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Games Entertainment

GameFAQs Acquired by CNET 92

Posted by CowboyNeal from the changing-of-hands dept.
Gamefaq addict writes "GameFAQs has apparently been sold to CNET. The operator says it will stay free for now, but premium services may be introduced later." Looks like a good deal all around. CNET gets the first site most people turn to when they need to get past level two of the dungeon, and GameFAQs gets an added boost. Makes me curious what premium features they have in mind, and how useful they'll be.
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GameFAQs Acquired by CNET More

GameFAQs Acquired by CNET

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  • Nothing good has come from commercial game sites that I have seen. Witness fileplanet et. al., charging money for the convienience of downloading promotional material for a game. I am anxiously waiting to be proven wrong, however.

  • And another one bits the dust... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Spokehedz ( 599285 ) on Wednesday June 04, 2003 @09:59AM (#6115052)
    I remember when SegaSages got 'acquired' by IGN, and it turned into some lame, half-assed attempt at going 'legit' at making it a business... You know--keeping some of it free, some of it pay, tons of annoying ads (I say that, but I don't see them thanks to Mozilla--I assume they are there.), and the usual things going FUBAR during the 'change of ownership' for the first few months afterwards.

    And now this is going to happen to GameFAQ's too? *Sarcastically* Great--another site that I'll have to ignore from now on, and rely on other fan-sites for the info I need.
  • Uh... the content on that site is made by a horde of volunteer gamers. How on Earth can you charge for access to a site whose content isn't yours?
    Are they going to charge ME for access to the very FAQs that *I* made?
    • Of course not!

      You will recieve free access for any FAQ that you created!

    • Re:Paying... for volunteer work?? (Score:5, Informative)

      by brave1 ( 646529 ) on Wednesday June 04, 2003 @10:14AM (#6115216) Homepage
      The announcement said:

      You still own what you've submitted to GameFAQs.

      If you've submitted FAQs, codes, reviews, or other content to GameFAQs over the years, it's no more CNET's than it ever was mine to own. You still have the right to remove anything you've submitted to the site, although naturally I'd be more than happy to try and talk you out of it. Your work was not sold to CNET; in fact, it was specifically excluded.

      Concerning the cost:

      GameFAQs will still be free. We're not cutting off any part of the site and making you pay for any of it. From the FAQs to the Message Boards, everything you see today for no charge on the site will be free tomorrow. While we may someday introduce new features that require payment, nothing you see today is going to be turned into a premium service.

      I have to admit that I am a bit skeptical myself, but I have enjoyed Download.com [download.com] and Computers.com [computers.com] free of charge for a couple of years now. I have benefited a lot from GamFAQs. I'm glad he'll get a paycheck AND a pager-free vacation from time to time.
      • Hang on there. Download.com is not technically free. For a long time, it was free to list your shareware or freeware software there. Then Download.com starting to charge authors to have their software listed. As a result, almost all the freeware listings were dropped because of the cost.

        You may not pay cash for using Download.com, but you paid in a different way.

  • Hrm. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by notque ( 636838 ) on Wednesday June 04, 2003 @10:02AM (#6115079) Homepage Journal
    I think I liked the internet much better when information was listed on websites for the use of everyone, not to sell to a large company to make a buck.

    Just one of the many reasons I hate the internet more and more everyday.

    There used to be tons of free content regarding every subject I could imagine. What happened?

    Why is it when I do a search for anything, I have to include "free" only to be given lists of websites that say they are, only to outright lie.

    I don't care about having to do a few extra searches, it just seems to me that the more and more content that is online, the harder it is for me to find legitimate information without someone wanting to take money from me.

    Grr. GameFAQS will be the same way. They will charge just like IGN, and they will fade as well.

    What happened to, For the love of the game?
    • Fine. You get a copy of every FAQ there is, get a machine, pay for all the colo costs and bandwidth costs. Then you cant' complain there is no free faq's site, since yours will exist.
      • Bandwidth costs are not going to be that bad for a site like gamefaqs.com. All they are hosting are text files. Its not like gamespot or IGN where they host full res. screenshots and movies of games. They could easily pay for things with advertising. Look at penny-arcade.com, they pay the bills and they have very high standards on what advertising they put on their site. All you need is a good fanbase of people that actually click on the ads.
        • Most FAQs are quite large, and if you get 1000s of people downloading the same one over and over, you could see quite a bit of bandwidth.

          Granted, since most FAQs are just text, you could save bandwidth by using a webserver that supports compressed files, so that aren't neccessarily the large file, just something 1/10th its size... Would save a lot on bandwidth that way.

        • Re:Hrm. (Score:3, Informative)

          by sporty ( 27564 )
          For a site that gets many, MANY referals a day just 'cause anyone who's anyone points to gamefaq's faq's? Also direct links.

          Even if the files are small, a lot of hits can change 5megs in a month to 50megs in a month.

          Also note, penny-arcade has taken its own initiatives to generate revanue.

