Games criticism, reviews, and SEO

@ cdennett

Thanks for signing up for the newsletter. I hope it is what you were looking for. The fact that you didn’t know it existed, although the sign up appears on every page except this one and the front page means I really need to rethink its placement.

And yes, I don’t want to turn my my hobby into a hustle. There are a bunch of things we could do here to squeeze out a few more pennies per month, but none of them are things that would make this a better place. I hustle a bit to get review copies of games for our contributors, and to bump up their numbers to make them more desirable to publishers. The rest is up to them.

With regard to the OP, and the pivot to video. Video can make money on YouTube and Facebook. Once someone has enough Followers or Subscribers, they are eligible for ad placement and can earn per view. It is one of the reasons so many people do video rather than text.

Articles critiquing mechanisms and/or themes would be awesome.

As far as publishers cutting off reviewers for giving a bad review, it really doesn’t happen with any publishers worth their salt. First off, it’s unprofessional. Second all publicity is good publicity. Even a negative review gets eyes on the game. For designers, a negative review stings, but the ones who are pros will suck it up and leave a nice comment.

In the entire history of this site, the only publisher that ever cut us off was FFG, and that was a whole shit show. And it wasn’t entirely just for a negative review, although that seems to have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was notified that we needed to deal with the negative comments in the forum, because their designers were reading the forum and the negative posts were upsetting them and impacting their productivity. Which was kind of nuts, because for every negative comment we had six people arguing back that it was wrong. When we didn’t comply they blocked the site from their HQ. Some of their designers continued to read and participate here under new aliases so as not to get caught on the “forbidden” site.

As far as negative reviews getting fewer hits, I don’t see it. Good, bad or mediocre, number of hits over time depends upon the reviewers following and the popularity or”hotness” of the game.

And as far as readers getting upset and leaving shitty comments...whatever, at least they commented. Fans will be fans. Haters gonna hate. If it starts up a heated discussion, even better; the page will get more hits and more comments.

The main reasons you don’t see a lot of negative reviews is because reviewers don’t like spending their time playing games they don’t like. So right from the get go, they are declining to review shitty games. And even if they do end up playing a game they dislike, they will often decide that they don’t feel like spending enough time with it to be able to review it. This is another reason publishers know not to cut reviewers off for one negative review. Silence speaks volumes.