This year's E3 ended a few days ago, and it's time for an assessment on the past week. The game part will be examined in detail during our first podcast to be released in the next few days, but in here I want to talk about the way less fun part of last week.
Before going into any further detail, I want to say that I'm convinced we did the best work we could do during this E3. All the trailers that were available to us (easily or not) could be posted without delay mostly thanks to Game2k's tireless work, and Miguel also did an amazing job filming nothing less than 19 games while working alone on the showfloor.
Despite all this, this E3 has been nothing less than a disaster for the site in terms of visitors (and as such, revenue). We didn't even do 50% or our visitors compared to last year, and added to that, ads on websites are worth less and less. To give you a better understanding of the situation, we went from $2,500 2 years ago to $300 this year for the days of E3.
Game shows (E3 and Gamescom in particular) are historically the moments where sites like ours do a lot of their yearly revenue. To be completely honest, if we didn't have any other revenue source (as it was the case until last month) the site would have closed before the end of this year.
So why the lack of visitors? This is of course a question we have been asking ourselves a lot for the past few days. First, quite a few publishers have now gone completely Youtube exclusive (Nintendo, Bethesda, Activision), or give their channel and a few select big sites a timed exclusive on their content (EA), making our coverage of their games impossible or at best anecdotal.
Let's add to this the fact the many publishers nowadays make their own shows with exclusive gameplay on Youtube/Twich and/or have their designers/producers go to various big sites to show exclusive direct feed gameplay.
There is also the fact that, besides Zelda, there was no *huge* game at this year's E3. Games like Fallout 4, Metal Gear Solid V or Uncharted 4 generated a lot of interest last year, even though we had little more than trailers to show for them. Sadly, there was nothing that big this year.
The sad thing about all this is that in the end it's the games themselves that suffer from all this. As all content shifts to Youtube - or even worse Twitch - we do not get to experience the games as they really look like anymore. And due to how ubiquitous Youtube is nowadays - it basically works on anything that can connect to the Internet - the vast majority of gamers either don't know or don't care that what they see is not how a game should be displayed.
Our goal here at Gamersyde is, and always has been, to show the games at their best, and not just as the blurry pixelated mess we all experience daily on Youtube or Twitch. It's really sad that our goal is clearly not financially viable by itself anymore, even though our hosting costs have been dropping very quickly.
The good news is that our Patreon, as long as it stays at around what it is now, is enough to ensure that the site will go on. It will allow us to keep putting the games in the spotlight like we have always done, without having to compromise in any way.
Thanks a lot to our patrons, it's only because of you guys that Gamersyde will keep on going (and hopefully get better). For those who don't want or can't support us financially, keep in mind that we really appreciate your support and long time appreciation. I said it when we launched the Patreon, I'll say it again now, we have no intention of having two tiers of people on the site with the patrons on one side and the rest on the other. Our content is and will stay free, because it's been our code value for the past 13 years we've been doing this.
All comments (44)
Good stuff!
Hopefully more of you get to go to the next convention.
The big 3 seem to prefer their own personal shows. E3 used to be massive
@Tinks: I don't think there is a decline. Okay, this year, there were less people attending E3 than last year, but last year was the strongest since I don't know when. Here are the numbers for the last years:
E3 2016: 50.300
E3 2015: 52.000
E3 2014: 48.900
E3 2013: 48.200
E3 2012: 45.700
E3 2011: 46.800
E3 2010: 45.600
E3 2009: 41.000
Also be sure that one day I will donate to Patreon. After all the summer fuss and vocations.
Keep up the good work!
This is a little off-topic, I often try - to my chagrin - to make my family watch things in a quality that is the best possible, or at the very least at a set quality standard.
But outside of me, no one else cares if they're watching movies in DVDs or Blu-Rays, watching TV at SD quality instead of Full HD quality (1080p), or playing games at the lowest quality - Xbox 360 instead of Xbox One, PC games with old graphics cards.
