Vox Gaming

I'm actually kind of excited about the new website. I like most of the writers, yes, even Arthur, so I'm definitely interested to see what they try different to bring to the table. Am I in the minority on this one? It seems like most people I've talked to have been negative on it to meh, at best.

I just don't see what's to get excited about, sure I like Justin McElroy but if they kind of end up making just another news and or opinion website then it's hard for me to get excited.

Yeah, that's the only thing that is worrying. I think they're all great writers, but that site isn't going to get by on writing. They have to do something different, and frankly, it seems to me everything in this medium has been tried. GB was the last true innovator and they can't very well just copy them, right? Haha

I distrust pretty much anyone from Kotaku. They're a bunch of just terrible writers.

I'm with the OP on this one - and I disagree with much of the sentiment here. The guys at The Verge are indeed innovating, and this will probably be the blueprint for Vox Gaming (or whatever it'll be called in the future).

I agree that bringing deeper articles and easier comparisons, etc, to gaming isn't as interesting as GBs take on the future of coverage, but still, it's something. Plus, if Chris, Justin and Griffin stay on in the lead positions, then the writing itself will be fine - they'll provide enough direction to put the others on the straight and narrow (if that is even an issue).

I'm prob. more excited than anything for a return to a good freeform podcast format with Justin in tow. Joystick's impersonation of community television spots soured me on the whole website, and I used to only really ever listen to GB, Shack News / 1UP and them. I wouldn't mind having that third pillar back.

@wmaustin55 said:

Yeah, that's the only thing that is worrying. I think they're all great writers, but that site isn't going to get by on writing. They have to do something different, and frankly, it seems to me everything in this medium has been tried. GB was the last true innovator and they can't very well just copy them, right? Haha

I would like to see a lot more video game sites copy Giant Bomb, actually.

I'm with the OP on this one - and I disagree with much of the sentiment here. The guys at The Verge are indeed innovating, and this will probably be the blueprint for Vox Gaming (or whatever it'll be called in the future).

I agree that bringing deeper articles and easier comparisons, etc, to gaming isn't as interesting as GBs take on the future of coverage, but still, it's something. Plus, if Chris, Justin and Griffin stay on in the lead positions, then the writing itself will be fine - they'll provide enough direction to put the others on the straight and narrow (if that is even an issue).

I'm prob. more excited than anything for a return to a good freeform podcast format with Justin in tow. Joystick's impersonation of community television spots soured me on the whole website, and I used to only really ever listen to GB, Shack News / 1UP and them. I wouldn't mind having that third pillar back.

@wmaustin55: Man, for a while there it was SO depressing. Rich left gamespot, then jeff and ryan left - which was a blow at the time. Then just as geff/ryan come back as GB (from memory), 1UP goes to hell. Then as Garnett goes to shack news and makes that good, Joystiq got all lame.

Having gotten used to Shack (and obviously loving GB), if Vox Games starts up with a podcast like the old joystiq one, then it'll be like 2008/9 all over again : ) . Colour me hopeful.

@wmaustin55 said:

@selfconfessedcynic

I'm with the OP on this one - and I disagree with much of the sentiment here. The guys at The Verge are indeed innovating, and this will probably be the blueprint for Vox Gaming (or whatever it'll be called in the future).

I agree that bringing deeper articles and easier comparisons, etc, to gaming isn't as interesting as GBs take on the future of coverage, but still, it's something. Plus, if Chris, Justin and Griffin stay on in the lead positions, then the writing itself will be fine - they'll provide enough direction to put the others on the straight and narrow (if that is even an issue).

I'm prob. more excited than anything for a return to a good freeform podcast format with Justin in tow. Joystick's impersonation of community television spots soured me on the whole website, and I used to only really ever listen to GB, Shack News / 1UP and them. I wouldn't mind having that third pillar back.

I'm in the same boat. Went through high school listening to 1up podcasts. Now it's mainly just Bombcast, Weekend Confirmed, 8-4 and the Comedy Button. Thinking about the old EGM/1UP days still makes me sad =\ haha

Agreed. I loved Joystiq for the Joystiq Podcast days, Justin and Chris and Ludwig (and sometimes Griffin) were absolutely fantastic personalities and it made me assume everyone was that funny and insightful. Then the Joystiq Show came on, and I got to hear all the other editors, and... I'm not sure that letting them talk was a great idea. They're alarmingly unfunny for a website that's joke-focused, and I haven't heard anything really thought-provoking from them. Joystiq is fine for now, but I doubt they'll keep their crown as "The Most Okay Video Game News Blog" for long after Vox Gaming comes out. I'm just sorry Ludwig is stuck there.