        • Re:Hrm. (Score:4, Insightful)

          by TheGreenLantern ( 537864 ) <thegreenlntrn@yahoo.com> on Wednesday June 04, 2003 @03:35PM (#6118457) Homepage Journal
          You're high. Since you obviously know nothing about the site, allow me to elaborate. GameFAQ's hosts a message board community that is easily on-par with Slashdot or Kuro5hin as far as usage, with well over 600,000 registered users. They are currently hosting some 21000 FAQ's, 49000 reviews, 34000 codes, and 2300 saved games.

          I seriously doubt that PA's bandwidth bill can even touch GameFAQ's.

    • Re:Hrm. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by EnVisiCrypt ( 178985 )
      It's quite simple: The cost.

      Free sites that are as popular as gameFaqs cost the owner a hell of a lot of money. Without corporate backing or subscriptions, sites like that can't stay open. Sites like that open "for the love of the game", stay open "for the love of the game", and get bought "for the love of eating and being able to pay the rent".

      There is a point in a popular site's lifetime at which it is impossible to sustain the endeavour without seriously affecting the lifestyle of those running it. A s

      • Re:Hrm. (Score:2)

        by pmz ( 462998 )
        Free sites that are as popular as gameFaqs cost the owner a hell of a lot of money.

        An indispensible gaming site like GameFAQs should have no problem making this popularity turn into profit. They are an integral part of the gaming economy (reviews, walkthroughs, codes, game lists), and, the best part, most of their content is provided by volunteers for free.

        That's right, GameFAQs is largely getting a free ride by the very gaming community it supports. So, with minimal content expenses, they just need ad
        • Having run an "advertising supported" site, I can safely say that advertising *does not* even come close to paying the bills.

          Just ask Taco, and I'm sure he'll tell you that the ads don't even come close to paying the bandwidth costs.

          • Re:Hrm. (Score:1)

            by pmz ( 462998 )
            Having run an "advertising supported" site, I can safely say that advertising *does not* even come close to paying the bills.

            What fraction does advertising cover? 1/2? 1/3? 1/10?

            Perhaps GameFAQs could stir up some non-interventionist sponsorship from Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft. GameFAQs is seriously good marketing for the big-hit games out there...but perhaps a bit too honest about the duds.

            • Re:Hrm. (Score:3, Informative)

              by EnVisiCrypt ( 178985 )
              On the site that I had, it covered about 1/8. If I had used skyscrapers, interstitials, and pop-ups, I probably could have knocked about 1/2 the site's cost.

              It was still too little, though, especially given how many users that would have driven away.

        • Re:Hrm. (Score:3, Interesting)

          by TheGreenLantern ( 537864 )
          In fact GameFAQ's does currently rely on advertising to make money. The problem is that running a site that big is too much for one person, and the advertising revenue is not enough to allow CJay to hire some help. This seems to be the main reason he's "selling" to CNet: he's tired of working 60 hour weeks just to see the backlog get progressively bigger.
        • Well, it's too late, since they sold their site, but anyway...
          How about mirrors? Let everyone set up a mirror of all gamefaq content (without message board). It doesn't help their bandwidth host that many of the FAQ writers are paranoid fuckwit jerks that write 2-page copyright notices, prohibiting any redistribution and posting on any sites except gamefaqs.

          Size of all the content is probably in the range of several gigabytes. By distributing hosting costs you can solve the problem. There are many people w

    • Re:Hrm. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by amuro98 ( 461673 )
      You know what will happen...

      If Gamefaqs starts charging for access to people's FAQs, people will pull their FAQs from Gamefaqs, and someone will start their own FAQ repository service.

      Personally, I don't really know how you could make money from a website anyways. Either you charge for the information (the FAQs) and/or use ads.

      Ad revenue has been proven insufficient to support a website. It might help, but no one's going to get rich from it...
    • And I liked the internet better when sites didn't get 50,000 hits a day and the owners could afford to pay for the bandwidth out of their own pocket.
      • Yup, that idea didn't scale well, now did it! Neither did Communism....

        Sure in the beginning it was very cheap to host a site and post a ton of simple HTML pages (no graphics) but now that there is a much larger Internet using population it's become much more expensive to publish to all the users. If you succeed you get swamped and have trouble paying for it all.

        I remember what it was like when the Net was new and everyone was migrating from BBS systems to the Internet. Once there were two ISP's in my
  • I guess this means going back to searching on google and other search engines for info on games.

    I don't care if they charge.. no matter what the info I want will be out there for free somplace.
    • From the FAQs to the Message Boards, everything you see today for no charge on the site will be free tomorrow. While we may someday introduce new features that require payment, nothing you see today is going to be turned into a premium service.

      So what's the big deal? I'd be worried if he was bowing out completely, but he's not. It's a labour of love & there is no indication we'll have to go elsewhere to find our FAQs.

  • Rrrright... (Score:1, Troll)

    by notque ( 636838 )
    GameFAQs has apparently been sold to CNET. The operator says it will stay free for now, but premium services may be introduced later.