Seriously, they just do not care. Which drives me crazy, if you're going to pay the same for a Blu-Ray movie as a DVD movie, why not buy the Blu-Ray version instead, since the difference in quality is insanely absurd to anyone with eyes and a shred of commen sense to ignore? They do not give a single care in the whole wide world. Same with buying a Xbox 360 game instead of a Xbox One game.
To me, that's extremely unwise and ignorant, but I also recognize that what matters for me does not necessarily matters for others, so I'm doing my best to learn to let it go, because trying to teach them enough so that they care will never work.
It's hard because you want the best for your family, even if it's enjoying a movie or game, you still want them to have the est experience possible, but there's nothing one can do.
Unfortunately, that's reality. People are very contended with "less" to the point that outside of essential things like Family, Health, Work, Finance, House, Vehicle, Smartphone (yeah, this they do care about its quality...), etc. they just do not care about anything else.
Though I always see a very funny inconsistenty, people expend a lot of money to get the best smartphones just to then watch YouTube videos on it or play mobile versions of games.
There's more examples of this inconsistency like buying a expensive TV to watch SD quality content, pay a very high TV subscription to only have mostly content in said SD quality - when paying 10-20% gives you all the same content in Full HD quality, or paying said expensive TV subscription to only watch open-cable TVs (yeah, this one gets me every damn time!), etc.
I seriously will never get some people's thought-processes, and since most people (casuals) think like this, well... whatever. To me, if you're going to watch or play something, then you should strive to have the best quality possible your means can afford.
Or if you're going to pay for something expensive, then it should really make a difference and you should also use it to the fullest as much as you can. But I'm definitely in the very small minority.
Being a gamer for over 32 years now and Gamersyde is the only place I check for trailers. You guys are the best, thank You !
[Battlefield 1, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Dishonored 2, Watch Dogs 2, Gears of War 4, Tekken 7, Resident Evil 7, God of War, Forza Horizon 3, The Last Guardian and Death Stranding.]
Second... Have you considered that maybe you are not really offering anything of considerable value for the masses, in todays, highly globalised digital world? I mean let's not kid ourselves here - as much as I like you - you are a relic of times long past... Today people are interested in what you can offer them [NOW], not a day from now or a week from now. It's idiotic to assume the vast majority of gamers will care for the higher quality videos, with solutions like YouTube and Twitch available. Let's not also forget that just this past february the giant that was GameTrailers, shut down after more than 12 years of operation. That website had hundred-fold more average visits than you, even in its final months. Sorry if I'm coming across as coarse... Just saying it like it is...
Lastly I just want to say that, yes you are targeting a very specific audience, and yes, this audience is getting smaller by the year, but there is probably still some value to be found here, at least for your devout followers. But in the end, when all is said and done, you are just one [very] small website and a group of pseudo-journalists making money and living off other people's work. Money that depends solely on the will of the publishers. So let's ask ourselves this: In these times or turmoil and crisis, when average monthly salary in many of the world's countries is under $1,800, who are you to earn $2,500 in the month of E3, for posting game trailers the publishers allowed you to have? And yes I realise website hosting, maintenance, operation and bandwidth are expensive. The world is changing, and we must change with it.
I was listening to the OST of FFVII for 3 months straight, was hyped to hear the remake's versions. the bombing mission theme remake was pretty impressive.
None of these games come close to the three major titles I listed from last year's E3. Death stranding maybe, but it was just a teaser and not a full blown gameplay reveal like fallout 4, uc4 or mgsv.
As for us being pseudo journalists making a living out of the stuff the publishers send us, you couldn't be more wrong. First none of us pretend to be journalists. Second not a single person on the site has ever been paid, ever. We actually all one way or another gave money directly or indirectly to keep the site alive at some point.
GamerSyde does offer something of considerable value: "Quality" and "Uncompromised Quality Standards".
You and other ignorant people might not care about quality standards and what they represent, but don't ever confuse them with not having any value. It's this type of thinking that is ruining so many aspects of modern life for everyone, people forgot what aspiring to be better is, what having a higher standard that you must always abide to is worth.