@bwheeeler: Yeah, Ludwig is a pretty cool guy and I'll be interested to see what he does with Joystiq. I have no idea whether the joystiq show panned out, but for the 3-4 weeks that I bothered listening to it before giving up, I was more annoyed with the tone of it than anything else. Video games are fun - I have no idea why they stuck with such a boring format.

*shrug* In my opinion the future looks bright though - hopefully the Joystiq Show will fucking die or at least be tonally shifted. I'll give it a listen once Ludwig gets in charge. Beyond that, I'm quite excited and hopeful about Vox Gaming - and Justin says he'll have a podcast going before launch too, so that should be fun.

I'm interested to see what they can bring to it. The Verge is pretty good.

I know Griffin and Justin from MBMBAM, but I don't know the other guys. If it's just as funny, and considering how funny Justin was at last years E3 Bombhaus, it should be, I might check it out. Might be cool to get in on the ground floor of a new site as well.

To be honest, no matter who they are, I don't have much interest in following another website about videogames. One is enough for me. But I'll still check it out at the very least considering the big deal this apparently is.

I'll be very interested to see the podcast product. I really like Arthur Gies's writing, but he can be a bully (asshole) at times on Rebel FM and other podcasts. It'll be interesting to have people on here regularly who will push back.

It carries the MTV taint. That's all I need to know about it.

It carries the MTV taint. That's all I need to know about it.

@Buzzkill said:

It carries the MTV taint. That's all I need to know about it.

So does Giant Bomb. Patrick worked at MTV games.

I thought your title refered to VOX, as in Voice Operated Switch's but if they are from kotaku then fuck them.

You can put me down for 'meh'.

I was hoping for more actual explanations why. A "meh" without substance gives them power ;)

@thornie said:

@Buzzkill said:

It carries the MTV taint. That's all I need to know about it.

So does Giant Bomb. Patrick worked at MTV games.

Patrick gets no love from me. (or much less anyone else around here lol)

MTV in the 90s was the single greatest abortion of all things good in this world, and they will never live down the shame or shake the stigma to those who lived through it.

I only browse Giant Bomb and Game Informer anymore. The super replay of Overblood 2 has been pretty fun so far.

I'll be interested in the content the McElroy brothers produce, don't really care about former Kotaku people.

@thornie said:

@Buzzkill said:

It carries the MTV taint. That's all I need to know about it.

So does Giant Bomb. Patrick worked at MTV games.

. . . Kind of validates Buzzkill's comment just a little bit. :)

So, my understanding is that VOX has raised almost twenty-five million dollars for this venture. This is the kind of bullshit that pisses me off and turns me off of sites. First, you have the "we're a network of sites" thing. Yeah, WM does this, but they manage to get away with it. I hate that like 80% of the internet is just a mix of AOL bullshit network sites or that Gawker bullshit. Why pick something you're good at and stick to it when you can just have a smattering of everything and earn that ad-dollar, right?

Second, what in the fuck could possibly cost twenty-five million dollars? Bandwidth (especially for something on the scale of most game sites) is not terribly expensive and a lot of the big players surprisingly just use a scaling cloud service (think Rackspace), anyway - reducing the investment in hardware, too. Solid web design can cost a bit, but we'd be talking tens of thousands; not millions (GiantBomb is the exception to what seems to be the "WE USE A CUSTOMIZED VERSION OF WORD PRESS" rule).

So, maybe they're paying the editorial staff six figures. Then they're paying a sales staff (assuming this is all going to be ad-based) six figures. Then they're going to have some execs and various other barely necessary roles that everyone thinks they have to have when they take a simple web idea and turn it into a "lets waste a venture capitalist's money and go nuts" project. So in all, maybe you're looking at a two or three million bucks. And that's really stretching it. Then triple it, so they can operate at a 100% loss for several years. What's the other 15+ million dollars for?!

