Nuclear Monster

  • Oli Welsh:

    Starting today with our review of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D, Eurogamer is making the biggest change we’ve ever made to the way we review games. From now on, we will no longer be scoring games out of ten.

    In place of scores, we’ll have one-line summaries for every review, and a new recommendation system whereby some, but not all games will be considered Recommended, Essential or Avoid. As a result of these changes, we will no longer be listed on the review-aggregation site Metacritic.

    Review scores are important to four groups of people: People making purchasing decisions; people who want their purchasing decisions justified; those who write about games; and developers who want their games reviewed well and scored highly.

    Unfortunately for journalists writing about games, review scores have been overvalued by people who play games, and they’ve had too much influence on the careers of the people who develop them.

    I spoke with an anonymous game developer about this and he confirmed that there are still some situations where studios receive bonuses based on the review scores the games they work on receive. However, he also elaborated it would be unusual for a specific individual’s contract to include mention of review scores with the exception of an executive like a studio president.

    Terrible games have scored poorly in critic reviews and still sell well based on marketing and other pre-release hype. Great games have scored well and not done well enough to warrant sequels, HD remakes, and marketing hype.

    It’s good news that Eurogamer, like the dearly-departed joystiq, are trying new things but I still believe that review scores offer something valuable to people who are looking for recommendations. Joystiq attempted to solve that with a short summary at the bottom of the review and awards on an ongoing basis. Eurogamer is doing something similar with awards and other signage to indicate games to look into or avoid.

    I think they’re onto something good, but just like everyone else I look at the score first and then go back and read the review. It’s a bad habit, but it’s one that isn’t going away with my generation. Younger people seem to be watching pre-recorded (youtube) and live streaming (twitch) videos instead of reading anything. I definitely watch and listen more these days than I read.

    This is a shame for everyone who has lost the opportunity to express themselves with more nuance than you can get on a podcast or in a video. Some games, and some opinions, just don’t get represented well enough on either.

  • Martin Belam:

    What I’ve seen again and again is that a hardcore knot of the community become hyperactive on the board, and this begins to inhibit new users from posting. A classic example, from the Points Of View boards, would be that someone would post saying they think Bruno was being a bit harsh on Strictly with his judging. A regular would immediately reply along the lines of ‘yes we’ve done this topic to death, there’s a thread from the last series here.’ It’s not a welcome. It’s an intimidating conversation killer.

    If you ever start saying that to the community, they immediately accuse you of lying, and say that no they welcome people with open arms. It doesn’t matter that you can see the metrics on new registrations and new posters. It doesn’t matter that you’ve done user-testing sessions where you’ve shown people the boards and they’ve told you that they’d quite like to post but they wouldn’t because it feels unfriendly. The community can’t see it.

    The headline to this article is “Why I’ve found that online communities on media sites always seem doomed to fail.”

    I don’t agree with Martin’s doom & gloom about online communities. Even if they’re on sites owned and operated by large media businesses, there is hope if there is good moderation & leadership.

    However, Martin is right about people in communities being an insular & minority voice, compared to the whole audience. Sometimes business-folk need to take the consensus advice with a grain of salt, and publicly admit that they’re doing so.

    If it doesn’t make business sense, or design sense, or for whatever the reason is. Just be honest with people about why you’re doing what you’re doing, and don’t use weaselly biz-speak to get out of it. The community is representative of your audience, even if they aren’t always right, and they deserve a straight answer about why you’re doing whatever you’re doing that pissed them off.

  • The Verge’s Chris Plante has an article about an online magazine (The Tablet) that has decided to charge their own community money for the ability to comment. The rates seem kind of outrageous at $2 (a day), $18 (for a month) or $180 (for a year,) but that will work itself out.

    If it isn’t a price that people will pay, and readership goes down I am sure the price will change. Some fantastically popular and successful communities have done this. The two that come to mind are, of course, SomethingAwful and MetaFilter. Both serve their readers well. They’ve both been operating for decades now, and both charge a one-time-only fee which as far as the business model goes is the only major difference between them and The Tablet. There is plenty of room for people to try new ideas around commenting. If The Tablet wants to charge money on a recurring basis instead of one time, go for it.

    Maybe they’ll be able to hire community managers to moderate the comments and build relationships with their commenters with this money, and not face the crisis faced by the one-time fee sites like the one Metafilter had last year.

    There is only one good argument against paying for the right to comment that I’m aware of, it keeps out people who can’t afford to comment. It’s a great way to systematically suppress the voices of the poor.  The Tablet does still have a few other ways to get in touch with them on social media as listed in their announcement.

    What’s kind of hilarious is that The Verge’s article is complaining about this practice. No, not by mentioning the classism of the fee. Instead, they end with their article and ending it with a pithy…

    The Verge’s comments remain free. Feel free to use them below.

    The Verge is yet another large media blog that can’t bother to link to their source, or any link at all to The Tablet until a tiny source link at the bottom of the post, which nobody is going to click on. I have a great deal of respect for their writers, but the business practice of not linking to your source and/or only populating your article with links to your own website is despicable. If your readers want to go check out who is doing the thing your article is about, you have to trust them and the quality of your work that they will come back and finish your article instead of putting a tiny source link in where you know they won’t click it. The web is made to be linked.

    TimeDoctor dot org continues to link to its sources. Even when they’re dirtbags like The Verge.

  • I cannot believe how talented some of the people making short animated films with Valve’s Source Film Maker are. The tools are great but they still have to make these films and tell a story without having access to the original voice actors behind these characters, which is why most are “silent.” Hats off to James McVinnie and team for the End of the Line:

    They’ve got a bunch more shorts on their channel and if you search for “SFM” on YouTube you’ll find other great teams doing great work.

    Thanks to the esteemed Andrew Henderson, most recently of BeagleSNES fame, for the heads-up.

  • John Walker, writing about the lack of progress on the kickstarter-funded Peter Molyneux god-game, Godus:

    As for those Kickstarter promises, it’s not looking good. The silliest claim made was that it would be finished in “seven to nine months”. That wasn’t even true of the money-raking mobile versions, and with the PC game in Early Access since September 2013, it’s been missed by a further 17 months on top. The Linux version, added as an achieved stretch goal, has shown no signs of appearing (and the game is built in an engine that doesn’t support Linux).

    As unsurprising as this failure is from Molyneux, people wouldn’t be writing about it if they didn’t want his god-game to succeed. I played a ton of the free-to-play version of Godus on the iPad last year until the buggy network synchronization code eating hours of progress finally got to be too frustrating to deal with.   Even though the developers are still posting updates, the adversarial nature of their forums (Steam, Boards) and the quotes in the rest of Walker’s article don’t lend any hope to a finished PC Godus coming out of Steam’s Early Access program. Awful.