I certainly don’t like Spotify and absolutely agree it’s bad for artists. The convenience is just hard to beat when you listen to a lot of music and I do go to like several concerts a week/month and buy physical music and merch to actually support the music scene.
My aversion to subscriptions comes from the fact that the costs just tends to just pile up and up on top of already high costs of living. One 5€ subscription a month isn’t that much but 10 x 5€ subscriptions are like 600€ a year for nothing tangible that I actually own in the end.
I know I don’t actually own anything I buy on like Steam either but at least that stuff doesn’t instantly vanish at the end of a subscription.
I just hate how you used to be able to buy Photoshop or Microsoft Word and now everything a subscription / SAAS.
I’m surprised that Giant Bomb ended up getting a definitive death, or at least a clear delineating point that denotes the start of “Zombie” Giant Bomb. I was convinced it would be slowly ship-of-theseus’d into something unrecognisable, with a small dedicated fanbase cheering it on the entire way.
I had a GB premium subscription basically from its inception until a few years ago (I cancelled the sub at the referral code nonsense, and disengaged completely when they fired Jess and Jason). It’s probably different for me because I was already a grown adult when they started, but I’ve come to resent the “It’s today’s modern games/streamer culture, but they were the first!” view of their history that proliferates today.
To me it was a lot more (Initially I thought of it almost as a missing link between “New Games Journalism” and “The way normal people talk about video games”) and I feel like it was slowly sanded down into something more generic over the last decade or so. Like they used to have great interviews and written pieces, but seemed to consciously step away from that almost a decade ago now.
I have nothing against the people that were there at the end, and it sucks that they’ve (apparently?) lost their jobs. But it’s weirdly satisfying to see it actually have a partially self-initiated end.
My good buddy Noah and I used to have a Star Wars in joke we would say to each other to brighten the mood.
“HALF MAN, HALF CAR. THE MAN-DELOREAN”
I’ve been thinking about what gaming as a hobby looks like without people on the ground reporting about it and its definitely made me sad, but also I share in Frank’s optimistic outlook for a reset. Outlets like Aftermath and VGBees are starting to pop up here and there so hopefully some of those affected will be able to regroup and build something more in line with their interests out of this mess. It really is a shame that the people in charge don’t care about anything but numbers.
As far as stat bonuses go I’d have to say that my boots lower my dexterity but raise my endurance, my Body Count tshirt raises my charisma but lowers my encounter rate, and my Duke’s Mayonnaise Hot Tomato Summer ball cap inflicts Confusion at the beginning of every encounter. My pants are generally pretty basic so probably just a small boost to frost defense, there.
I’ve never been one to purchase dlc that was just cosmetics and don’t ever really see that changing, but I also remember a time before things like the horse armor existed whereas some younger folk have always been presented with cosmetic dlc and maybe see it as personalizing their gaming experience a bit. Ultimately I think there’s no point trying to convince people they need the horse armor because the people buying it are the kind of people who were always gonna buy it and probably already know they don’t need it and just want to have some added fun.
@adashtra I hope you get to feeling better. A nice ginger root tea with honey and lemon always helps me when I don’t feel well.
I guess convenience makes sense - all the things you (and I) don’t like about subscriptions are crystallized in Spotify but sometimes you’ve got to intentionally choose one or two of the awful things to have a little space in your life to relax (for me it’s still using Amazon).
And financially they really do add up. I spent hundreds on film service subscriptions last year and yet spent most of my time watching physical releases. Subscriptions are definitely one thing I’d like to roll back the clock on.
I feel like the decline of ‘good stuff to read on the internet’ is largely because the 2010s business model of rebranding blogs as professional media outlets (and hiring well-meaning amateurs to act like seasoned, top-tier journalists) led to this horrible clash of ‘serious money’ against an industry that’s no longer as prestigious as it presents itself. At least when writing about tech, movies, games, music etc.
It’s been a constant death spiral ever since.
Also (and kind of as a result) I stopped reading the big online tech/gaming publications because honestly they just kept getting stuff wrong. I’m not blaming the writers for that, more the management and business structures that put them in positions they weren’t experienced or well-trained enough to be in. The thing Ash said about the threat that journalism faces from gimmicky YouTubers kind of already happened in this respect.
This is a great idea, because they already have the textures. Just put them on the horse. No questions, no modifications - just put the human skin texture on the horse.
Also, it’s okay if not everybody buys it. Brandon will buy it one hundred times. This is the secret behind mobile game monetization.
To slightly defend subscriptions, I’ve heard that smaller organizations generally prefer them because it’s much easier to estimate your budget going forward and make plans for the future. If you’re just getting individual donations occasionally, it’s harder to know how much money you’ll have next month.
On the decline of discovery, there was a sweet spot of maybe a decade where search engines were reasonably useful, aggregator sites were not entirely gamed, and many users had the requisite experience to go out there and find new stuff.
