Meta Game Spot Critic Guide Giant Game Cord FAQs Comic Cutters Vine... Bomb
October 3, 2022 8:55 AM Subscribe
In a big roll-up of culture-junkie style websites, Fandom has acquired GameSpot, Metacritic, TV Guide, GameFAQs, Giant Bomb, Cord Cutters News and Comic Vine in a deal worth an amount "in the mid-eight figures". Fandom already acquired Screen Junkies, Curse Media and Fanatical in the past few years.
Kotaku's reaction is... not enthused.
Kotaku's reaction is... not enthused.
Considering the state of the fandom wikis, I feel sorry for the fans of those sites.
posted by simmering octagon at 9:48 AM on October 3, 2022 [16 favorites]
posted by simmering octagon at 9:48 AM on October 3, 2022 [16 favorites]
Metacritic—which uses a far better review aggregation algorithm IMHO than Rotten Tomatoes—has been deteriorating for years. Cautiously optimistic this will breath new life into it?
posted by rossmeissl at 12:12 PM on October 3, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by rossmeissl at 12:12 PM on October 3, 2022 [3 favorites]
GameFAQs has been a great source of information for me over the years. I'm worried about a future where all my questions about console games from thirty years ago will be answered by having to watch a goddamn Youtube video.
posted by box at 12:35 PM on October 3, 2022 [18 favorites]
posted by box at 12:35 PM on October 3, 2022 [18 favorites]
TV Guide? I didn’t know it still existed… it’s ubiquity in grocery store checkout lines disappeared years ago, though I don’t wonder what’s on TV anymore.
posted by njohnson23 at 1:13 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by njohnson23 at 1:13 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
Jason Scott says:
Archive team, would you kindly take a snapshot of this place before they crush it like a tin canposted by vibratory manner of working at 1:25 PM on October 3, 2022 [17 favorites]
The problem of video tutorials is that making a bad video is very easy, making a written tutorial is somewhat harder, and making a good video is the most difficult of the three. That's before you even get to the commercial incentives. It's bleak.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 1:28 PM on October 3, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by vibratory manner of working at 1:28 PM on October 3, 2022 [7 favorites]
Does Giant Bomb actually do anything anymore? Whenever I get bored and check-in on the Roku app, it’s always the same tired repeats of 30-something-dudes-talking-while-they-play-some-shit-game-from-their-childhood.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:01 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Thorzdad at 2:01 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
Hahaha I was looking something up this weekend and had a conversation with a friend about how terrible fandom was, in reference to their wikis. On top of being overloaded with ads to the point on unusability, on any device not using ad-protection, they also lure you to their sites unduly. Sometimes you look up a quote or clip from specific media, and the google video results seem to indicate full videoclips of appropriate length, featuring exactly what you wanted to see. Neat!
Psyche. It's fandom, so you end up at some random wiki, not related to what you were searching for, and somewhere one of their clickbait ads might mention what you were looking for but there is never, ever the video you search for. At best, an ad, but again, not featuring anything you sought.
I think they are also behind all the shitty results you get when you look up something for a videogame. The information will be outdated, often directly stolen from a user's post or guide somewhere else, loaded with ads, and then seamlessly scrolls into madness and irrelevant shit they push towards you. If you sought one specific thing, like, "In Judgement, where is [this item]." Should be one word answer essentially, a place. Instead you get this bloated article written with all the procrastination of an SEO-hunting recipes website boring you with personal family anecdotes they made up.
MetaCritic was always terrible, but I admit I'm curious how the new owners will manage to make it even worse.
posted by GoblinHoney at 2:13 PM on October 3, 2022 [6 favorites]
Psyche. It's fandom, so you end up at some random wiki, not related to what you were searching for, and somewhere one of their clickbait ads might mention what you were looking for but there is never, ever the video you search for. At best, an ad, but again, not featuring anything you sought.
