Gamespot Goes to Subscription Model

-PS-Sangloth writes "Gamespot, arguably the best video gaming website will expand in July to a pay service(Gamespot Complete). It seems that while review scores will be free, the actual reviews for new PC games will cease to be available to non-payers 7 days after the review was written. This is a real pity, I suspect many PC Gamers, like me, don't have credit cards(or cash), and Gamespot has good, hard, objective reviews. Read what they said at Gamespot Complete."

Um

[autopr0n]

If you can't afford a couple bucks a month, how can you afford spending $40/50 a month on new PC games?

I can understand

[taffyd]

...why they had to do this, as a business trying to stay alive in the "new economy".

I don't read GameSpot often, but I've enjoyed many of the reviews and walkthroughs that they've offered in the past.

The subscription costs ($4.95 a month) aren't unreasonable. I pay that without blinking various computing and gaming magazines whenever I'm in the newsagency browsing for some literature on the train.

I hope that they can offer enough subscription only services to make it worthwhile for subscribers, or they surely fade away.

Taffyd.

Seriously, who will buy?

[Beowulf_Boy]

Alot of gamers are in college or below, and have no money. I make 6$ an hour, there is no way I would even spend 2$ a month on this subscription service. And I am sure that 99.99% of others agree with me on that. Is that .01% of people who actually pay going to make them more money than the 100% of people that would otherwise just deal with the ads?
If gamespot charges, now I will just go somewhere else. Until it is a proprietary service, and gamespot only offers it, will I pay. And I still probably won't pay either! This is just like fileplanet. Either pay 50$ a year, or wait in line for an hour. I just run an internet search on the file and get it elsewhere, its not like they are the only ones with it.

Re:so...

[Alpha Wing]

Part of the issue is what the money is used for. Buy a game you intend on keeping, that's a good $40+ spent. Subscribe to a service you're not completely addicted to, that's a waste of $25.

I still have Doom on my computer and I don't have to pay yearly subscription fees everytime I feel like digging it up to play through it again.

Re:What a shame

[jayant_techguy]

Hey people don't even pay for services they use, forget about paying for reading content on a website.
Tell me how many people actually paid Yahoo! to keep POP and SMTP access of their mail, the figure is less than 1.5%. infact figures show many people shifted to other free mail services such as hotmail which can be downloaded using Outlook Express.
We will have to look for some other revenue model. Paying to get content will not work. Internet is here for providing information not sheilding information unless you pay. We are going away from the basic idea behind the internet: freely available information.

Re:Um

[56ker]

Yes but people are reluctant to part with any money at all for content on the web that can be found elsewhere for free. After all you can find other reviews for nothing - but you can't get the games for nothing. However what's to stop people just viewing the google cached page to get around this?

Come on guys...

[Tranvisor]

Use all have to recognise the difference between buying a subscription and a tangible product. With the subscription you have fun for that year or whatever and then thats it, games over. Buying a game for $40 gives you the pleasure of playing that game ... forever. And don't give me crap about once you beat the game the fun's over, if you are selective the fun never stops. Good examples of old games still very playable would be Starcraft, Baldur's Gate, Diablo2, and others.

Heck, Diablo 1 is still a great game to pop on a zip disc to play on a Uni computer when all you have is a spare second, just install it on the zip, crack it and truck it around :). As a final point I just reinstalled X-Wing after like a year of not playing it. (This time I will beat it!)

Paying $40-$50 on a great game is not a problem when you know you will be enjoying it for years to come. Paying $24 to read reviews that you can read elsewhere? Unless you have a great income, and personally love Gamespot, I would say the answer is a hearty NO.

Almost there

[The Cat]

sigh... It's almost to the point where the comments can be written with only the headline.

