I was chatting with a few people on Twitter the other day, one of whom was the fine and lovely Aubrey "Chupacaubrey" Norris, better known as Deep Silver's Information Tarantula and the sender of the best PR emails in the known universe. The main thrust of our discussion was that the games press is seemingly becoming increasingly homogenised, with the latest "blockbuster" releases consistently monopolising coverage to such a degree that smaller games such as those Aubrey frequently represents are finding it particularly difficult to get noticed by big sites like Gamespot, IGN et al.
In practice, the games press is likely no more homogenised than it has been in the past, but the medium it examines has, over the course of the last few years, diversified to such a degree that it's nigh on impossible for the staff of high-profile outlets to cover absolutely everything — particularly when you throw the burgeoning social and mobile markets into the mix. It's the "Cambrian explosion of possibilities" that Sim City creator Will Wright talked about back in 2008. On the one hand, it's great that the audience playing games covers a much wider demographic than ever before. But on the other, coverage hasn't adapted enough to be able to celebrate the full breadth of experiences on offer. No one site can do that by itself.
Instead, behind the scenes at outlets decisions are made, and those decisions inevitably err on the side of "cover the shit out of whatever is going to be a massive seller this month". There's also something of a crossover between the outcome of this decision and the amount of assets tossed out by publishers — those big publishers who are responsible for getting hot new titles noticed and scoring the fat sales figures ensure that absolutely bloody everyone knows about their game by issuing a press release every time they release three new screenshots. (This is not an exaggeration.) This has the side effect of, at times, taking over the front page of press release aggregators such as GamesPress, particularly if the announcements show up in several different languages. Consequently, announcements regarding smaller titles often fall by the wayside.
It's not just with press releases that this happens, either. At gaming shows such as Gamescom, which I had the pleasure to attend last year, large publishers often throw big events lasting for several hours, which can cut into the valuable time available for journalists to scoot around smaller companies and pick out what are likely to be the "sleeper hits" of the year. And no-one wants to be that one outlet who didn't cover, say, EA's press conference.
At the other end of the spectrum, we get the phenomenon of the "indie darling", whereby a developer which hasn't followed the same sort of marketing strategy as a giant, multi-million dollar publisher has grown to seemingly disproportionately huge success through viral promotion and word of mouth. It's great to see this, but again this can lead to the monopolisation of coverage as outlets consistently pick out titles like, say, Minecraft and Bastion to point at any time they want to go "LOOK, WE COVER INDIE GAMES TOO!" Then the problem starts all over again in a slightly different form. Look at all the lists of awards for last year, for example. Most of the awards which celebrated indie games mentioned Minecraft, Bastion or Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP. Where was the love for Frozen Synapse? Dungeon Defenders? Sequence? Dungeons of Dredmor? Dustforce?
In many cases, it's not that these titles don't get covered at all, it's more that they're treated as curios at best, deemed somehow "unworthy" of the excessive amount of behind-the-scenes footage, interviews, opinion pieces, previews, multiplayer previews, DLC previews and what have you that the big hitters get. There are occasional outliers — look at the positive effect Jim Sterling's celebration of Deadly Premonition had, for example — but for the most part, I can see why people like Aubrey get frustrated when they just want people to give the games they represent the attention they deserve. Tom Ohle of Evolve PR — an agency which represents some of the best, most underappreciated games in recent years — wrote an excellent post on this very subject about a year ago.
So what's the solution? It's a difficult prospect, to be sure, for coverage of these large blockbuster titles is, in theory, what the majority of the audience wants. The games sell bucketloads of copies on release, everyone is talking about them months before they're on shelves and reviews often seem like foregone conclusions by the time the embargoes eventually lift. But the trouble with all this is it means that one outlet becomes very much like another. Sure, each outlet has their own distinctive "voices" and some try to make a point of having a "unique" editorial style — sadly, this often translates simply to "snark" or "swearing" — but all of them are generally covering the same things at the same time.
For a possible alternative way to look at things, I looked to a different creative industry with a similar sort of overwhelmingly massive breadth to gaming: music. In the music business, no one outlet attempts to cover absolutely everything. That would be pure folly, quite simply for the fact that it would be literally impossible to do, even with a massive staff. But not only that, the audience doesn't want that, either. A kid who's into One Direction and Justin Bieber doesn't give a toss about what Vladimir Ashkenazy is up to. Similarly, a classical music buff probably isn't that interested in what Skrillex has to say about his latest beats. All across the music business, coverage is tailored to a specific, more specialised audience according to any combination of popularity, genre and target demographic, with occasional overlap and crossover. This happens with magazines, TV shows, websites and radio stations. It's been like that for a pretty long time, and it works.
