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Tag Archives: journalism

Can we stop with NPD already?

Leave a Comment Posted by on September 10, 2012

When you’re into gaming and the industry to the unhealthy degree that I am, you like to know numbers. Numbers give a very simplistic, top down viewpoint on how well a game and by extension, the people involved in getting it to you are doing. If it’s a game I like by a company I want to see succeed, knowing it sold well brings a small grin to my face because it means that company gets to make more games and hopefully, more like the ones I enjoy. Unfortunately there has never been a wholly accurate way to track this data and new distribution methods are making the true picture even murkier. That doesn’t stop the click-happy press from trying though and the primary vehicle they use to do so is the monthly sales report from NPD Group, a research firm that’s supposed to specialise in this stuff. Like the myriad of analysts they love to quote with no accountability, every month a new NPD report comes out, gets regurgitated in the press with a bunch of uninformed predictions attached and the fans go nuts. The problem is, NPD’s report has actually gotten less and less useful over time but it’s still treated as a barometer for the health of the games industry and it needs to stop.

The NPD monthly report began a number of years ago, back when the only way to buy video games was in a physical form from a brick and mortar store. Even then it wasn’t great but it was certainly more accurate than now. As the industry has evolved and adopted more platforms and distribution methods, the report has failed to keep pace and their accuracy and usefulness have waned. Media outlets and game companies pay NPD a lot of money for it though and they have continued to push it in order to keep those subscription dollars rolling in.

This wouldn’t necessarily be bad as any data is better than none but the press never puts the increasing blurriness of NPD’s data into context and it’s still taken by many gamers (and the analysts looking to get quoted) as the true gospel. Right now, NPD numbers month over month are going down at a rather alarming pace, causing many to think the AAA games industry is in free fall. While it’s certainly not healthy and game sales are indeed down, using NPD data alone as a source of industry health is wrong and frankly, the kind of bad journalism that’s stinking up the enthusiast press. The big story this month is how Darksiders II apparently posted very disappointing sales numbers despite being the #1 title on NPD’s list, causing many to go into a panic since this was one of the games that was supposed to secure ailing THQ’s short-term future as they attempt to restructure and save their business. The problem is, the current state of NPD’s report itself makes most of this panic unwarranted, at least for now.

To get an idea of just how messed up NPD’s data is, here’s a few points of note:

  • They only collect data about game sales in the United States. Some different charts are kept on a few other countries but they’re from other companies and are never included.
  • They only count sales from brick and mortar retail stores and don’t even count all of those. Most independent retailers are not counted and Wal-Mart (the biggest retailer in the world and I believe second in game sales only to GameStop) was just added recently.
  • They don’t count digital distribution sales in any credible way. Most digital distributors (including Steam which is to that market what GameStop is to brick and mortar) don’t release sales numbers to anyone but the publishers they partner with. NPD very recently started providing guesses of these numbers but they have no idea what the true ones are. Given that almost all PC games are sold digitally now (with many other platforms entering that space as well), this is a critical and glaring omission. This is why there have never been NPD numbers for Xbox Live Arcade or PlayStation Network downloadable games and why they don’t cover the mobile market.
  • The only numbers released to the public are the console hardware sales and a top 10 list of games which isn’t broken out by platform. NPD used to put out more detailed stats and then distilled them down further. While AAA titles generally live or die by their first month sales, catalogue sales are also important but will never be in the top 10 if they aren’t Call of Duty, Nintendo or Blizzard games. THQ was actually profitable last quarter despite having no new releases at all because their catalogue sales were very strong. Some titles can indeed have long legs but the report doesn’t tell that.
  • Their sales numbers don’t take into account release dates. If a game comes out with only 5 days remaining in a month, it’s obviously not going to sell as many units in that reporting period than if it came out with 25 days remaining in the month. Some press discuss this but many don’t, nor do NPD themselves, electing not even to put release dates in their charts. These are critical for proper context of sales in a given month. Which flows nicely into my next point…
  • Their numbers are always released without context. They currently say overall sales are down year-over-year and while that true, some of this can be attributed to fewer games releases from big publishers as they are devoting resources to next-gen projects and taking fewer risks with what’s left in this generation. They also fail to mention how sales of most luxury categories are down across the board because the world is still in a massive recession that’s worsening in many places. That one or two outliers like Apple and Samsung buck the trend does not invalidate it. This isn’t entirely NPD’s fault. It’s the job of those reporting the numbers to provide context and most are not.