Myths:

1. Nobody will pay for content
2. People don't trust on-line transactions
3. "I'll never pay for anything on-line"
4. I don't have a credit card therefore I can't buy anything on-line

Colloquialisms for "pay" that ALWAYS replace the word "pay" when describing an actual transaction of less than $100:

1. Plunk down
2. Shell out
3. Fork over

Example: "Before I [colloquialism] [$amount] I want [impossible amount of value]"

The reality is that the economy of the Internet will include many billions of dollars of purchases, and that these purchases not only will happen but are happening already. If people want to have any influence on this, then they HAVE TO PARTICIPATE IN THIS ECONOMY. "Vote with your dollars" appears in almost every group of comments. Fine. Everyone should not abstain when it comes to electronic commerce.

The Internet costs money. It always has, and it always will. It was never, is not and will never be free as in soda. :)

These articles are almost always on the same page with "Quake|Everquest|Neverwinter LXVII Almost Here!" and "Will E-books work?" articles, both of which routinely contain at least 200 comments with something along the lines of "Ooooh GIMME! GIMME! GIMME!" and the electronic equivalent of waving a handful of cash in the air.

The truth:

1. Free on-line content is only free if your time is worth nothing.

2. Even on the Internet, you get what you pay for.

One of the best subscription models yet?

[skunkeh]

Having read through the information on their site, I think that's probably the best subscription model I've seen launched so far. The balance between "what you'll get for free" and "what you'll have to pay for" seems pretty much spot on, and by keeping ALL of their new content (with the exception of downloads and video streams) free to view for seven days there will still be plenty of reasons to visit their site without a subscription (and for new subscribers to see why they should sign up).

The price is right too - $25 a year or $5 a month allows dedicated fans to make a big saving but still lets new users try things out for a month or two before making a bigger commitment.

Provided they get their payment model right (there need to be alternatives to paying my credit card) I reckon they could be on to a winner. That said, I probably won't be signing up but that's because I hardly ever visit gamespot as it is. Hopefully GameSpot fans will react differently.

Gamespot's reviewers kiss too much ass

[Anonymous Coward]

Gamespot's reviews are crap. They always give top scores to games from their sponsors, no matter how bad they are. Try to find an Electronic Arts game that's under 60% - you can't. In fact, there are almost no games under 50% (which should be the _average_ score). The only good reviews (and honest scores) are the ones written by the readers.

If Gamesdomain had a section for reader reviews I wouldn't bother to read Gamespot at all.

Reader reviews still free!

[artemis67]

My experience with GameSpot has been that a) reader review scores of a game have been more accurate than the score given by a professional game reviewer, since most of us aren't as hung up on minor details if a game plays well, and b) most all of the salient points of the official reviews are repeated many times in the reader reviews.

I know that *I* won't now or ever be sending any money GameSpot's way. As others have said, the content is available free on a bazillion other sites, so why pay?

Not to mention that this is turning into a general trend on the internet, paying for content that was previously free. Just yesterday it was announced that a game I've been playing for free over the internet for the past couple of years is going back to a subscription model. I won't be paying, because there's just too many other good games out there that are free (and, frankly, more important things I really should be doing with my time, like finishing up my master's degree, not spending untold hours on a game).

Plus, they say the GameSpot cost is only $4.95/month. Slashdot is roughly $5/month. Salon premium, $6/month. On and on. When they say "it's only $5," that doesn't account for every other site that you visit wanting your $5, too. It adds up. I won't be paying for any content, because I believe in the essential "free-ness" of the internet (which I'm already paying $25/month to access). There's too many folks out there who would like to be competition for these sites that are willing to do it at no charge.

I pay for IGN, if I had time, I'd add another

[alexhmit01]

I usually buy 1-2 games a month. I'm really stretched for time, there are games that I've bought in the past few months that I haven't played.

With IGN, I don't buy Gamecube games that suck. I avoided Spy Hunter because of their review. I later played it at a friend's place, I'm glad I didn't buy the game.

If you avoid 1 bad game purchase every 2-3 years from a subscription to a online gaming mag, it's paid for itself.