I don't know why, but it really makes me irate when I see people undergo these huge rounds of fundraising and building big companies to do simple things online and everyone just acts like "oh, no, it totally costs ten million bucks a year to have two writers and a word press blog" is fucking normal.

@Branthog said:

@thornie said:

@Buzzkill said:

It carries the MTV taint. That's all I need to know about it.

So does Giant Bomb. Patrick worked at MTV games.

. . . Kind of validates Buzzkill's comment just a little bit. :)

But Vox also contains the Kotaku taint. Patrick is good at his job (if a bit sloppy with typos). Crecente was the ringmaster of a goddamn three-ring circus of stupidity.

I like Arthur, I like Justin, I like Chris Grant as the annoyed father of mindless idiots. The site's news and reporting I couldn't really give a shit about (since Klepek has been batting well above average), but I'm definitely interested to hear what a podcast from these people would sound like.

As for the Kotaku Taint, I dunno. I never got the impression that Kotaku's bullshit posts every 15 minutes was mandated by Crecente. That seems to be a Gawker thing on the whole. I'm willing to give them a fair shake, unless they ask for my money. Here's hoping we get another great podcast out of this, at least.

@Hailinel said:

@Branthog said:

@thornie said:

@Buzzkill said:

It carries the MTV taint. That's all I need to know about it.

So does Giant Bomb. Patrick worked at MTV games.

. . . Kind of validates Buzzkill's comment just a little bit. :)

But Vox also contains the Kotaku taint. Patrick is good at his job (if a bit sloppy with typos). Crecente was the ringmaster of a goddamn three-ring circus of stupidity.

Frankly, Vox has enough of their own taint, as it is. These massive content-farms (which Vox is) are part of what's becoming wrong with the internet. A few companies maintaining control of most of the eyeballs and pilfering from the rest of the internet. Vox is just another of these "we have 450 different websites that all use a sort of similar template and feed the same pig, under different topics". With Vox, it's that shitty Verge site (ala GDGT, Gizmodo, Engadget and all those other shitty sites that you turn to if you want 87 different cell phone stories in your RSS feed every day) and then a bunch of NASCAR, NBA, MLB, etc websites. And now, apparently, a gaming website.

I'd have been far more impressed if these guys struck out on their own and said "we can find a dude to put a website together for us and hold down the back end -- and the few of us will make awesome content - so... here goes". That's sort of how GiantBomb originated. I mean, not entirely, since it's also sort of part of a "network of sites", but it's not even on the same scale or in the same league of insincere crap that Vox is (it's the difference between a guy who runs a D&D magazine _and_ a Videogame magazine versus a corporation that publishes 8,000 different magazines).

Frankly, I except your typical corporate website/network bullshit with your same old corporate "don't piss off the advertisers" bullshit. The only thing that will make any part of it a possible draw are the McElroys and maybe that Chris guy and Arthur - but those two guys are more "hey, they're okay" than actual draws. And all that could be undermined by "oh... and then there's Crecente and whoever else". I mean, if these guys do a podcast (of course they will), it would be the main way I'd consume any of their content . . . and if it were just Arthur, McElroys, and Chris doing their chatty thing, it could be awesome. Toss in everyone else (especially Crecente) and it might spur quick reaches for the unsubscribe button.

Griffin and Justin McElroy are among my favourite people ever, so I'm really hoping the site is good.

Well, apart from the fact that a new gaming website is better news than gaming websites closing down, I am unmoved by any of this.

@Akrid said:

Griffin and Justin McElroy are among my favourite people ever, so I'm really hoping the site is good.

Well, you can get a rough idea - I'm sure - by looking at their more than 300 sports websites that the same company also runs, beginning with sbnation. It really baffles me that people just wake up one day and see these sites that spring up as part of some corporate media publisher initiative and say "yep, that's my new daily shit, baby!": http://www.sbnation.com/ . I hope it's good, too (but doubt it) . . . but would love for it to have been on their own in some way. Anything other than just being one of many hundreds in a mass media portfolio for a bunch of slick douchebag sites.

@Dagbiker said:

I thought your title refered to VOX, as in Voice Operated Switch's but if they are from kotaku then fuck them.

I was looking for the Half Life VOX.

And yes, fuck Kotaku and anyone associated with that site.