The point is that this particular NPD report (which is the only one from them I can speak to) is hurling towards irrelevance. It’s numbers have never been wholly accurate but as the industry evolves and shares less data with them, they become even fuzzier. NPD is very careful to not point this out and the enthusiast press is doing the same because the doom and gloom stories they write with them drive traffic and controversy. There’s a reason the more credible sites like Giant Bomb don’t really talk about them, despite the most ravenous fans being there. Continuing to use this report (and the analyst quotes it spawns) as any kind of true barometer of the industry’s health is poor journalism, nothing more.

On the subject of Darksiders II, it’s premature to sound THQ’s death bell over these numbers but it is important to note that just because NPD’s report is not wholly useful doesn’t mean the game is doing great and we just don’t know. Publishers love to send out press releases when titles sell even as well as expected and that hasn’t happened yet. Ultimately, the best place to tell how well this and indeed every title has performed will be in the publisher’s earnings call. They may not reveal exact sales numbers but we will know if it met, beat or fell short of expectations. Until the companies for whom these sales truly count have their say, anything NPD says really doesn’t matter any more.

This is a two pronged problem, both in the NPD report itself and once again, the enthusiast press which falls asleep on their responsibility to provide context in order to aid sensationalism. There’s a reason you don’t see stories in the mainstream press talking about the next video game crash every time one of these declining reports come out. It’s partly because NPD numbers aren’t a huge deal outside enthusiast circles but also likely because their report doesn’t pass the smell test. When it’s easy for a total non-journalist like me to realise their data is a joke, what excuse does the actual press have? The publishers are not the best place to get accurate sales data either but whether they’re in the red or in the black is a better barometer for the industry’s health than anything NPD says. If you want to know how things are doing, read an analysis of publisher earnings. Don’t listen to NPD, don’t listen to the stories about NPD and especially don’t listen to the likes of Dent, Pachter, Broussard, Sebastian and all the other analysts who use them as a basis to get their names noticed and know no more or better than NPD themselves.

Business, Coverage, Video Games , , ,

Gizmodo shows what’s wrong with the enthusiast press

Leave a Comment Posted by on August 3, 2012

One of the things I’ve railed on for a while is how I believe the majority of the enthusiast press–at least in the tech and gaming spaces–is broken. Not just dysfunctional, bloody broken. It’s an important subset of the media, intended to cater to the most passionate fans. As someone who lives and breaths technology and gaming to what some might consider an unhealthy degree, I should be loving it and soaking it in. Instead, I now ignore all but a few places. Much like cable news, they’ve become little more than carefully manipulated outlets for big company PR, often terrified of being properly critical of certain things for fear of losing precious access. Everything’s about publishing first, not accurately, rumours are printed as fact, nothing’s authenticated and analysts are fished for quotes constantly and never called to account when they’re wrong.

Yesterday, inexplicably popular technology blog Gizmodo provided one of the best examples of everything I bitch about.

David Pogue is not a journalist. Oh he calls himself one, make no mistake. He even works as the technology writer for supposedly one of the few remaining bastions of journalism, The New York Times. What Pogue is, is a professional Apple fanboy, something I say without hyperbole. He reviews Apple products and never finds a fault with any of them, though he finds and overhypes many that he manages to find in anything that competes. He goes out of his way to be smarmy and sometimes downright mean to anyone who dares to say that Apple products are not the best by default and claim that something else is perhaps of better value. He was one of the chief deniers of Apple’s many labour problems in China. Worst of all, his main source of income aside from the Times is writing books on the Apple same products he reviews, most of which come out the same day or the day after. Any way you slice it, he’s represents the very antithesis of good journalism. The man’s a two-faced hack.

Yesterday, he lost his iPhone, a clumsy thing that happens to many. So what does Gizmodo do with this utter non-event? They write a story about it, rally their community into action and post not 1 or 2 or 3 but 18 bloody updates throughout the day detailing the whole process of helping a wealthy fanboy find a phone he could probably get a free replacement for with a quick call to his masters in Cupertino. This is disgusting, there’s no other word for it. Why does anyone losing their iPhone warrant a full investigative piece with 18 updates, let alone a person for whom the event likely had less impact on than most Apple employees? If Ed Bott lost his Windows Phone 7 device, would anyone there write a story about it, except maybe to laugh? I highly doubt it. Really, I can’t explain everything that’s wrong with this garbage in a reasonable amount of words. Just click the link if you dare and see for yourself. You can’t not see what’s wrong with that if you have any sense.

