More concerning than Bethesda’s decision to withhold early review codes from certain outlets is how heavily some sites are relying on the game to drive their business.
More concerning than Bethesda’s decision to withhold early review codes from certain outlets is how heavily some sites are relying on the game to drive their business.
This article made a damn good point about how much gaming websites depend on guides now. It hasn’t really clicked until now with me. I follow a bot on Mastodon that posts new articles from a bunch of different gaming sites, and it seems like half of them are for guides and walkthroughs. That’s where they get their ad bucks from, so that and SEO are the big focus.
Yeah, after Reddit died (as far as I’m concerned) I set up a tracker for a load of RSS feeds. A lot of them are, as you say, updates concerning walkthroughs and guides. Predominantly Baldurs Gate 3 at the moment.
Which is fine I guess, but it is very obvious what they’re pushing…I’d rather just have news.
yeah, it sucks and I just stick with the wiki source and proper sites I know. I am a hoarder so I don’t want to miss some good items I can get by accidentally wiping a area or block myself from them because of a wrong decision. Some of the generated sites are still refer to old early access stuff.
I just checked that gaming news Mastodon account I follow, and of the 20 most recent posts, 19 of them were guides.
When I look up guides, I’m now spammed with game8 and screenrant links. I’m pretty sure they’re just AI generated too.