I think they are also behind all the shitty results you get when you look up something for a videogame. The information will be outdated, often directly stolen from a user's post or guide somewhere else, loaded with ads, and then seamlessly scrolls into madness and irrelevant shit they push towards you. If you sought one specific thing, like, "In Judgement, where is [this item]." Should be one word answer essentially, a place. Instead you get this bloated article written with all the procrastination of an SEO-hunting recipes website boring you with personal family anecdotes they made up.
MetaCritic was always terrible, but I admit I'm curious how the new owners will manage to make it even worse.
posted by GoblinHoney at 2:13 PM on October 3, 2022 [6 favorites]
I use Gamefaqs’ historical data for Game Boy release dates because the site was active while those games were coming out so the data is very good and precise. This news blows, and I can’t wait to have to finish my parsing of the data I hoarded from the site because it no longer works for me.
posted by papineau at 2:36 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by papineau at 2:36 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
> Cautiously optimistic this will breath new life into it?
Go look at Fandom and let me know how you feel then.
Not holding my breath even a little bit. This is 100% in service of their consumer-habit aggregation product FanDNA, the same reason why all the shitty Fandom sites exist in the first place.
posted by tubedogg at 2:58 PM on October 3, 2022 [4 favorites]
Go look at Fandom and let me know how you feel then.
Not holding my breath even a little bit. This is 100% in service of their consumer-habit aggregation product FanDNA, the same reason why all the shitty Fandom sites exist in the first place.
posted by tubedogg at 2:58 PM on October 3, 2022 [4 favorites]
Ugh, the dissection of every property into a atomized wiki sucks enough as is. The fact that the model is actively metastasizing into existing properties sucks even moreso
posted by Ferreous at 3:00 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Ferreous at 3:00 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
@njohnson23:
TVGuide the magazine, TVGuide the website, and TVGuide the listings services were spun off into separate entities about 15 years ago. I can't remember which one technically owns the IP but the non-owners just license the name.
posted by mmb5 at 3:44 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
TVGuide the magazine, TVGuide the website, and TVGuide the listings services were spun off into separate entities about 15 years ago. I can't remember which one technically owns the IP but the non-owners just license the name.
posted by mmb5 at 3:44 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
Metacritic is terrible for games, but their model actually works reasonably well for film, where critics broadly agree on the five star scale and that three stars is a soft recommend. It highlights the difference between a film being mediocre and a film being divisive much better than Rotten Tomatoes does, which frankly struggles to tell the difference between 'exceptional' and 'inoffensive'.
In games, there is no consensus (or rather the consensus - four point scale, 7 to 10 - is widely agreed to be terrible, and so many critics will try and use a system of their own devising) so Metacritic scores aren't meaningful. What's worse is that they're _financially relevant_ - many game publishers have clauses where, in theory, a good game that sold poorly still earns its developers a bonus, and so there's a financial incentive tied to the Metacritic score. (The most high-profile example of this is of this mechanism backfiring: Fallout New Vegas missed its qualifying Metacritic score, despite now being considered the best of the 3D Fallout games, because it shipped with serious bugs. You may well ask, given the publisher was responsible for QA, whose fault was that.)
posted by Merus at 4:39 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
In games, there is no consensus (or rather the consensus - four point scale, 7 to 10 - is widely agreed to be terrible, and so many critics will try and use a system of their own devising) so Metacritic scores aren't meaningful. What's worse is that they're _financially relevant_ - many game publishers have clauses where, in theory, a good game that sold poorly still earns its developers a bonus, and so there's a financial incentive tied to the Metacritic score. (The most high-profile example of this is of this mechanism backfiring: Fallout New Vegas missed its qualifying Metacritic score, despite now being considered the best of the 3D Fallout games, because it shipped with serious bugs. You may well ask, given the publisher was responsible for QA, whose fault was that.)
posted by Merus at 4:39 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
Sad about Game FAQs, that's a very useable old school site. Pretty much the opposite of a Fanfom wiki.
posted by subdee at 6:05 PM on October 3, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by subdee at 6:05 PM on October 3, 2022 [5 favorites]
Do people still use Gamefaqs? I guess it must still have all of the great guides written in its time, but are people still writing guides there or have they all moved to Community Guides section of Steam?