Gizmodo’s one of the many hack sites that’s part of the Gawker network. They’re known for doing this kind of crap, not that it makes it right. This wouldn’t bother me too much if it had stayed within their realm as the people who volunteer to read that tripe usually know what they’re getting into. However, a quick search of “gizmodo pogue iphone” shows that this got rebroadcast by the likes of CNN, The Atlantic and a bunch of other places, all of which should know better. This event was junk non-news any way you slice it but it got everywhere and was treated as major news. I’m sure David Pogue is sitting back, smugly satisfied at the way he’s played his fans and the press like a two dollar banjo, giving both himself and the company he covers while taking paycheques from a bunch of free press neither earned.

I’m ranting about this a lot but frankly, it really pisses me off. We have a field that is in desperate need for proper journalism. Gaming and technology are expensive and growing markets where people need to be properly informed and honest details from reporters, not repackaged PR need to be out there. While there isn’t much, there are a few who are genuinely trying to cover this stuff with a proper attention to professionalism and journalistic standards. I fear that they’re having little impact though because they’re routinely drowned out by stories about a nationwide Internet manhunt for a professional fanboy’s iPhone. It’s not as if Apple doesn’t get a disproportionate amount of coverage and lack of criticism already but their PR people must have been grinning ear to ear watching this unfold yesterday.

Has journalism truly become this cynical, this amateur, this disrespectful of the people it serves? Is this really what people want or are people just reading it because unless you want to spend hours a day digging up the real journalism, this is the best they can get? Top that off with another Gawker site whining about how one of the biggest problems in gaming coverage is that publishers don’t bend over to give them all the access they want exactly when they want it and it’s enough to make an enthusiast like me tear his hair out.

Gizmodo should be better than this, David Pogue should be better than this and The New York Times should damn well be better than this. They should all be ashamed of themselves for what happened yesterday, as should anyone who willingly participated in that farce that spits in the face of journalism. I think we as consumers of the coverage they produce should be demanding better. People who write books for Apple shouldn’t be reviewing their products, sites with any respect shouldn’t be writing about when they clumsily lose their toys and we shouldn’t be giving traffic to this crap. Is it that they started writing this lazy tripe first or that we started demanding it? Is there any reason it can’t be both? We should be demanding better and when crap like this is printed as news, it should be mocked and ignored, not validated with readership. If you want real information and real journalism, you need to demand it and reward it. It’s getting harder and harder to just get the truth anymore.

Coverage, Technology , , ,

So That Was E3 2012

Leave a Comment Posted by on June 11, 2012

This week went by super fast for me. Some of that was because work was a non-stop cascade of crazy but it was also because of E3. For as many faults as the show’s structure has, I love it. It’s loud, rambuncious, obnoxious and serves one singular purpose: To scream “VIDEO GAMES ARE AWESOME!” It’s funny because during the week of the big show, I get so caught up in consuming press conference streams, trailers, articles, podcasts and discussing everything at length on forums that it takes up all my free time and for that week, I never actually play any games. This year was no different, aside from a couple of tiny play sessions with my Vita during lunch. There’s always a lot of excitement and anticipation around E3 but this year had a very weird vibe both leading up to and during the show. There was the whining about the show’s relevance, but beyond that, there was a lot of uncertainty about what exactly we’d see. Vita aside, Sony and Microsoft are still flogging what is positively ancient hardware at this point and Nintendo was going to talk about the new WiiU and hopefully breathe some life into the 3DS but last year’s showing (filled with info that was subject to change) really had people confused on what to expect.

Now that the show’s over, I’ve been seeing a lot of really perplexing opinions from the enthusiast press. Many are complaining that the show was disappointing, nothing really impressive came out of it, that Nintendo disappointed really badly and the rest of the makers are pretty clearly just coasting until next year when they’ll presumably announce the next generation Xbox and PlayStation home systems. I’ll admit that this wasn’t my favourite E3 and there are past shows that have been better than this one but once again, the whining from the segment of the press who drives most of their traffic and hype from this show–who indeed should thank this show as a big reason for their field’s existence–really frustrates me. Also guys, what’s with the clapping at press conferences? When you’re there in a coverage capacity, you’re supposed to be journalists first and fans second. Applauding at what are really fancy sales pitches don’t do wonders for demonstrating your integrity. Stop it.

