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Gamasutra Podcast Transcript - Game Reviews Roundtable
People could always be better writers for sure, but just writing more articulate, more high brow articles - that's just going to limit the audience, not grow it. At the risk of speaking for the three of us, I'm pretty sure we're all in the business of growing our audience. We're not trying to cater to the elite enthusiast. We're helping to get the word out about this stuff to anyone who cares to have a discerning opinion. I think it's more about ease of use, more about breaking things down more clearly to people and finding new ways to do that. I enjoy the craft of writing, but I don't think, for everyone writing about games, for them to become better writers is the solution to having better game reviews. I think it's a little more complicated than that, and it gets down to the question of what is it that people are looking for really from a game review. They want to know what the game is like. Vederman: Absolutely. Kasavin: We all work in onlines to varying degrees. I thing we've all discovered there are things like video that are pretty compelling. You could construct a really great paragraph, but showing someone a game play clip for a minute might do a better job of showing the person what the game is actually like than that paragraph. Davison: A minute video clip with you going, "This part's awesome!" [laughter] Vederman: Where was it yesterday when it was spreading around the Internet like wildfire - the Wii remote wristband has been breaking, and people have been throwing the remote into their wall and into their TV. I might be wrong here, but I think it was maybe IGN? Davison: Oh, yeah. They did a piece about it snapping. Vederman: They did it on video. It wasn't a video showing it happening - it was a video of a guy standing there talking about how it happened? Yet, that's still more interesting to a lot of people than that same article just written out. There's something about video - that it's very compelling. Davison: The biggest video on Game Videos last week for a couple of days was Japanese people standing in line for a Wii. It's like, wow. That's who you want to watch? But it's all about context and seeing something just unusual. I think there's a lot that we're going to see with video from all of us over the next year where we're discovering what we can do with it and how efficient it can be. Vederman: Also just finding out what works. It seems like, obviously we've got less experience with it here on PC Gamer. We're just at the starting stages of doing our video podcasts. But we have a lot of traction with our video podcast, probably relatively speaking. I'm not sure what downloads numbers you guys are getting, but it's at random times. You think you've put together this awesome video piece, and it tanks. Then you put something out that you weren't that happy about, and it gets crazy download numbers. Kim: Well, now you know how the game developers feel. Vederman: That's true, I'm sure. In a lot of cases, though, I think it's probably different. I think it's probably rare, with as much time and effort, and as many people as have had their hands on a game for that long - by the time it ships, my guess is that most people know it's either a good game or not. Now, how well it sells, it's tricky. I think, unfortunately, for better or for worse, if you put out the world's best - I don't know - World War II shooter, it'll sell right now; whereas if you put out the world's best - let's say - Psychonauts clone, it's not going to do well, even if the Psychonauts clone is a better game. Davison: Let's talk about the way that the studios and MPI uses media right now, because I think gaming PR is a bit behind the times in acknowledging the way people want to consume media right now. They're not really embracing what's happening with blogs and MySpace and the way people are responding to video on YouTube. It's all still way too convoluted. It's over-produced. There's too much of it, when very often all it's going to take is 20 seconds of something cool and get it out there. They haven't got there yet. There's things that we can do to do that, but all we ever hear from PR about the process is, "We don't have the time to generate that. We don't have the time to give you the screenshots. We don't have the time to get you the video." If you knew what would work, you wouldn't be saying this. |
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