I‘ve had a Google alert set for Elden Ring for maybe about six months now. I checked my emails, actually, it was in May. Probably after thinking there was going to be a point at which I stopped thinking about Elden Ring and I would need to be reminded to think about Elden Ring. I don’t know how I could have forgotten myself so much.
This ended up being such a bad idea. Google Alerts has been a great boon for game websites that look to be purely the creation of bots machine-learning ways to regurgitate the same information as reproduced by other websites doing the same thing. It's been about seven months of sites like GAMERC3NTRAL.COM and GAMEURZNATION.CO.UK posting an article called like ELDEN RING ANNOUCE RELEASE DATE GAMEPLAY and all of them saying there the game hasn't been seen since 2019. One from today was from a "publication" called DroidJournal. They're not even trying!!
Even worse is seeing what very well could be half the product of someone actually writing and a bot doing their research, cause of course they all know how Cyberpunk 2020 works and if some poor freelancer manages to cobble together 5 Things We Want To See In _Bloodborne 2_, they know weirdos like me have google alerts set for _Elden Ring_ so of course they mention _Elden Ring,_ a game that From Software has actually said they have been working on.
Anyway, Happy Holidays.