As a superfan of this medium and the AAA segment of it, I’d have done some morally questionable things to be able to attend that show and while I understand it’s bloody hard work for the press, seeing them pimp their coverage all week and then whine about how there wasn’t anything good to see drives me mad. Anyone who says there was nothing interesting at this year’s E3 either didn’t look hard enough or is outright blind. Several of the bigger publishers are certainly coasting on established brands while their front line teams crank away on next-gen hardware but that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone and in spite of that, we’ve seen several new IPs this year and the unique re-imagining of others. The amount of originality on display was more than I was expecting and even though my expectations were low, that’s saying something.

Not everything was as encouraging however. Those that coasted this year really coasted and some of those who really needed to hit their messages out of the park botched the swings to the point where they ended up being little more than bunts. The “big five” press briefings are always a good way to form some top-down impressions of the show as a whole so let’s start there. There were shining highlights but they were almost universally disappointing for different reasons. I’ve heard it speculated on podcasts that a lot of this was because the briefings are being aired on TV to a wide audience and as a result, they’re more strictly crunched for time and are focusing them around more mainstream appeal than they did before. If this is true, then I say they need to stop being aired on TV because all that makes these shows interesting was largely sucked out this year.

Microsoft – This beats EA as the most disappointing, only because EA actually showed games. This year, Microsoft was almost entirely focused on media features and their briefing gave a strong vibe that games were basically an afterthought. We got no new game announcements, some new (but largely old) footage of games we already knew were coming, a smattering of Kinect lip service and from then on it was media, media media. One can only imaging the bazillions of dollars that Microsoft must have spent to secure some of the content deals they announced but as someone who doesn’t give a crap about sports and who doesn’t live in the US and thus, won’t be able to get many of these, I just don’t care. Their SmartGlass feature which will allow supplementary content to appear on your phone or tablet looks like cool tech but the main thing I took from that was “Oh great, yet another thing to distract me from watching the damn show.” They even released the video showcasing all their cool looking Summer of Arcade titles after the show, they didn’t even run it as a sizzle real which would have taken two minutes. Microsoft pretty clearly thinks they’ve already got the gamers locked in for the rest of this generation and now it’s time to broaden to non-gamers to try to keep moving hardware until next year when I’m sure they’ll laser focus on the games again for Xbox: The Next One. There’s probably numbers that indicate this makes sense in some way but as a hardcore gamer, I was pretty annoyed. Gamers are what made the Xbox 360 the success it is and we’ll be what drives adoption of the next system. To leave us out in the cold to showcase a bunch of media features that you can get on boxes that cost less and have no subscription I don’t think is necessarily a willing formula.

Sony – They had one of the more engaging presentations and it was book ended by awesome new IP (Beyond: Two Souls and The Last of Us, both of which I want in my eyeballs right now). Like Microsoft though, they also dropped the ball in key areas to focus more on mainstream stuff, though at least it was focused on games. As a Vita owner itching for new content, I was both stunned and frustrated at how little they talked about the system. Most press and Vita owners left that show thinking Sony has basically left what’s far and away the best portable system out to die. It was later revealed that they had something like 25 games at their booth and more announcements were made during the show itself. They also have a ton of really interesting downloadable indie titles in the works, which weren’t even hinted at. They also waited until later in the week to reveal an incredible list of free AAA and downloadable titles that were already available and will be rotated on a monthly basis for PlayStation Plus members, something which finally made me pull the trigger on it. This neglect was apparently in service of doing a nearly 20 minute embarrassing glitchy demo of an augmented reality storybook for kids and pimping their PlayStation Suite service for Android smartphones, which has been a complete flop so far and I think will continue to be. They even went as far as to apologise for not giving the Vita the attention it deserves. They also waited until after the show to reveal a massive list of free Sony as a company is bleeding badly right now and largely ignoring the device they need to get their investment back on quickly at their press briefing was nothing short of idiotic. As the show progressed however, I quickly realised that Sony platforms are getting a ton of compelling content this year and I’m excited for it now, including the Vita.

