@whyareyoucrouchingspock said:
@Gaff said:
Because the ultimate indication of a game's important is a video review. Text is obsolete. Why am I typing again
While I like your young whippersnapper MTV generation attitude. I think it probably is a case that the general public would rather just watch a video or look at a big score number than sit and read paragraphs of text.
Alot of people into games are kids or people casually surfing the web, remember. I imagine it's partly the reason they have video reviews and keep the review text very slim.
A quick word count of both the IGN and the Game Informer review of Fall of the Samurai throws up a number of about 800 words each. Of course, both combined still pale next to Dave Snider's review of Empire: Total War (1821 words, right here, on Giant Bomb), but I wouldn't call them very slim. And considering the anecdotal tweets, forum post or Facebook status updates of the average late-teen / twentysomething, even that might be too much? I kid. I hope.
I think two major factors are at work here:
First, the enthusiast, core gamer market / community on the PC is incredibly insular and commited. Barring the odd outlier like The Sims, Popcap or... World of Warcraft, the PC remains the territory of RTS, 4X, Simulation games, with indie games rapidly carving out their own pillar. They keep informed (patch notes get dissected, mechanics get researched, press releases are examined with a fine toothed comb, etc), are fiercely protective (prime example, the SimCity relaunch and the outrage it inspired), and, above all, they know what they like. Starcraft 2, arguably an example of the most hardcore of PC franchises, sold ~1.2M units in its first week, with little to no mainstream advertising. Publishers and game journalists probably have a hunch that catering to that audience is almost futile: that audience has made up its mind well in advance. Spending a couple of million extra trying to market it or commiting a staff member for ~30 hours to review that one game, whether he wants to or not, is a waste of resources.
And this is were the editorial part comes in. You may or may not have noticed that most sites are moving away from covering absolutely anything, starting to focus on features, long form writing, or interesting or underexposed titles / facets. As the Giantbomb crew or other publications have often said, trying to cover everything is futile when everyone else is doing the same thing. It's better to carve out your own voice on the internet which hopefully attracts an audience. More often than not, that is creating content for titles that the staff finds personally interesting.
Combine those two and you'll find out that Giantbomb writes and talks extensively about the indie PC titles they're interested in, and explains the lack of coverage, both here and in other publications, of most PC titles.
Log in to comment