and operating systems that keep themselves current automatically, it’s never been easier to be a PC gamer. I could sit my girlfriend or my Mom down with a new PC with Steam on it, say “Buy, install and play something.” and neither of them would have any harder a time doing that than they would putting a game into a console. Sterling also touches on how digital distribution means the actual games are almost always cheaper now as well. The standby excuses no longer apply and are just that, excuses.

Meanwhile, consoles have paid online services that are free on PC. Patching also became possible this generation which has given rise to the “release now, patch later” mentality that the absence of used to be their greatest strength. This is backed up with manufacturer “certification processes” that are supposed to ensure you get quality in the box. However, especially of late, we’ve heard many developers (especially smaller indies) complaining about how bureaucratic and slow they are and how more and more are finding the process not worth it. Even with this, we still get numerous games like say, every Bethesda release that are often barely playable at launch or the strange and continuing problem of most Xbox Live Arcade titles shipping broken online play. When you combine this with both Microsoft and Sony making games more and more secondary and trying to turn their machines into all-in-one living room devices, I think Sterling’s bang on when he says that consoles are simply becoming closed, less powerful and increasingly less friendly PCs.

Most indie developers have said that they both endured fewer headaches and made more money by releasing to Steam on PC or even the App Store than on any console service. Services like that allow you to create and release a game entirely on your own whereas Xbox Live Arcade requires that you have a publisher who cuts into your profits. Then there’s retail games where self-publishing hasn’t been a realistic option for over a decade. You can patch and update your game with ease and as often as you want on PC without penalty and contrary to the console certification philosophy, PC games that are broken at launch are no more or less common. In other words, PC not only has by far the largest number of potential players in the world, it’s the easiest platform to develop and maintain your game for.

Here’s the thing though: That’s been the case on PC for the better part of a decade now and it was the case throughout most of this time when people declared PC gaming dead. What amazes me is not only that the pendulum has swung back but that it’s done so with such speed that the pendulum’s practically warped by the G-force. The PC always does get a bit of a resurgence as a console cycle ends and given that this cycle has gone on way too long, a certain amount of that is expected. This time seems different though, with many developers big and small now speaking out against how frustrating the consoles are to work with and how many who have previously released on them aren’t going to bother anymore. Many say that between PC and mobile platforms, consoles are increasingly becoming irrelevant and that the next generation may be the last of them, at least in their current form. I don’t know if that’s true but I do know that PC and mobile are raising the bar of value expectations both from developers and consumers and if the consoles want to continue to have the great success they’ve attained, the large companies in charge of them need to stop slogging through the mud and learn to be agile and less controlling.

What I’ve really learned throughout watching this huge and sudden paradigm shift is just how increasingly irrelevant and frankly useless the enthusiast press is becoming. The same people who were declaring the PC dead with certainty only a couple of years ago are now cheering it as the killer of consoles. These are the same people who said the DS and Wii were gimmicky and would never take off and that people would never want to play games on a mobile phone and that PC gaming was always going to be a niche for wealthy nerds. PC gaming never went anywhere and was never close to dead but people believed it because the enthusiast press said so. I’ve come to realise in recent months that the segment is really just an inter-feeding echo chamber based on opinions people pull out of thin air without any real empirical evidence. Time and time again, the enthusiast press proves itself to be pretty useless at understanding trends and what consumers actually want, only at taking wild guesses and stating them as fact. It frustrates me to see their word so often taken as law among gamers, even when it constantly flip-flops and is proven wrong by others who remain ignored. I don’t know how one goes about fixing this problem but I’ve been granularly moving further and further away from this segment of game coverage in the last couple of years and I think if they aren’t careful, a lot of other people are going to as well. If when the next Xbox and PlayStation come out, we start seeing coverage once again swinging back to the PC being irrelevant, I think perhaps it’s their own relevance they should check.