Nintendo – They without question had the most to prove this year. The Wii has flared out badly, the 3DS had a bad start and the WiiU is their big chance to shut up those who are saying Nintendo should get out of hardware and make iOS games. They had not one but 3 different briefings, a video one talking about WiiU’s online features on Sunday, their main WiiU briefing on Tuesday and a dedicated 3DS show the following day which I missed. From what I understand, there’s a lot to be excited about for 3DS this year and Nintendo seems to have finally found their stride with it (funny how all the gaming press who said the handheld market had “moved on” last year were silent on that issue this year). They did a decidedly worse pitch for the WiiU. I went into this show excited to get one pre-ordered and probably still will but came out the other side pretty deflated. There were far fewer games announced than people were expecting and some heavy hitters were missing. One big pleasant surprise was the announcement that 2 WiiU GamePad tablets controllers can now be used simultaneously. Up to now, the announced limit was 1 so this is nice to see, even if it comes with the caveat of cutting the frame rate on the GamePads by half if both are in use. Pikmin 3 looks cool (though I’ve never been a huge Pikmin guy) but there was no mention of Retro Studios’ new title, there’s yet another New. Super Mario Bros. game coming (I like the series but the formula is getting tired), Ubisoft has a couple of neat titles on the horizon with ZombieU and Rayman Legends but other than that, the big third-party title they spent many minutes on was Batman Arkham City Armoured Edition, an update to a game that has been out for almost a year with gimmicky WiiU map and inventory features tacked on. I fail to see how they expect to find a new audience for this title on the platform but they seem confident. Their big closer was NintendoLand, supposedly their answer to WiiSports. It’s yet another minigame collection centred around the core idea of a theme park and though it seemed neat, most press who played the games thought they were underwhelming. There simply weren’t enough game announcements. They needed to rapid fire them to show how committed both Nintendo and third parties are to the platform and they failed at that, to the point where Nintendo’s stock took a hit after the show was over. Some in the press have said that Nintendo has been focusing on very short PR cycles lately, not talking about games until much closer to release. Since the WiiU isn’t due to ship until the holiday season, they theorise that we’ll see many more announcements before then and that they were light on announcements at E3 because it simply comes too early. That may be true but to give such a paltry offering at the show where mainstream media is watching seems like a massive missed opportunity.

EA – After their briefing, one of their executives did some damage control and came out saying that EA has several new IPs in the works but that they were all for next-gen systems which is why they weren’t talked about here. That was slightly reassuring but it didn’t really detract from the slimy feeling one gets from watching this conference. At least for 2012, EA is showing itself to be a company that’s creatively bankrupt. Their entire hour plus briefing did not talk about a single new IP. Everything was sequels, add-ons, stapling mobile/social garbage onto every title whether they needed them or not and putting on a brave face while begging people to resubscribe from Star Wars: The Old Republic.  Their announcement that it’s going to be free up until level 15 is cool and will get me to try it but I’m sure I won’t end up subscribing and I think it’s going to be fully free to play by the end of the year. They put a big bet on the subscription MMO segment and there’s just no success to be found there anymore. SimCity looks really cool and I love some of the new mechanics they’re introducing. But I don’t trust EA to do always-on DRM in a consumer friendly way (Blizzard does it best and they can’t even really do it right) and the inability to revert saves has killed the best part of the game, manually triggering crazy disasters on your established cities. I’ll probably end up skipping it. I do like the new Need for Speed meets Burnout idea that Criterion is taking with the new instalment in that series that’s inexplicably sharing the same name as the one that came out only 2 bloody years ago but it’s going to be yet another driving game I’ll probably get distracted from before I can finish it. The announcement later in the week that it’s getting a Vita release perked me up. Their attempts to force connectivity with other platforms into everything is gross and just seems like an attempt to hit marketing bullet points and trying to keep people always thinking about their games when they can’t be around to play them. I don’t have time to check stats and play pointless little side games for Battlefield 3 on my phone and those resources are best spent on making the core games better.

