If you are like me, around football season, you scour the net in search of every morsel of news until the games are released. Right now, I’m fixated on Head Coach and FIFA news.
In searching for the HC news, you are predestined to come across some really bad Madden previews that are glorified press statements. Some of the read as if an EA PR intern wrote them.
Having real-time blogs, twitter, forums, facebook and whatever nifty social network I’m not on, there is no need for preview features on any of the major gaming sites. They simply are an outdated way of hyping up games that suit the game publisher and not the consumer.
Before the internet and high-speed connections, you gaming news came in the way of magazines. Before release you got a small preview and after release a few paragraphs reviewing the game. You never knew how much a reviewer played the game.
Now, atleast with blogs (real-time posts), gaming sites should have a running thread of just impressions. Previews tend to favor the publishers in that they tend to focus on what feature lists want them to focus on. Game companies will not like this becuase they can’t direct [control] writers into focusing on their handcrafted PR statements.
A running blog would let readers see how much a game is being played. How knowledgable that previewer is in a certain sport. And with no virtual ink limit, it can cover games with more depth.
Advertising wouldn’t be a problem because you would have multiple hits. It someone is providing real-time Madden impressions, how many times are people going to hit the refresh button to get the lastes thoughts.
The old model for gaming sites to do first-take, early media, preview and then review is outdated. It’s not as if IGN, Gamespot and others aren’t moving toward blogs. IGN already has writer blogs except they are filled with crap like this.
It’s time for the major gaming sites to offer its readers new types of content.