BBC Radio 6 Music is a digital radio station from the publicly-funded British Broadcasting Corporation. It is almost the complete antithesis to the small-playlist, youth-targeted pop-focused station that is the BBC's flagship station Radio 1. It purports to focus on "alternative" genres of music including indie, folk, rock, punk, funk, blues, soul, jazz, hip-hop and all manner of other disparate (but still "non-classical") genres, though it doesn't eschew the mainstream entirely. It is, however, the place to go if you're tired of hearing a loop of Adele-Katy Perry-Maroon 5-Justin Bieber-repeat, and is regarded by many as a fine example of How To Get It Right. In fact, it is so well-regarded that when the corporation proposed closing the station to provide commercial rivals with more "room" in July of 2010, outcry from fans was so vehement that the BBC Trust rejected the proposals, noting that the station was "well-liked by its listeners, was highly distinctive and made an important contribution".
But what, you may be thinking, does any of this have to do with the games press? Well, quite simply, why isn't there a high-profile outlet in the games media performing a similar function to 6 Music? Why isn't there a successful, "well liked, highly distinctive" games media outlet making an "important contribution" by specifically choosing not to let the mainstream dominate its coverage, instead preferring to delve deeper into the game's industry's equivalent of "alternative music" while still acknowledging the blockbusters exist? A site which focuses on, for want of a better word, "single-A" and "double-A" titles to the same degree that every site and their dog has been focusing on Mass Effect 3 for what feels like the last aeon?
The audience is certainly there. I can't be the only one in the world who would rather read that site than bear witness to the increasingly-predictable coverage provided by leading games sites today. And should the site have the chops to prove itself as a go-to destination for this "alternative" side of gaming — to the exclusion of blockbuster-centric sites for those who prefer to avoid the big titles (or who don't want to hear about them quite as much) in favour of slightly less well-known fare — there'd definitely be the full support of hardworking PR types. The BBC has the benefit of an established name to promote itself as well as public funding, of course, but there have been stranger success stories.
Food for thought, huh. Perhaps I should just start it myself!
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Very cool, Pete! I'm with you 100% on this!
I'd also add one point I had in this conversation- sites should allow for all their writers to review games as they play them. I understand the need to a lead review, but the idea that sites have one stance on every game is very old media. B level titles are often seen much more differently person to person, and the extra attention after release would benefit the whole industry.
Yes, I used to love the concept that EGM used many years ago, with several people reviewing each game. Of course, the reviews were necessarily very short in that case, but I feel having several alternative takes on games would be an interesting experiment. It comes back to that staffing and time issue, though, doesn't it — what do you review and when? If you're going to do this, though, then you can review things after the fact and be "late to the party" with other people's takes. Helps get around the whole embargo thing, which is counter-productive — how many reviews of a new game do you read when they all hit at exactly the same time? One? Consider being able to catch someone else's take on, say, Mass Effect 3 in a month or two, though — or, as you say, in the field of B-tier titles, where opinions tend to differ a little more.
There's potential here just waiting for someone to take advantage of it. If I had any clue how to start/run a site and had any funding whatsoever, hell, I'd do it myself.
I've been thinking about this a lot since our conversation, and since the confluence of GDC and Mass Effect shenanigans. There are probably more reasons than any of us can think of that things are the way they are, but it really seems to me that the major factor is tribalism. The people running the major sites have mostly been around for a while, and are still embedded in an old media mindset of mainstream vs. alternative. When your worldview is that EA, Activision, etc. are pitted against the young upstarts like Jonathan Blow or whatever, there's not much room for something like Shadows of the Damned that has an upstart attitude, but a big ol' EA logo right on the box. Naturally, that sort of coverage draws readers who are extremely invested in that same worldview and either want to get in the comments and air their grievances against the mainstream or tell everyone how "entitled" they are for being upset about DLC.
I'm not sure there ever will be money in catering to the crowd that just wants to be turned on to good games, and doesn't care about what's "important" or has the most indie cred this week. I'd love to be a part of covering that stuff, but the audience probably isn't emotionally invested enough to drive the requisite site traffic or subscriptions.
I do hope that the popularity of iOS and Android, with their less visible release schedules, will help break people of the notion that if you don't play a game in the first month, you should just forget about it. That would give critics more room to write "late" reviews.
Well said.
You know, I can't help but feeling that something of this type would have to be born out of love rather than business/commercialism, at least initially. As you say, building up emotional investment with the audience, creating a solid, loyal base of people who think that this sort of coverage is the kind of thing they want to see more of and developing relationships with the PR people who want to see these smaller titles succeed are the most important factors to begin with. Monetising the whole thing can come later.
It's the money factor that's stopping it from happening, though, I think. None of the big sites are going to take that risk, and we've all seen the slanging matches that result from people talking about writing for free. It has to be born from a desire to just do it, not a desire to make money. That will (probably… hopefully?) come in time as the audience expands.
When you think about it in that way, there's no real reason that a few of us with some spare time on our hands shouldn't have an experiment at trying to build something like that ourselves. Perhaps I should mull it over a bit. 🙂
If you build it, they will come.