Ubisoft – Ghastly hosting choices aside (I couldn’t stand that YouTube flavour of the month but nothing is as bad as Mr. Caffeine), this was far and away the best show. When Yves Guillemot briefly came on stage to introduce the incredible looking new IP Watch Dogs, really all he should have done was yell “Triple A bitches!” and dropped his mic. Beyond some nods to casual franchises like Just Dance and an embarrassing, borderline sexist demonstration of ShootMania which did that game no favours, this was all about top-shelf, mirror shine polished titles for hardcore players like me. No unnecessary social and mobile connectivity, no  Assassin’s Creed is one of my favourite series of this console generation so I was already sold on the new one coming this Fall but their demonstration just blew me away more, unnecessary animal killing aside. Rayman Legends on the WiiU was almost enough to sell me one of those systems and from what I’ve been hearing of ZombieU, that might seal the deal in spite of its dumb name. They closed off with Watch Dogs which looks like Assassin’s Creed meets Deus Ex and I couldn’t be more excited for it. It looks like the kind of game I’ve been dreaming of for years now. Ubisoft clearly believes there’s a future in AAA and is driving almost all their company in that direction which is a very refreshing change. This is a company that doesn’t always do right by their customers but in terms of new ideas, they are the ones to watch in 2013.

There’s so much more that happened during the week beyond these press briefings but if you combine the vibe they all gave off into one, you get an idea of the show as a whole. They (plus a number of other surprising new titles that were discussed throughout the week) to me indicates an industry that’s in a bit of a holding pattern while it waits for the next generation  (even Nintendo, who should be in anything but that) and sees how emerging platforms continue to grow (or not as I think the next couple of years will show). Nonetheless, the industry still has some new and different ideas left in it that’s it’s working on them full steam ahead. Personally, this year has been a bit of a AAA drought for me so far (not that my pile of shame is complaining) but the second half of this year and in particular, the first half of next year is shaping up to be bonkers with a huge number of titles coming I think I’ll be really in to as well as a wide variety of people with different tastes and genre preferences. For all the questions of the show’s relevancy and whining that there was nothing interesting here, I’ve found tons to be excited about and if the future of all video games is dreck on iOS and Facebook, no one seems to have told the people at this show and they aren’t exactly stupid people who don’t know how to turn a profit.

With the economy still not improving and another recession possibly on the horizon, the stakes for the AAA industry have never been higher. There’s definitely some creative seizures taking place due to that but there’s still a market for new ideas and those trying them aren’t just dipping their foot in the water, they’re diving in deep and making substantial and in some cases, ballsy bets. For me, the biggest disappointment this year was in the coverage itself. I’ve been following E3 closely for years now and never before have I seen such a ho-hum, torpor response from the people who like to call themselves the enthusiast press. Maybe they know something they aren’t sharing with the rest of us but what I took from this show was that there’s few new ideas, the console companies don’t care about gamers anymore and that the new and shiny platforms like the Vita are apparently dead, even though there were 25 games at the Sony booth and I rarely read a story about any of them. I’m not sure how you can call a platform dead when it’s screaming at you for attention and you just ignore it.

I’m actually sympathetic to a degree in that I think the enthusiast press is hearing a lot of the same unfounded and frankly dumb rhetoric about how AAA gaming is dying and iOS and Facebook are taking over the world and is beginning to drink some of the Kool Aid. I can personally attest to how it definitely seems like no one’s backing what you like when that’s all you see everywhere. For the fault of this year’s E3 (and there were many), it’s the one time of year when the AAA industry can scream about all the incredible gaming experiences you can’t get anywhere else and they still came out swinging this year. It’s an industry that’s in a hard place right now but they’re nowhere near dead yet and even if that’s their ultimate fate, they are going down in one Hell of a blaze of glory. Point out the faults when you see them but this is an event that should be cherished, not admonished. If you’re in the enthusiast press but can’t find your enthusiasm even at this time of year, then maybe you need to start writing about something else.

I see a great year ahead for those of us who love AAA gaming and I can’t wait for what’s to come.

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

Some Ranty Thoughts On E3′s Relevance

2 Comments Posted by on June 4, 2012

So the big show starts today. Nintendo’s going to announce a new home console and a bunch of games will get announced and have more shown of them. Yet for some reason, this year’s E3 seems to be getting a real negative spin in the enthusiast press, even before the show officially opens. While hyping their own coverage up as one would expect, many sites are now posting articles questioning the show’s relevance. Some of the bigger publishers have their own events before the show and throughout the year which are cannibalising some of the hype. In addition, lower console sales (which are in line with the end of a cycle that’s gone on longer than anyone planned) are making everyone suddenly question if there’s value in a big flashy glitzfest for AAA gaming. Many mobile developers are also coming out of the woodwork to say that the show no longer means anything and it’s just a bygone relic of an industry that’s dying, the void from which they are filling in.