posted by forbiddencabinet at 7:28 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by forbiddencabinet at 7:28 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
Papineau, is MobyGames suitable for your needs? It doesn't always have info on more obscure games, but for a system as popular as the GameBoy it should be thorough and accurate.
posted by jy4m at 9:46 PM on October 3, 2022
posted by jy4m at 9:46 PM on October 3, 2022
Steam Community Guides, for whatever reason, don't seem to have quite as much search engine juice for me, and plus they only cover games that you can get on Steam, which excludes a lot of console-only releases.
posted by Aleyn at 10:37 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Aleyn at 10:37 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]
Weirdly, I've found lately that GameFAQ's forums have been more helpful for stuff than their actual FAQs these days, probably in part because there probably isn't a lot of cachet in writing FAQs when you could either be on Steam community guides and getting more visibility that way, or actually making money in one of the very few parts of the writing-about-games industry that still reliably makes money somehow. But there's always people looking to discuss minmaxing strategies and whatnot, and for particular games that don't get coverage from the larger professional sites like IGN's guide section, and don't have a single person dedicated enough to write up a whole FAQ, the GameFAQs forums can often be a vital resource.
Who knows what Fandom will do with it; I actually forgot that they bought Fanatical, and so far it seems like they haven't messed with it. But something like a GameFAQs or a Giant Bomb is a lot closer to their core business (or at least what seems to be their core business), and I imagine it's a lot easier to plaster forty thousand autoplay video ads over gaming editorial sites than an actual games storefront where it would interfere with the primary business model.
posted by chrominance at 11:03 PM on October 3, 2022 [3 favorites]
Who knows what Fandom will do with it; I actually forgot that they bought Fanatical, and so far it seems like they haven't messed with it. But something like a GameFAQs or a Giant Bomb is a lot closer to their core business (or at least what seems to be their core business), and I imagine it's a lot easier to plaster forty thousand autoplay video ads over gaming editorial sites than an actual games storefront where it would interfere with the primary business model.
posted by chrominance at 11:03 PM on October 3, 2022 [3 favorites]
I completely ignore Rotten Tomatoes: the user rating is, if anything, an anti-indicator as far as I'm concerned, and the critics score is made useless by the vast number of obscure sources.
So, I've long relied on MetaCritic for film and television guidance. I think the curated critics' score is very reliable. I really want that site to survive and thrive.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 5:44 AM on October 4, 2022
So, I've long relied on MetaCritic for film and television guidance. I think the curated critics' score is very reliable. I really want that site to survive and thrive.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 5:44 AM on October 4, 2022
Ugh, Fandom wikis are just terrible.
All wikis should be like The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Wiki
THAT'S how you do a wiki.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 6:22 AM on October 4, 2022 [5 favorites]
All wikis should be like The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Wiki
THAT'S how you do a wiki.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 6:22 AM on October 4, 2022 [5 favorites]
I find that most gamefaq style websites require 10 layers of ad/overlay blocking to be useable (maybe that's just IGN, but I feel like GF was like this as well, last time I needed it). Even with everything blocked, the wording of the written article itself always seems to be very verbose for the amount of information.
Please, I just want to be reminded of which companies to invest in before Franklin does the assassination missions, and how to kill the legendary cougar.
posted by shenkerism at 12:50 PM on October 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
Please, I just want to be reminded of which companies to invest in before Franklin does the assassination missions, and how to kill the legendary cougar.
posted by shenkerism at 12:50 PM on October 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
Sad about Game FAQs, that's a very useable old school site. Pretty much the opposite of a Fanfom wiki.
I know that in the end everything becomes a garbage wasteland of auto-playing videos, but it still makes me sad when a site I like goes.
posted by betweenthebars at 2:30 PM on October 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
I know that in the end everything becomes a garbage wasteland of auto-playing videos, but it still makes me sad when a site I like goes.
posted by betweenthebars at 2:30 PM on October 4, 2022 [1 favorite]
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