@Branthog: I understand your hesitation considering most multi-site networks tend to be shit, but from all accounts I've heard The Verge seems to be pretty good (and popular). I'm not sure I'm understanding the hate considering the majority of the people Grant hired onto this venture could be on an all-star list. With the exception of Crecente who is suspect at best, the entire line-up looks rock solid. Is it the money? That they managed to raise a lot of money that guarantees they'll be in business for a long time yet? GB opened under similar circumstances. The crew never specified the exact amount, but there was always talk of "yeah we got bankrolled x number of millions to start this" whenever the subject came up.

I'm not sure where this all coming from.

@Branthog said:

@thornie said:

@Buzzkill said:

It carries the MTV taint. That's all I need to know about it.

So does Giant Bomb. Patrick worked at MTV games.

. . . Kind of validates Buzzkill's comment just a little bit. :)

/highfives

@Inkerman said:

I know Griffin and Justin from MBMBAM, but I don't know the other guys. If it's just as funny, and considering how funny Justin was at last years E3 Bombhaus, it should be, I might check it out. Might be cool to get in on the ground floor of a new site as well.

I can't stand Joystiq, but I loved their podcast when Justin and Griffin were on it. It was something I looked forward to. Go listen to what happened as soon as they stopped "running the show" (or at least, stopped being the main draw of the podcast). In the span of one show, it turned into a sad college-quality attempt to mimic a shitty NPR format. They were clearly straining to do the "A Life Well Wasted" thing, and fell on their face. It was painful to listen to. It got a little better over time, but is still a shadow of its former self.

@KingWilly said:

@Branthog: I understand your hesitation considering most multi-site networks tend to be shit, but from all accounts I've heard The Verge seems to be pretty good (and popular). I'm not sure I'm understanding the hate considering the majority of the people Grant hired onto this venture could be on an all-star list. With the exception of Crecente who is suspect at best, the entire line-up looks rock solid. Is it the money? That they managed to raise a lot of money that guarantees they'll be in business for a long time yet? GB opened under similar circumstances. The crew never specified the exact amount, but there was always talk of "yeah we got bankrolled x number of millions to start this" whenever the subject came up.

I'm not sure where this all coming from.

The Verge is just another spin-off of Engadget, Gawker, Gizmodo, GDGT, etc. It offers nothing of interest, as far as I'm concerned and I find the incoherent design off-putting. But, mostly, it just does the kind of tech coverage that I find disinteresting. In fairness, I'd put them a little above the other sites I mentioned in quality and variety of content - but that isn't saying a lot.

I think a lot of my venom comes not specifically from the talent involved. I see these guys all over the place in other formats (especially Josh Tapolskey) and they seem like perfectly nice and intelligent people. And, at the least, at least they're not Gawker. I'd put Gawker so far down at the bottom of the list that you'd have to dig to find it. Much of it comes from the whole "mega site portfolio" style of company that they end up working for. GiantBomb is unique in that it's sort of a part of a string of sites, but they are sites build for a real purpose with a real passion. Whiskey Media doesn't have 400+ websites that it treats only slightly better than those domain squatting spam sites that pop up on every domain people fail to re-register or only slightly better than true content farming shitholes like eHow.

These network sites are all about eyeballs and advertising. Yeah, what isn't on the web, these days. Your grandma won't blog unless she has a monetization plan, right? They are just like the traditional media. They don't serve you or me or the subject. They serve the advertiser. You end up with severe conflicts like those that are often found with, for example, pharmaceutical companies and the coverage (or lack of) on news outlets that are significantly sponsored by those drug companies. Even more so than a lot of other websites would, because when it comes down to it, integrity doesn't mean anything. What does mean something is doing whatever will please the advertisers, because they will not risk the future of 400+ websites because of the ethics of the staff and talent of one of those sites. It's just as bad as the problems that arose at GameSpot. Maybe worse, due to the sheer size and range of content. Can you imagine the intricacies involved in putting out a review of sports games and franchises when 300 of your 400 sites are involved with MLB, NFL, NHL, NBA, etc?

They could turn out to be something amazing. That'd be awesome. I certainly really dig a couple of the staff and am interested in about half the staff. But if they do, it's in spite of all the vile components of the machine rather than the machine, itself.

Can someone give me a quick synopsis or a link to why all these guys quit/ got canned in the first place? I missed out on that

I'm really excited, and frankly I'm pretty surprised at the volume of hate in this thread. The Whiskey Media / Giant Bomb story is a really inspiring way to start a website that has turned out awesome, but it definitely isn't the only way.

