Ashtear

A lot of the sports subs’ better content is instant reaction. Harder to fake. The only participation I still have on reddit is a similar community for a large video game. It’s more like a chatroom than a message board. Small wonder I spend way more time talking on Discord than anywhere these days.

Something’s that’s easy to forget is barely half of US households were even online by the 360’s release. Under a third had broadband. Even the Nintendo Power hotline ran until 2010.

I sold thousands of book guides at Gamestop, and the retailers also pushed them because they were higher margin than the games themselves. Yes, back then, the gaming enthusiasts knew GameFAQs was the place for info, but the mass market? The vast majority still got their info from guides and magazines, or word-of-mouth.

It’s like social media adoption. The mass market didn’t jump in until a generation later.

Even just revising my guide for the new Final Fantasy Tactics remaster is way too big a project for me right now. It’s amazing how much work it is.

This is where I’ve been at on it. On top of that, the stuff that’s not directly exploiting human actors (like drawn or animated content) or pushing their boundaries is still coming out of studios that aren’t exactly known for healthy work/life balance. To say nothing of the kind of fetish content that might come out of those places too, which surely takes its own toll on creators.

If we can offload all of that potential trauma onto computers, I’m all for it.

Staff shake-up last year. Phil Savage and Tyler Wilde have really stepped it up and let their writers sound off.

Like any of the major sites though, the news side still has its share of articles generated from one-liners sourced from interviews ran elsewhere.

If an Internet infrastructure giant can’t make MMOs work, I don’t see how these smaller MMO projects that keep popping up are going to, either. Greg Street also recently just talked about how his isn’t getting funding.

It’s too bad, I think SpaceCraft looks interesting but I don’t know if it’s going to make to 1.0, much less stick around.

I get the feeling the people at Aftermath are just hungry to poke the bear. I imagine it’ll eventually catch up to them, but hey, more power to them for now.

Maybe it’s because my experience with it goes well back into the print era, but very little of it is actual fact-finding capital “J” journalism, and even that part has only come on in the industry more recently. I’ve always put the games press in its proper buckets of “previews for access” and then game criticism. Quality for both varies, but I’m rarely disappointed when I stick to a publication I like (until the inevitable EIC churn, anyway).

If I had the money I’d definitely do the same, but for now I do RSS instead of link aggregator communities if I’m being serious about it. Takes some curation, but at the very least it’s not being run through a vote algorithm first.

Ugh, the only thing I hate more than a few people I regularly talk with still using Messenger is having to deal with the desktop client. Now this 🙄

I moved to a web browser but I can’t even get push notifications working.