My first reaction to this is one of confusion more than anything. The enthusiast gaming press lives for this time of year, it’s when they get all the juicy details of upcoming releases they need to feed their users for the rest of the year and I would wager it’s by far their busiest traffic period. Why they are actively questioning the existence of a show that’s the bread and butter of what they do baffles me. I remember a few years back when E3 tried an experiment of becoming a much more slimmed down, streamlined affair. The theory was that the show had become too noisy, too gaudy and too sensational and it was costing publishers a fortune so by slimming it down, it would let the games speak for themselves and make it easier to cover and talk about. The results were a disaster with everyone saying that E3 had lost its soul and was in danger of losing the cultural impact it represented. The old formula was restored for the following year and now the same people are saying that the spectacle they once demanded return is no longer important again. In the span of a single year, the show’s perception for many has gone from being the go-to gaming event to being representative of a segment that might as well roll over and die while iOS dreck takes over.

I think the opinion of mobile developers is about as pertinent to a discussion of E3 as a Greenpeace member’s on the Detroit International Auto Show. With a couple of exceptions this year, the mobile industry doesn’t participate in E3, not because they aren’t welcome but because they choose not to. So why is their view on it at all important? If their industry and the disruption they love to tout that it’s having on the “traditional” games industry is so significant (because remember that one thing can’t succeed without something else failing an equal or greater amount), where is the annual trade show dedicated to mobile games? Given the lacklustre promotion and support from the mobile platform holders, I would think such an event would be extremely beneficial for them. There’s certainly enough money going around that segment to make such a thing possible. So where is it? If E3′s no longer relevant, what does it say about their perceived dominance over gaming today that they don’t have their own spectacle? To give them and their largely well, irrelevant point of view such a loud voice in the enthusiast press strikes me as a cynical attempt by outlets to drive clicks through controversy. The enthusiast press loves to do this and that’s bad enough unto itself but to do it over something so important to what they do is just stupid.

The thing that the enthusiast press and many hardcore fans have continually failed to understand is that even though we’re the biggest consumers per head of the goods hocked at E3 every year, the show isn’t meant for any of us. While E3 and the publishers who attend it certainly welcome any enthusiast attention they get, their targets are the mainstream media. CNN, USA Today, Good Morning America et al., the places that ignore gaming as a whole for the remaining 51 weeks a year, unless it’s to trumpet some clueless researcher talking about how they make kids violent. While we hardcore gamers like to think we’re the reason this industry makes so much money, we aren’t what driving 15 million+ sales of Call of Duty on an annual basis. Those are the people who have one console and maybe buy 1 to 3 games for it a year. That audience is who the industry has their sights focused on with E3 and the way you get the attention of the mainstream media they pay attention to is with flashy, loud, bombastic spectacles, everything the show does better than few others anywhere. This is why even as AAA publishers and platform holders like Sony and Nintendo struggle, they continue to spend millions on booths and press conferences.

In spite of all the doom and gloom prophecies I’ve read this past week, every major gaming site has E3 logos plasters all over their front pages, they’re all live streaming the press conferences and every podcast I listened to discussed at length their travel and coverage plans and what they were hoping to see. For a show that’s apparently lost its relevancy, everyone sure seems to be talking about it a lot. Last I checked, that was still the point of the thing. People pay attention to E3 in enormous numbers and until they stop doing so, I think there’s no question of its relevance. Perhaps if the enthusiast press wants to see AAA gaming grow and thrive, they should continue to embrace that which fosters growth rather than say “It’s all over but please keep reading and watching us talk about it!” and giving attention-seeking mobile developers exactly what they want.

Me personally? I’ll be streaming all the press conferences on my second monitor at work and I have my Visa primed and ready to pre-order the WiiU as soon as its available. Bring on the insanity, I can’t wait!

