The Games Industry Needs A Stronger Games Media
The Games Industry Needs A Stronger Games Media
The move away from written coverage of games is a problem for journalists and for the games industry.
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Who is going to pay for it? Every time journalists try to get paid enough to eat and have a roof over their head people cry "paywall!!!"
Or if they do ad supported people cry "ad infested cancer site!!" Or "lol adblock!"
Just to be clear, i adblock the shit out of the internet. I prefer some kind of paid model, but i'll get downvoted to hell for saying that. I'm not smart enough to have any good answers on how to pay journalists. But crying "paywall" at everything is not helpful...
What i dislike is having to have an account and password for everything. There needs to be a better model/system for paying journalists (not just in gaming media)
Currently the only business models are:
- ad filled clickbait
- billionaire backed media
- unpaid volunteer work
- paid subscription
And it seems like the only sustainable ones in this day and age are 1 and 2 (to the detriment of our society)
I always get a little annoyed when people imply consumers are at fault for what’s actually just shitty economic practices.
I’m no economist, but ad-supported everything just seems like a stagnant bubble trying desperately not to burst by throwing more ads everywhere and calling you the bad guy for blocking them.
A hundred percent, but the fact remains that journalists have a very hard time supporting themselves in their profession. A job that is critical (when done well) to an informed public.
It must be depressing knowing you could just take a TypeScript React bootcamp and probably double salary in a year. Like, journos have an important job. It's just not lucrative, despite its value to people/society.
You missed a huge one: merch. Gamers love gaming-related merch, so make a lot of it. Partner with game studios to prepare merch around big launches, and secure rights to make memey merch a bit after launch to keep the hype going. If done correctly, the journalists don't need to sacrifice integrity in reviews because even flops can sell spicy merch.
I think that could sell well. Start selling merch before launch, discount it right around launch, and then launch the memey merch right after launch.
Seems like such a company would quickly drop their journalism branch if it's the merch that's providing traffic and revenue.
But the journalism is what drives the merch sales, and they're willing to pay more because of the association with the journalism. If you remove the journalism, you can't charge as much for the merch.
It's like YouTuber merch, it generally costs quite a bit more than equivalent products elsewhere, but people buy it to support their favorite creators. That's the angle here.
I'd rather just pay a subscriptiom fee (aka paywall) than buy some branded crap that i dont need....
Like, whatever a creators markup is on a tshirt, i'd rather just give them that money in susbscription fee.
Why would i buy a $55 tshirt and have have the creator take home $5? I'd rather just give them the $5
Sure, donations should absolutely be a thing, but I highly doubt donations are reliable enough to build a business on.
Exactly. Cant apply for a mortgage if you have an unstable income. Cant plan for having a family without stable income
All the things we take for granted, we just expect journalists not to have because we are all entitled to their work for free
I'm honestly fine paying a subscription if the content is good, but I highly doubt enough other people are to sustain a business. Plenty of people seem to be willing to buy merch or watch ads, so that's probably where a games journalist should be looking.
There is patreon-supported or similar. There are also ad blockers that click the ads too to destroy your tracking profile. I'm not sure if they trigger click-through statistics for payment purposes.
Patreon is just another "paywall"
Only if it's an actual wall. A lot of YT channels and even free games are supported by Patreon and similar.
I was there, 5000 years ago… Ads were unobtrusive and nobody cared about them. Then greed happened. Pop up ads, massive content hiding ads, privacy intrusive ads… not using Adblock now is like not using condoms.
Maybe it's just me, but the only topic where i see people consistently complaining about paywalls is in publicly-financed research articles behind a paywall, which should definitely not be legal and fuck universities doing that shit. As for general news i haven't seen so much complaints, but then again, maybe i just wooooshed through them.
Personally I don't really care in this context because i can go to the source if I'm that invested and don't want to pay, their job is to keep track and sometimes summarize what happens in the industry. Seems reasonable to either pay or invest my own time. Adblock is non negociable tho.
oh yeah, publicly funded research should 100% be open access to the public
go visit any of the news subreddits/communities... any time people post a link to a news site there are a bunch of comments complaining about paywalls, or OP gets downvoted