@SSully said:

Can someone give me a quick synopsis or a link to why all these guys quit/ got canned in the first place? I missed out on that

Long story short, they wanted to work together. I believe every founding member of Vox Gaming voluntarily left other positions to join this new venture.

@UnsolvedParadox: Isn't that a pretty shitty move of Arthur Guise, since he literally just got a job at joystiq?

@UnsolvedParadox said:

I'm really excited, and frankly I'm pretty surprised at the volume of hate in this thread. The Whiskey Media / Giant Bomb story is a really inspiring way to start a website that has turned out awesome, but it definitely isn't the only way.

@SSully said:

Can someone give me a quick synopsis or a link to why all these guys quit/ got canned in the first place? I missed out on that

Long story short, they wanted to work together. I believe every founding member of Vox Gaming voluntarily left other positions to join this new venture.

"New gaming website" alone doesn't justify any excitement. The line-up doesn't necessarily generate excitement (with some of the talent, it does, but you'll see a significant concern that the more lackluster of the talent in the project will taint the whole thing). Then you have the "massive media portfolio advertising network model" that they're jumping into. If one good guy was leaving his band to go be part of another band and that band was being managed by Lou Perlman and all the other guys in the band were going to be from shitty boy-bands-past and it was going to be on the Disney label, would you necessarily give it a chance or look forward to it? Of course not, because all of the indicators are leaning toward "shit", even despite the one bright spot of that "one dude" being part of it.

I mean, yeah, this could turn out to be something unique and worthwhile - but they've got to prove it and signs are currently pointing to "future is cloudy".

@SSully said:

@UnsolvedParadox: Isn't that a pretty shitty move of Arthur Guise, since he literally just got a job at joystiq?

His first post at Joystiq was September 1st, so he held the gig for maybe four months. Maybe that's a life-time in gaming "journalism"?

@Branthog said:

@SSully said:

@UnsolvedParadox: Isn't that a pretty shitty move of Arthur Guise, since he literally just got a job at joystiq?

His first post at Joystiq was September 1st, so he held the gig for maybe four months. Maybe that's a life-time in gaming "journalism"?

It felt much shorter. Still I find that to be pretty damn shady. Oh well, hopefully this works out for the best for these guys.

@SSully said:

@Branthog said:

@SSully said:

@UnsolvedParadox: Isn't that a pretty shitty move of Arthur Guise, since he literally just got a job at joystiq?

His first post at Joystiq was September 1st, so he held the gig for maybe four months. Maybe that's a life-time in gaming "journalism"?

It felt much shorter. Still I find that to be pretty damn shady. Oh well, hopefully this works out for the best for these guys.

I don't think it's enough to make a judgement on. I've been at my company (though through many acquisitions) for fifteen years, but I also know plenty of people who have had several different gigs in just a couple of years. He may have actually been freelance. Or things may have been horrendous there and he didn't know until it was too late. Or everything may have been okay and this was just too great of an opportunity for him to pass up. You can only be so loyal, these days, because nobody (ie, no business) is going to be loyal back to you.

I think I'll actually wait and see what this thing is going to end up looking like before I nerd rage. Though I think the age of the big, bloated, gaming website is over, it doesn't cost anything to check it out.

Well since the joystiq podcast is gone and was my alternative podcast from the bombcast, anyone have a good replacement for a secondary gaming podcast? I already listen to Game's Dammit and it's ok too meh, I'm considering dropping it in my podcast rotations. Any good ones I'm not aware of?

What's exciting about this is that the staff is free to build the site from the ground up, that means design, functionality and more importantly voice and mission. Every one of those guys has a pretty progressive perspective on games (something I definitely respect) and for someone like me who's always looking to add some decent reading material to their rotation, it's going to be a very exciting outlet.

Another great thing about it is the roles they've assigned each staffer. Crecente is heading up news (which is fine, not many folks in this field hold a candle to Patrick anyway), Russ Pitts (formerly of the Escapist and its many great video series) is heading text/video features and Arthur Gies is reviews editor.

Most people probably won't agree with me, but I love that last choice. Arthur has a keen critical and a willingness to criticize big games that's sorely lacking in many outlets.

So yeah, I'm pretty excited.