Alex

Re:Um

[Anonymous Coward]

They have 100k downloading with in the on the front page and they are bitching about bw!? And most of that is the 16k banenrs that say. wait for it ... gamespot. plus 4k pics of thier people on the front page?! give me a break. Most of the stuff on thier page is available elseware. It was just nice for it to all be in 1 spot. They are a graphic heavy site, they need to slim down the graphics a bit and they will see thier bill go down... They are also probley marketing to the wrong people to sell thier advertisments to. Hell the whole site is basicly one giant advertisment for games. They should get the companies that are making the games to host some of the bw for particular demos and movies. That way the companies that are more popular can charge for the game in accordance to it. And the companies can help eat some of the cost of the advertisment of thier own game...

Subscription Model

[Varuna]

The problem with subscription based sites lies in the fact that there would be to many for me to afford if all the sites I went to choose that business model. Lets look at a scenario. I pay $44.00 a month for broadband access. I have 5 favorite sites that I would hate to do without and at least 10 more I do like to visit occasionally. If each one went to a subscription model like Gamespot; I would have to pay $118.00 a month just to get my "basic Internet channels" that I like to visit. This doesn't even take into consideration sites that I may visit once every couple months or so for information. Take britannica.com for instance; I used to visit there very occasionally for information; but now you have to subscribe to see more that a couple sentences of an article. I can't afford this and I don't think there are enough people who can to make this a viable business model for web sites. I don't know what would work but I hope they find something cheaper than this.

The reason I don't buy online content (usually)

[image]

An argument has been made that people who subscribe to a tradition paper publication for ~$5/mo are candidates for an ongoing subscription to online content.

However, there is a greater risk associated with online content. Hundreds of online ventures have failed [fuckedcompany.com] over the past few years. When those companies go out of business, there is almost no chance of getting a refund on your pre-paid subscription cost, and no way to retrieve content that you have already paid for. Whereas in a traditional media, the magazine's cover price includes a permanent archiveable version.

While Gamespot has the right idea (give away the current issue, pay for archives), their subscription prices are way too high, considering that they are on par with a physical permanent copy (which has tangible value).

For online subscription models to succeed, they need to recognize that they are inherently less valuable then physical content. Thus Salon, Gamespot, etc., should charge radically less for online subscriptions than their paper equivalents.

Fortunately, this is economically viable as the cost of reproduction is asymptotically approaching zero (as bandwidth costs decrease over time).

Suggestion to Gamespot -- try $0.50/mo subscription rates. I assure you that you will get more than 10 times the number of subscribers. And if you make it $5/yr, I'll sign up myself.

Paying for fancy graphics

[mark_space2001]

I've been a loyal Gamespot reader for many years. One thing that bugs me about the current subscription service is that much of their bandwidth costs seems to be for all the fancy-schmancy graphics they have on their site. All those fancy-schmacy graphics were added so that they could attract advertising dollars in the first place. They wanted a web site that looked "professional". It's a vicious cycle that drives up their costs.

Now they got streaming downloads and video reviews. Huh? Guys you're gamer geeks. You sound awful giving a video presentation, plus the sound editing is always way too low. And they have WAY too many screen shots posted. This can't be good for bandwidth costs, and plus it isn't anything I really want.

What I really want is just the info. Text pages of game reviews. The rest of what is on most web sites is unecessary.

Why should I pay?

[Stalyn]

Someone justify to me why I should pay for no new content? I mean if the articles would read themselves to me maybe I would pay. Also it's only video game oriented information they provide. While maybe to some this information might be crucial to one's survival, to me its trivial and not worth really anything.

If you can't support yourself with ad based revenue then cut costs. I'm sure the person who reviews only fighting games can start reviewing some racing games. Fire some aritists and cut down on graphics, which in turn reduces bandwidth.

I can't find a reason why subscription based services will suceed when no new content is being provided. Why don't they instead decrease content, cut costs and stabilize themselves. Then provide new content to those who want to pay for it? Sell me something worth buying, not something that you first provided for free and now you deam worth my money since you can no longer afford to provide it.