I’ve always been a PC gamer first and will continue to be, even though I will likely be all three new consoles when they arrive. I do wonder what the future is going to hold in this regard but the important thing to remember is that throughout the entire history of gaming (including one major crash), playing games on computers has always endured and grown, no matter what has happened to every other segment. I think consoles are important for growing the gaming audience but if the future is in fact one where open, expandable, decentralised platforms can once again be dominant, I think that’s ultimately good for everyone. Regardless of where you choose to do your gaming, make sure you make your choice because it’s where you prefer to be, not because it’s where the increasingly irrelevant press tells you to be.

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The Gaming Press Needs to Find Some Humility

Leave a Comment Posted by on March 26, 2012

A while back,  I wrote a post about the gaming enthusiast press’ continual crisis of confidence. Now I’d like to talk about the other side, that is when the enthusiast press gets overconfident and dismissive of outside criticism, some of which may be deserved. As many are aware, there’s a wee bit of a hubbub going on over the ending to Mass Effect 3. One of my next couple of blog posts is going to detail my experiences and opinion on it but the gist of the uproar is that many gamers don’t like the way the sci-fi trilogy ended and have been loudly voicing their displeasure, even demanding that BioWare change the ending to one they would prefer. True to form, the enthusiast press has stepped up to comment, sometimes with insightful and interest pieces and sometimes with facepalm inducing tripe that insults their audience.

That items such as the latter one linked above exist in quantity is distressing enough but perhaps moreso is the way some generally respected members of the enthusiast press respond to attempts at constructive criticism of what they do. Late this past week, a series of articles at Forbes which are nicely summarised with additional commentary here asked the question of whether or not the universally positive coverage of Mass Effect 3 (almost none of which talked about the ending so many dislike) demonstrates a credibility problem in the enthusiast press. Now I will admit that Forbes has a reputation for writing pieces designed to rile people up (this is the same site that predicted Apple will have a $1,650 stock price in 2015 backed up by hilariously flawed arguments) and it should be noted that one of the first published articles on gaming by the author that touched this all off is well…an unflattering diatribe. Regardless, the series raised a number of interesting questions as to whether many in the games press specifically have a problem separating the fans within them from the critics. Many well known gaming reporters did not take kindly to it and lashed out pretty strongly. I also witnessed some strongly worded responses from Alex Navarro of Giant Bomb and Ben Kuchera of the Penny Arcade report with Kuchera having gone so far as to publicly block people on Twitter who have written him mature yet unfavourable comments.

Frankly I’m appalled that this is how some are choosing to respond to the people they write their content for (and I should stress that this is only a few high profile people doing this), as if they are somehow above the criticism. As I’ve said before, the games press seems to have this constant need to defend and validate what they do, whether it’s to idiot commenters or now to people from other areas of the press. Clearly the article hit a nerve with some, something I might add it was likely written to do and it’s likely the responses it provoked have simply validated the author’s opinions.

I will say that I don’t agree with all the points made in the Forbes series. I think claiming that the enthusiast press should be faulted for being enthusiasts is as ridiculous as it is paradoxical. Obviously you have to be a fan of a creative medium to write or critique it in a meaningful way because otherwise, you can’t relate to the other fans you are writing for. This is true in all forms of media and that’s why there’s also a thriving enthusiast press for books, music, movies, TV etc. There are however, several endemic elements to the games press that aren’t often found in the othes and I believe these hurt its credibility. They can be overcome but with few exceptions, there doesn’t seem to be many attempts to do so. I don’t know if this is because many gaming sites are owned by large media conglomerates that target them to niche demographics or simply because they feel its necessary to appease the vocal minority audience rather than simply tune out.

The first of these does tie in to the point the Forbes series made on critics also being fans. It’s something I’ve seen happening for years and it’s why I only trust reviews from a handful of sources. That is what I call “honeymooning” with games. When a hotly anticipated title comes out (especially if it’s a sequel in a highly regarded series) many critics have an initial honeymoon phase with it when the title is new and they’re so happy to have it that they will tend to overstate their praises for it and often gloss over obvious flaws or downplay their significance. Almost all reviews are written in this honeymoon period, they have to be. It’s only a few weeks later (usually after the next hot title comes out) that the honeymoon period ends and the flaws are discussed, often to the point where many wonder why they weren’t brought up before since they appear to be such big deals.

