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Giving to perspective on connections between game devs and press.

This is a response directly towards @adrianchm's twitlonger which you can find here: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1skoggc



Bear in mind, this is from the perspective of somebody who is neither a developer, nor any press. All I am, is a consumer. With that said, I just wanted to give perspective on some points that I'd like to make.



The first thing that I'd like to address is how much power I see the journalists actually having. I have no doubt that they are as scared as you are, if not more so. The bounce back rates(I believe thats the term) have been dramatically increasing the past few months, and other alternative sites have been getting increased traffic because people have been looking for alternatives. I remember reading in a post on NicheGamer where they said "We’ve only been around for a year and a half but we’ve already grown from only a few hundred views/hits a day to at least 8-10,000 every day, as a concurrent readership and fanbase." Full article here: http://nichegamer.net/2014/12/happy-holidays-for-2014-from-niche-gamer/ Because of the traffic that they got from GamerGate, they've had to revamp their site with a new hosting(I forget what the terminology is that they used) because the server they were using couldn't handle the explosion of traffic that they were getting.



Likewise for Techraptor, they have a monthly video where they update their viewers on how the site is going, how much their traffic has increased, or decreased for that month, and they too have been getting increased traffic, here is the link to their most recent one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqIDxNoVsDA.



ChristCenteredGamer is yet another example. People were looking for alternatives, found them and liked them. They liked how ChristCenteredGamer wore their bias on their sleeve, and they have a seperate rating for their bias so that it doesn't influence the score. This was their posted response: https://www.christcenteredgamer.com/index.php/reviews/misc-articles/5761-what-is-gamergate-what-has-it-done-for-us-and-what-does-it-mean



There are plenty of other sites that publish articles in the written word. This isn't even including youtubers and streamers. People like Totalbiscuit and NerdCubed are REALLY popular. There are LOTS of other critics that are worth your time, and if you're okay with Let's Players playing through your game, there's also that as some people will look up the first few parts of a Let's Play to see if it looks like it'd be their thing.



I'm segwaying into my second point now, and that is you have JUST as much power over them as they have over you. They need you to give them a review copy before the game launches so that they can have enough time to play the game, and write the review, and if they are late to the party, they will get decreased traffic on the review and might not even be worth their time. I don't personally like him, but I'd like to link to Jim Sterling on the power that I feel you have over them. This is about review embargoes and why he will never break one: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/9732-How-Review-Embargoes-Work I feel this works the same way. If a journalist is scared to break an embargo because they think they'll never get a review copy from you again, then why would they try to scare you by threatening to not cover your game because of your opinions on the internet? It feels like that requires a few hoops of double think to jump through to get to that.

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