When you lose certain things, you lose yourself. Respect, Honor, Dignity, Valour, and so many other standards are there to keep people decent, honest, and above all helpful to society. In GamerSyde's case, while I wasn't present at the site's inception and creation, from my years frequenting it, talking to the people behind it and of its community, it's clear that GamerSyde's goal is to deliver content with the best quality possible.
To the people who care about quality and have a minimum degree of taste, quality is very important. And before you tell me quality is not important, please tell me how many VHS movies you have watched in the last decade, or DVD movies in the last 5 years.
You can even expand this to anything, quality of life (which includes having better experiences), quality of work, quality of character, etc. If given the choice between 2 types of experience based on the same content, an excellent one and a worst one, it's completely foolish to choose to have a much poorer experience if it doesn't cost you anything.
Also, just because the masses don't care about something, it doesn't mean that something is worthless, or vice-versa. The majority of people do not decide what is and what isn't good, or what has value and what doesn't. If this were untrue, then no government on Earth would be bad, now would it?
Most people are ignorant, not because of a lack of intelligence or capacity, but because of a lack of effort to try and be less ignorant. We're all ignorant in certain subjects, that's normal and it's impossible to be all-knowing, but most people tend to not put in the effort to even know if their lives can be improved in some way or another, let alone try to have better lives, better experiences, better lifestyles, etc. I wish this wasn't true, but it is the reality of the world we live in today.
What's the point of showing a truly beatiful game with the best technology and visual techniques with 60-70% of it's inane quality gone? You must also think that Apple's iTunes Movie Trailers site: http://trailers.apple.com/ is a "relic of long times past"? Please, kindly go to their site and tell Apple how much wrong they are and that they shouldn't care about quality, after all, who in the world cares about watching a trailer of that great movie they're very interested in excellent quality instead of shitty quality?
This is exactly why Sony and Microsoft are releasing new hardware, because they want to provide the best quality experience they can, be it a hardware level, be it at a software level, or at a service level. They also want to enable 4K Blu-Ray playback so people can watch 4K Blu-Ray movies and most important of all, to enable more realistic and, consequently, more immersive Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality experiences.
The moment yu stop caring about quality, is the moment you stop striving to achieving it. And you might not care about quality, but I do. Would you prefer to watch a movie in a dark room with great sound, or would you prefer to watch it with all the windows open or lights turned on and many people talking or hearing music loud enough that you can hear it? This is why movie theaters are dark, to increase the viewer's experience. But according to your ignorant view, that's all worthless and they shouldn't care about it.
1) A lot of fucking assholes on YouTube kept stealing their works when GameTrailers was at its prime, and were getting 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 million views on Youtube that rightly belonged to GameTrailers. GameTrailers got almost all of its revenue through ads, now please - as hard as it may be for you to comprehend - try to imagine how much ad revenue 1 million of views generate. After you have a grasp of a figure, try imagining how much 1-5 millions of revenue PER VIDEO lost is. There you go, all of that revenue money down the drain.
But most importantly, all of those users that GameTrailers lost that could potentially register to be members of their site, and in turn would generate a whole lot more of revenue money for GameTrailers. And the more popular GameTrailers would be, the more money companies would pay to advertise on the site.
The people at GameTrailers wanted to create their own YouTube channel, but at the time Viacom was suing YouTube for all those stolen videos, so they didn't allow them. And while the suit was going on, more and more content was being stolen every day without GameTrailers getting any revenue from it.
2) Ad-Block is the second reason GameTrailers lost so much ad revenue money as they did, if I'm not remembering incorectly, it was around 50-60% of all of their money in the last years of the site. The general manager at GameTrailers even posted a lot of news post to urge people to stop using Ad-Block in GameTrailers, but most people didn't care enough to do it.
3) When the Viacom company decided that they wanted to make all sites use the same network and technology, GameTrailers lost about 350.000 videos overnight - I might be wrong with the figure, but I think this is the correct number. All those links in other sites and programs that pointed to that content stopped working, which in turn made a lot of people who used them and had followers who also used them not visit the site anymore.