The best recent example of this I can think of is Mass Effect 2, the last game in the series. It was undeniably a fantastic title and in my opinion was the best of the trilogy but it had several major gameplay and narrative problems that were commonly agreed upon. Most of these were not reflected in reviews or in podcasts I listened to at the time. The podcasts in particular were full of lavish praise, some going so far as to call it one of the best RPGs ever made. I heard the term “perfect game” used more than once. However, several weeks later if someone on one of these shows were to bring it up, the discussion would almost exclusively be focused on the faults and how major and damaging to the experience they were. None of these points were apparently important before and of course by the time they were discussed, most of the game’s sales had been made and all the glowing reviews were out there and it was too late to change them. I think the inability many in game critics have to disconnect themselves from their fandom is a big problem and I don’t see this as often in other media. You can be a fan of something and critique it but you need to train your brain to look at something with straight objectivity when you’re reviewing it, even if it’s something you were looking forward to. I’m not a professional critic but I had no problem doing this with Mass Effect 2 at the time or many other games since. I loved the game but could tell you right away what was wrong with it and how that dampened my experience. Not everyone has to agree with me but many did, just later on. As a reviewer, you are supposed to be writing buying advice. If you can’t play games and not have a “honeymoon” phase with them, I dare say that perhaps you’re not the best qualified to be reviewing them.

The second issue is the intertwined relationship the games press has with the companies they are supposed to be critical of. I won’t say this never happens in other media criticism but it’s definitely the exception as opposed to the rule as it is in video games. The primary form of advertising on almost any video game web site is…video games. On top of that, they’re usually new releases which are of course the focus of most of the coverage. I have no idea how the web advertising business works or why it’s seemingly so difficult for these sites to get ads from industries they don’t cover but it’s a major problem and there’s no sure way to gauge the influence it has on coverage beyond the press’ assurance that they can be trusted which they’ve proven they often can’t be. If it is so hard to get non-endemic advertising, I can sympathise because these companies need to make money but if other enthusiast media can at least partially avoid it, I don’t know why they can’t.

Beyond that, there are the large number of incentives that the enthusiast press is often given by big publishers. Getting early copies of games to review is standard in most media and that’s fine. If you’re writing buying advice, it’s important to have your review ready the day a title launches. Indeed, music and movie critics get to sample new products in advance too and it makes sense. However, for most movie critics, that means getting a free ticket to an advance showing at a local theatre. With large game publishers, the big means of press promotion the last few years have been “media and review events”. When a publisher has a slate of big titles in the pipeline or a new title coming out shortly and wants press coverage, they will hold a fancy event that they will invite the enthusiast press to. These are often in lavish hotels or resorts in fancy locations like Las Vegas or Hawaii, they’re fully catered, include a bunch of free swag and sometimes even special events for the press that are themed around the upcoming titles. Occasionally the reporters are even allowed to stay for an extra couple of days after the event as a mini vacation. This is all paid for by the publishers. In the case of review events, the reporters are all placed in a special area together where they have a limited amount of time to play the game to completion at a rushed pace and are surrounded with PR people the whole time. Review events such as these are usually saved for large franchises such as Gears of War or Call of Duty and are often the only way enthusiast outlets can review these titles before release.

