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214 points minimaxir | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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drumhead ◴[] No.43952747[source]
I dont know how popular Giant Bomb is as a site, but in general video game journalism online is pretty much in the doldrums. Most of the big players from the last 20 years seem to have either disappered or are cutting staff back to the bare minimum. They seem to have become click baity and but dont even get much interaction from viewers.Looking at the Titan of the industry, IGN, they barely get more that 20k views for videos they put out on Youtube, even though they have 19million subscribers. Their audience seems to have moved on from them to individual Youtubers or twitch.

As a business proposition, video gaming sites seem like a money pit with no guarentee of a return. They may have a chance at survival by serving a niche audience that wants a specific type of content, limiting their scope and ambitions. But at the moment I just dont see a comeback for them.

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malfist ◴[] No.43955122[source]
I think it's because there's no trust in the big names anymore. Most of their "reviews" seem to be largely written by the game studio. How many times can you see IGN gush about how awesome a game is before launch and then when you get your hands on it, is a buggy boring mess before you stop checking IGN?
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1. techjamie ◴[] No.43956207[source]
A lot of it is on the publishers for their early review copy practices. Big media outlets will get early review codes for the games so they can be among the first to get a review out and net the traffic. But the publishers want good publicity in return for the early access codes, and reviewers that don't play ball can find themselves on an industry wide blacklist from receiving them in the future.

So the best, least biased reviews you can find are going to be 2-3 days post release, and not from someone who is large enough to get free review codes. I never trust pre-release reviews.