4) Because of all of these things - and a few more - GameTrailers ended up not making enough money, so Viacom decided to sell it to Defy Media, which layd-off most of GameTrailers' staff, they basically lost almost all of the resources necessary to create all of those high quality content shows they became so much famous for. Which is why in the following years they just basically did mostly "talking" and "interviewing" videos.
You can learn more about everything I said and more at SIFTD Games' video on the matter on their YouTube channel:
SIFTD Games - GameFace: What Happened to GameTrailers?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqdBStO9jkE
You absolutely cannot compare GameTrailers' situation, which arised and was exarcebated by really bad management and outside factors (asshole thieves, the rise of YouTube, Ad-Block, etc) with GamerSyde's one, which for years now is only surviving because BlimBlim invested a lot of his own personal money into the site and Driftwood has invested as many hours or more - if you take into consideration that time is money - of his free time into creating and curating content for the site.
It's already hard to distinguish visual quality in a game comparing a 1080p resolution vs a 720p resolution in some YouTube videos, same with Ultra, High, Medium and Low settings in PC games - this last case is more vivid in my memory because I did a lot of research into GPUs in the last 5 months and YouTube's quality is utterly shit in trying to compare different quality presets.
As more and more hardware gets released, you can be absolutely sure Sony and Microsoft will release upgrades to PlayStation 4 Neo and Xbox One Scorpio after 3-5 years of their launch, more and more people will want to know if it's worth expending that extra money to get better quality. Unrelated to this, but I'm sure that by then they both will stop support for PlayStation 4 Base and the regular Xbox One in order not to cap the upgraded hardware. This is what happens with GPUs, be it on processing power or DirectX technology restrictions. So all those new upgraded games will get even more hard to distinguish.
I also have never ever heard any GamerSyde staff refer to himself/herself or a colleague as a "journalist". If they have done so in the past, I honestly didn't read or heard it. But they make fun of that a lot of times, so I doubt they would have done so, unless they were joking.
As for your utterly asshole-ish comment about salary/wages and how GamerSyde is not worth of support - this is what you implied, SIFTD Games was a subscription-based site for 1 year with only paying members paying U$ 30 per year, or with a few other options. They just increased the subscription to U$ 50 per year, which they needed to cover costs as the U$ 30 per year per Premium member wasn't enough, even though they opened the rest of the site to everybody else.
Even after the increase in subscription, they are still thriving and even more surprising, SIFTD Games got most of its equipment stolen just days before E3, and after Shane Satterfield reported this incident and said they might have to shutdown the site, the members donated more than U$ 6.000 in less than 2 days to help prevent the site from having to be shutdown.
SIFTD Robbed! Equipment Repurchase Donation Program:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SWOKxr8_Z4
SIFTD Games' Donate Page:
https://siftd.net/#!/donate
Then you have the great folks at Easy Allies and Kinda Funny Games with very successful Patreon campaigns, and in the Kinda Funny Games case, they are around since January 2015 and thriving almost entirely on Patreon/Sponsor money. And crowdfunding projects and donations are more supported now than ever before with Patreon, KickStarter, GoFundMe, Fig, etc.
Easy Allies' Patreon Page (5,124 Patrons Donating U$ 39.959 Per Month):
https://www.patreon.com/EasyAllies?ty=h
Kinda Funny Games' Patreon Page (6,231 Patrons Donating U$ 24.715 Per Month):
https://www.patreon.com/kindafunnygames?ty=h
When you like something enough, you donate to it if that means it can continue to exist. Only assholes who don't care about anyone else will think differently.
As far as I know, GamerSyde has 83.550 registered users - your registered member number is 83550. If only 3% of those users donate U$ 1 per month, GamerSyde will have more than the U$ 2.500 they need every month.
PS. To everyone else, I'm very sorry for these 3 really long posts, but I just felt I had to say something. Too much stupidity and ignorance in that person's post regarding GamerSyde, GameTrailers, value, donating, etc.
The fact they made it known they use ad block too makes it all the more weird too.