The third issue is one of access. One of the criticisms levied against cable news networks now is how they are always afraid to offend those in power for fear of losing the access to key people and information they require in order to report effectively and quickly. The games press has this same issue. Piss off a major publisher with a negative review and you may not get review copies next time or get invited to press events or get interviews or screenshots. They may even give a time exclusive to another outlet that will steal your traffic. Less coverage means less traffic and less ad revenue. This is the single biggest reason in my opinion that so many sites really review on a “7 to 10 scale”, meaning that even though they claim to use the 10 point spectrum, anything under a 7 is only reserved for truly bad titles and even the mediocre ones can be expected to score between 7 and 10. I also believe it’s why bad games from larger publishers will often get higher scores than bad games with similar negative qualities from smaller publishers that don’t have bigger PR departments or large numbers of releases in a given year. A bad game from Activision or EA may get a 6 but a game with very similar problems from say SouthPeak or dtp Entertainment might get a 3 or 4. I don’t even know if this is done consciously a lot of the time but I’ve seen a definite score bias towards larger publishers over the years.

To say that factors such as these don’t have an undue influence on coverage is naive and ridiculous. You simply cannot have an industry that relies on advertising dollars, access and free events from the people they are supposed to be critical of to not have lapses in integrity. I don’t paint the entire enthusiast press with this brush but the problems are undeniable. So what can they do to fix this? I don’t know what they do about the advertising problem but when it comes to press events and access, the fix is simple: Say no. Activision won’t let you review Call of Duty prior to release without coming to their event? Then wait until release, buy a retail copy and make it clear to your readers why the review is late. Is EA hinting that you may not get preview assets for the new Medal of Honor game if you don’t lavish praise on Mass Effect 3? Then go without those assets and once again tell your readers why. If the publishers are playing dirty, there’s nothing wrong with saying so and if nothing else, we know that gamers are passionate people and will call them to account for that. All it would take is a couple of big sites to do this before the publishers would have to smarten up for fear of alienating big chunks of the hardcore fan base that evangelise the products they sell. The problem is, this all requires one or two outlets to be first and no one wants to be.

My point with this is that if the games press is going to operate with all these dubious ties to the industry they cover, they are going to have to live with the occasional accusation (be it in editorial or forum form) of foul play in their coverage. To see people like Alex Navarro, Jim Sterling, Justin McElroy and Ben Kuchera get all high and mighty because someone dared to point out the massive integrity issue that has hung over their entire industry for over a decade now is disingenuous and arrogant. The gist of most of their responses was “I’ve never personally done such a thing so how dare you say it’s a possibility for anyone to!” Sorry guys but your relationship to the industry you cover would be described in any other journalistic field as a massive conflict of interest. That the business model of your field is so flawed that it has to operate this way doesn’t excuse it and I think the concerns (and in some cases, criticisms backed up by real world examples and trends) are perfectly valid. You may be the pinnacle of integrity but many in your field are not and I don’t know if you noticed but the Forbes guy didn’t name names.

If you are so convinced that your work is proper journalism, who cares what some guy at Forbes thinks anyway? Once again, you feel the need to leap to the defence of your craft, almost as if you think it doesn’t have the means to stand on its own merits. Fox News doesn’t feel the need to complain about their critics because those aren’t the people they serve so why do you care? For a group that claims to have such a thick skin because of the often vile nature of their communities, the games press sure does seem to bruise easily.

That’s not to say there isn’t real journalism going on in games or that there are many sites out there that are trying to change the formula or are doing great work within it. There’s a lot out there but sadly, the really popular sites are the ones that rely and thrive off this dubious symbiotic relationship with publishers. It’s been like this for a long time and barring a major shift in how games are made and published (which could be coming in some form), I sadly don’t see it changing any time soon. Nonetheless, these problems exist and need to be brought to light. People of influence responding as some of them did only serve to further demonstrate how undeveloped and immature the games press is and why other press scoff at them. Want to be considered “real journalists”? Then earn it and when it’s questioned, prove the accusers wrong rather than just hurling insults. And for the love of everything, don’t write a response to an issue raised by a passionate section of your fans that basically calls them stupid. We’re not on the school yard here and no one even won an argument by taking the low ground.

Coverage, Video Games , , , ,

So Vox Games, who saw that coming?

