#NerdsUnite: Confessions of a videogame journalist (damn you #E3!)
<editorsnote> Nerds, meet my buddy John. We started talking on the twitter not too long ago, and then he reached out and asked if he could write for us regarding his journey through the nerdy realm. I was all DUDDEEE!! That's so raaaddd!! And now, here we are. Like right now, in real time, this is happening. Pretty cool huh? HIT IT JOHN!!! </editorsnote>
#TalkNerdyToMeLover's John Sollitto
So here’s the thing. Me and the guys at the Vault applied for E3, right? And Parker, God bless him, got his application in first. But, he was rejected! These guys want 10,000 site views a MONTH to our site for us to qualify as a legitimate press site.
Okay, I can understand wanting the best of the best there, the people who can get you the most eyes on your products, and the real journalists to cover your event. That totally makes sense. It’s the Electronic Entertainment Expo after all. What really grinds my gears is them letting in Gamestop employees cause they’re in the “sales” industry, and guys like us at the Vault get denied. We got 10% of what they wanted, and Joe Shmoe from the Gamestop down the road, the guy who works the register and stocks the shelves, is going to get in because he’s “part of the industry.”
Lemme tell you something: The guy that sells food at the supermarket is not a farmer because he handles produce all day. You get me?
I get that they want the game vendors to know the future products. But won’t I be providing the same information, just on a website and not in a store? I’m no math wizard, but that just don’t add up in my book.
Oh, and if you just happened to want to attend E3, and you’re not part of the industry, it’ll only set you back a pitiful $795. Yeah, you read that right. And after April 23rd? That goes up $200. That is if you still qualify to their registration standards because the general public is not allowed to attend since this is a “trade-only event.”
So basically they force you to go to a number of websites that have been approved to cover the event itself and watch/read their coverage of E3 from your computer/couch, and drool over all the fancy stuff people get to play. OH NO! WAIT! THAT’S ALSO A LIE.
Remember my first article here on TNTML? While I walked around last year’s E3 I found out that even if you were still industry and press, you had to have an appointment to test out some of the stuff being shown there. YEAH. This event is so exclusive and some of the reveals and demos are so secretive and sensitive, that even the industry professionals aren’t allowed to touch them.
It’s like these guys decided to make a gamer club where everyone gets to show their wares, but only the cool kids get to play.
I imagine that entire conversation went like this:
“Hey, so we got rid of the public because we wanted to control how many people tested the games and were able to experience them. Now we have all of these press and industry people walking around…How do we get some of our biggest supporters the traffic they need to stay in business and leave the rest of the people to get try stuff out that everyone knew about?”
“We could always make them schedule appointments to test out all the really really exclusive stuff so that they have first dibs on all the breaking news and demo footage.”
“Well we could always make that process really difficult, and raise our standards so that even legitimate small-time press junkets that want to cover us, can’t. That’d mean we’d have the same people year after year until the smaller people got bigger and might give us the publicity we want.”
It’s just…ugh it’s just so dumb. It’s crap like this that perpetuates the idea that all game press junkets are filled with elitest monkeys who sit around on golden thrones and complain about games aren’t as good as they were in the 90s. Unfortunately I have no illustration for that turn of phrase so you’ll just have to imagine that. I think the monkey is wearing a JINX shirt…yeah. That’d be funny.
The hard news equivalent to this would be if the White House threw a fancy pants 3 day dinner for people at CNN, Fox News, BBC, and any other big news name. They all sat around and talked about policy and foreign relations, ate a crap-ton of food, and danced the night away. Then all the press people came back and told everyone what was going to happen for the next year in politics.
Wouldn’t that make you feel a teensy bit distant from your press as well as politicians? As gamers, we all feel disconnected from the big companies and even the press outlets now. All we can do is comment on forums and articles and hope our tweets get on the live streaming Twitter wall of some show somewhere.
It’s not fair, and honestly the press is not an accurate representation of how the consumers would react to something. How often do reviewers cover every single perspective and every single opinion of a game? That’s the point of allowing the public in. You can actually communicate one-on-one with your customers and maybe even find out some stuff about your games they won’t like before you release it!
Now, E3 being exclusive to industry is old news. I get that. But even as a small-press editor, I feel my chain is being jerked by the man on this. I’m really starting to see how our industry needs to change if we’re to get back to quality.
#nerdsunite
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