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

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 , , , ,

The Gaming Press Needs to Thicken Its Skin

1 Comment Posted by on November 3, 2011

When I dare to venture out of the one or two sane forums I frequently use, I’m still amazed when I see the number of people who want to get into the gaming press. I’ve only briefly toyed with the thought but aside from realising very quickly that I can’t write worth a damn, I also realised what a terrible job it must be most of the time. You get lousy pay, usually have to move to one of the most expensive cities in North America, the average gaming site has about as much stability as a dot com startup in 2001 and perhaps most of all, it’s a thankless job. Most of the feedback on your article will be filled with vitriol and hate from the people who disagree with you and in turn, the people who come in with an equally vitriolic counterpoint. Those people come in not to defend your work but to defend their position which may also happen to kind of coincide with yours. In many cases–especially with reviews–it can seem that your job is simply to write things for others to fight over, often without even fully reading it. However, when you take a step back, it’s easy to see that most of the time, the only people who post in the comments and forums of gaming sites are people with an axe to grind and not enough of a life to find something better to do. I would wager that the ratio of views on a review to the number of comments is probably dozens to one, meaning that the squeaky wheels are the vocal minority and generally, best left ignored. So why is it that the members of the gaming press who are best equipped to understand this, seem to be the ones least able to?

There’s dozens of these controversies to choose from but the latest revolves around Eurogamer’s 8 of out 10 review for Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. In summary, they really liked it but found the gameplay formula very linear, tightly scripted and similar to the previous two games. As a result, they gave it what they thought was a fair use of the 1-10 point score scale. Eurogamer is one of a very few sites who try to make proper use of the scale, which is really a 7-10 scale at most other sites. Their score was also among the lowest given to the game and as a result, fanboys who would have bought it anyway and just wanted their pre-existing opinions validated went into rage overdrive. An even more negative review on A.V. Club also kicked the hornet’s nest.

Almost immediately, both Eurogamer themselves and other members of the gaming press leapt to the defence of reviews, criticism and rehashed the same arguments they do every time about objectivity, personal opinions and how scores do and should work. In doing so, they gave weight and credence to the morons who made this a big deal in the first place and insulted their sane and rational audience by assuming we all paint with the same brush. I am well aware of the irony of diving further down that rabbit hole by writing this but I think this angle is an important one that I haven’t seen explored elsewhere. Why does the gaming press have this burning need to always defend itself against people being dicks on the Internet?

Anyone who has used the Internet for more than a few minutes knows that many perfectly nice people in real life can become vicious and cruel when hiding behind a screen and anonymity. After a few more minutes, it also becomes apparent that these people are the ones who vent their anger and frustration with other aspects of their lives in forums and comment sections and that they can’t possibly represent a large segment of people because if they did, society would have starved to death long ago. They’re the outliers of the Internet population, the savages who choose to life in the gutters because there are no rules there. You don’t see newspaper columnists writing editorials defending their craft from the people who comment, nor do you see it happen in the speciality press for other media like movies, television or books. Entrenched, partisan fanboys exist in all these places and on some topics, their vitriol can far surpass that which gamers generate. So why is the gaming press the only one that feels the need to frequently come out to defend not just what they say but the way in which they say it? Why are they in a perpetual crisis of confidence?

I’ll be the first to admit that the art of true journalism is dying fast in the corporate media world and the gaming press is certainly as big a victim of this as anyone else. There have been plenty of payola scandals, firings due to pissing off publishers or PR agencies and nearly every big game is reviewed by the press being sent to a luxury, all expenses paid event that is heavily curated and controlled by the very people they are supposed to be critiquing. There is not a lot of journalistic integrity left and aside from a few chosen sites, I don’t even really pay attention to reviews anymore. There are many out there who truly believe in what they write though and that’s great. But if you really have confidence in your content and want to see it respected, the best thing you can do is put it out there and let it speak for itself. If you rightly feel that the commenters don’t matter and that you’ll never please them, then stop validating their viewpoints by addressing them. Let them revel in their filth while the silent majority gains knowledge from what you say.

It’s like if you don’t want to listen to racist, homophobic 13 year olds on Xbox Live. The easiest way to do that is simply to take off your headset. You can still play the game without it and you’ll often have a lot more fun. In other words, haters are just gonna’ hate and for that reason, they don’t matter. Be proud of what you do and let that pride show in your work. Mounting a defence after the fact only degrades it and you. Other media has evolved to realise this, the gaming press needs to as well.

Coverage, Video Games , , ,

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