Leave a Comment Posted by on January 4, 2012

I was rather taken aback today to see word spreading like wildfire on the Twitters that a bunch of seasoned gaming press veterans are joining forced to create Vox Games (or whatever it ends up being, apparently that name is only a placeholder), an entirely new–and independent–enthusiast video game web site set to launch some time in the near future. Among the founders are Russ Pitts, Brian Crecente, Chris Grant, Justin & Griffin McElroy, Arthur Gies and other names whom will sound very familiar if you follow the enthusiast press in the slightest. A number of these people recently resigned from long-held positions at other prominent outlets, sparking rampant speculation on where they were heading which they put to rest with their announcement today. They were mum on details of what specifically they will cover or the way they will cover it (judging from the timing, I get the feeling this idea was conceived, pitched and is coming together in a spur of the moment kind of way) but they stressed that they are being funded by an independent entity and not one of the large media conglomerates that largely make up the copy-paste, drab, soulless content factories of the popular gaming press today.

I’m surprised and happy to see that in an era of plummeting ad spend, layoffs, all-time low journalistic integrity and lack of public confidence in the gaming press, that someone has stepped up and decided to fund a new initiative with the dollars needed to unseat some well known talent from long held positions elsewhere. Video games are an important medium that deserves meaningful coverage, the likes of which largely doesn’t exist and when it does, is usually relegated to niche sites that can’t pay their talent well, if at all. Most mainstream sites are little more than click farms and the type of content they produce often draws with it communities that I and many others simply can’t be bothered to wade into. With this new initiative, this power team of journos have the opportunity to make something truly great and give it a unique voice that will draw in a unique crowd who clamours for depth and dare I say it, art in what they read about our hobby. A few years ago, a smaller group of veterans decided to pursue a unique angle and created Giant Bomb, a site driven by unique personalities, passion, and a desire to cover the medium in a different, yet entertaining way with a mix of written, audio and video content. Their staff is less than a dozen people but they crank out buckets of high quality content every day. It’s my favourite video game coverage site by far and is one of the only ones I check daily anymore. I don’t know if the Vox Games team plans to pursue a version of this angle or if they have their own vision to bring to the table. If anyone has the chops to make something different, it’s these guys.

I do temper my optimism with a healthy dose of caution however. While these are all well known gaming journalists and some of them I have a great respect for (such as Russ Pitts), others have run sites that comprise big parts of the problem with games coverage today. Crecente was the long time Editor-In-Chief of Kotaku, a site known for poorly written, lazily researched content and rumour mongering that many would not use words like journalistic to describe. The McElroy brothers are funny guys with insightful things to say but they are the biggest purveyors to Joystiq’s snarky editorial tone, which often makes light of very serious matters and doesn’t foster a lot of serious discussion. And while Arthur Gies has cultivated a fairly big following from the inexplicably still popular Rebel FM podcast, he has developed an ego you could fill a city block with and I’m not sure his idea of how game journalism should work (such as stating how a review should be taken as one person’s opinion while also taking every opportunity to dump on reviewers he personally disagrees with) is an idea that should be adopted as standard practice. The thing is though, all of these guys operated under different–and much larger–corporate overlords before and likely had a lot of their editorial policies and their site’s “voices” if you will, dictated to them. When they are allowed to pursue an editorial vision that they are in charge of, the voices will become entirely their own and that is an exciting prospect. I doubt many of these guys would have so quickly left the otherwise comfy positions many of them held were they not enthralled at the idea of having real creative freedom.

Vox Media (the site’s backers) is not run by these guys and they will still have superiors to report to but like Giant Bomb’s parent Whiskey Media before them, if they are smart and forward thinking, they will run the business side and let the editorial team do what it does best. Even if certain members of this team bring with them traits I don’t personally care for, more voices in the gaming press and particularly ones without “corporate thinking” behind them are needed more than ever. I really hope they can pull it off and I’m very excited to see what Vox Games turns into. Good luck guys, don’t screw it up!

Business, Coverage, Video Games , , , , , , , , ,

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