This is anecdotal: on Reddit, I run into a lot of commenters who seem to have no discernable research skills. Maybe the research skills of earlier internet users were generational, and maybe I was an oddball, but basic activities from the internet of before seem to elude some users:
Looking at a review for a game. Sometimes they’re only aware of streamers playing. Sometimes they mention, fourth-hand, that games journalists (and by extension professional reviewers) aren’t trustworthy, like some post-post-GG mantra. And it’s like, I’m not asking you to give them your life savings. I’m just saying, maybe read how they describe a game and try to imagine what game they’re describing, and do that a few times to get an impression of what a game is like.
Finding basic info on a game. To be fair, sometimes games are bad about instructing players on mechanics or (especially) mindset while playing. But knowing that GameFAQs exists, that sites other than clickfarms have game advice, that could help with some of the basic questions. And you’ll learn cool things to go back to, like the excellent walkthroughs of Like a Dragon games by CyricZ.
Double-checking a claim. CRAAP, reading around, all that is useful too, but it all starts by thinking, “That might or might not be true” and knowing to check somewhere else.
Building a list of sites to check. Having a daily/weekly reading list or places to check for things (as Jaffe mentions about Polygon) is useful to have. And something we can all work on, which I think Frank alluded to, is going a bit further out to find things and taking note of who made them when they’re interesting.
I don’t think it’s just the users, and I hope the vibe isn’t “users bad now.” If they’re asking questions, they’re trying. The tools for discovery and research have gotten worse thanks to AI summaries and search engine optimization (or the search enshittification of opportunity: SEO). But as long as the kids (in a general sense for anyone coming of age in the last decade) are asking questions, they have a chance to learn new skills or hack the infrastructure into something new and more useful for us.
Maybe this is a stupid and naive question, but why can’t the people fired just make another website? There are barely any of them left. The audience need for it is huge (bigger than ever given the discoverability problems), the competition is almost non-existent, and the ones that do exist, as we have seen, are ad-and-guide-riddled, clickbaity content farms. A lot of these people know each other, they know everything there is to know about running a games website and they have connections within the game industry. Sure, being unable to travel to events sucks, but surely that’s not what makes or breaks a website in this day and age. I’d like to think that a website that is well written, run by experienced journalists, that simply covers games without the venture-capital-induced fluff, would quickly rise to the top of the bookmarks page of everyone who cares about games, given what there is on offer. No?
How much do you think setting up and maintaining a website costs? Especially one with heavy data usage from pictures, videos, or other? Do you want this site to be free or subscription based?
People can’t “just make another website” without some sort of funding to keep it going long enough to build an audience to sustain itself with ad or subscription revenue. The journalists/people you are expecting to run and post to the website need an income, too.
only marginally less anecdotal, but one of the many crises facing teachers right now (particularly millennial teachers, as everyone older refuses to engage with the issue) is upholding their responsibility to teach internet & broader media literacy to kids who:
primarily or exclusively access the internet via smartphones, which are, by default, massively closed platforms that are not only technically siloed but also subliminally discourage engagement with the traditional web vs. SNS
use platforms that have been simplified to the point where all their necessary/“necessary” utility is available to people who genuinely cannot read, let alone apply a critical eye to what’s being presented to them
are part of an online ecosystem that changes far too quickly for anyone to keep up with—very few of the techniques or practices one might teach someone about search engines are still effective, for example, and it’s incumbent on individual teachers to have known any of that stuff to begin with (tying back into older folk who never cared to learn themselves and just presume every millennial Knows Computers)
and then you’ve got the dual delusion/paranoia around AI muddying the waters on top of everything else: teachers may not buy into it or even care to understand it, but if their bosses are foisting it onto them and they’re being fed halloween stories about kids using AI to cheat their way through every grade, it’s going to take.
In my experience, the most immediate and practical means of breaking people out of closed ecosystems and developing their familiarity with traditional internet practices is by teaching them how to pirate shit.
I do not know how much that costs, but I assume it’s like any other business; you get a loan, you invest your own money, you find a financier. I don’t understand why that would be so complicated as to be impossible.
Sure, if you’re into high-risk-low-reward investment. As Frank emphasized on the podcast, the big problem is the ways to reliably make money with that model have evaporated, and no one has a vision for a new way (yet).
In my rudimentary understanding, the best way to protect oneself from financial ruin if their company goes under is to make an LLC.
Once that’s established you need to reach out to various places to get the loan, assuming they will give a brand new LLC with no history a loan large enough to get started. If no one will, then it might be venture capital investing in it. After initial money is established, it comes down to “how do we make money to pay back this loan AND give employees money to live?”
That could be via ads, or via subscriptions, which unless you have good name recognition, a lot of people won’t bite and will move on.
If someone could come up with a better way to make money that isn’t ad-intrusive experiences, subscriptions people will balk at, or venture capital that will pull strings in the background, then maybe this would be a good success story.
I get that it’s hard, and of course being summarily fired makes it a lot harder to organise than carefully planning it and making the jump. But I think some of the conditions are favorable; mainly that the need for it is huge and the competition generally sucks.