    In this case may be means definately.

  • Might not be bad (Score:3)

    by fredrikj ( 629833 ) on Wednesday June 04, 2003 @10:07AM (#6115146) Homepage
    Remember folks, while we all know that information wants to be free, "premium membership" deals are not necessarily a bad thing. Admit it, you never click the ads anyway, so you should be able to feel OK about directly supporting a service that's actually useful.
  • What comes to mind is stratigic delaying with the FAQs, giving paying users a chance to get them sooner, partiuarly for news games.

    Also perhaps there may be a move towards adding things like detailed maps as premium content. While other sites do have them, a central resource is something that a few folks may pay a bit for.
    • OH NO! That means people might have to figure out game on their own again. Heaven forbid! :)
    • I would imagine that the premium content would be like Prima guides you can buy for games, with all the fancy color tables, pictures, maps, etc... And the free content would remain the "basic" (albeit usually more detailed) text and map info that we have come to expect from GameFAQs.
      • Maps aside, Prima has just plained sucked in recent years. Compare the MOO 1 (Master of Orion) hint book to MOO 3 both published by Prima. The MOO 1 book was practically a design document, the only thing better would have been source code. MOO 3 on the other hand didn't even match the released game. That another reason why GameFaqs is so popular (besides being free). Take for instance FF 7, there isn't guides for sale as complete as the fans' versions. I would buy strategy guides again if they just made
  • The the poster was a little too optimistic about the future of GameFAQ. What will more likely happen is the type of info that used to be free will now be 'premium'.


    This isn't to say that you won't be able to reach your Diablo walkthrough anymore. Only new info/features will be affected as they are added.


    That said, here's hoping the optimism of the original post is found correct.

  • Premium feature (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Apreche ( 239272 ) on Wednesday June 04, 2003 @10:20AM (#6115293) Homepage Journal
    Their premium features will be the same as everyone elses. You will now have to pay for what you are used to getting for free. As soon as it is no longer available for free anywhere else it becomes special.

    What I wonder about though is all the faqs. They aren't owned by gamefaqs. They are written by others for everyone else for free. If cnet tries to profit off the faqs written by random gamers, can't the gamers sue them for mad cash? This will surely be intersting. I hope the gamefaqs poll doesn't go away though, it is high quality.
    • the gamers sue for mad cash...? maybe... but won't it be hard proving that you're who you say you are...
  • They'll probably do Premium like IGN. Look up the walkthrough on, say, Toy Commander for Dreamcast and you get the 'main' levels (required to advance). Subscribers get access to the walk-throughs for the 'extra' levels.

    So maybe the Zelda GameFaq will now say "here is where the items are. For a list of all mushroom locations and the secret faery locations, become a subscriber!" etc
    • If they do this, GameFAQs will die.

      Most of the time it's the secrets I'm interested in anyways, such as some of the more hidden quests in FF-whatever.

      Trying to get me to pay for such information will simply cause me to stop going to GameFaqs.

      Besides, most of the FAQ writers include this information in their documents anyways, and as stated on the website - the FAQs belong to the writers - NOT to CNET or GameFaqs.

      Now I could see Cnet maybe trying to convince a FAQ writer to sign up for a pay-per-view typ

  • Quote the article: (Score:3, Funny)

    by Rudy Rodarte ( 597418 ) on Wednesday June 04, 2003 @10:31AM (#6115402) Homepage Journal
    ... everything you see today for no charge on the site will be free tomorrow.
    Well, thats good. Now, I hope that we dont get flooded with pop ups or those in between comercials ala Ign.com Sure, Moz lays the smackdown on the pop ups, but the commercials in between pages... No thanks.
    While we may someday introduce new features that require payment, nothing you see today is going to be turned into a premium service. I wonder what they could add as a premium service. I mean, you go there, post a message, see how to defeat Motherbrain in Metroid 1 and thats about it. I'm sure they'll think of something. Maybe pay to see the newest FAQs. Something like this:

    The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!

    s/Slashdot Story/FAQ for Zelda XII
  • I (and most of us I think) usually visit GameFAQs to get those .txt files called FAQs, and those files are contributed by people around the world, if CNet is going to charge for those files, then people won't submit them anymore, so I guess FAQs will stay free, that's all what I need, I do't care about other services.

  • Let's hope this doesn't turn out to be like another Gamecenter-Gamespot case.

    Remember the days [archive.org] when we have a mature, well-written, not-on-the-big-gaming-companies-payrroll gaming site? I've felt at loss ever since Gamecenter was dropped in favour of more profitable Gamespot. Ohwell, let's hope this doesn't happen to GameFAQs too.

  • Are you guys nuts? (Score:3, Informative)

    by snubber1 ( 56537 ) on Wednesday June 04, 2003 @10:36AM (#6115451)
    You all are paranoid nuts I swear. OK, quick, what other gaming site does CNET own? ...Thats right, GAMESPOT.
    Gamespot is almost the opposite of IGN, where as IGN locks new content in a magic box of money, gamespot gives you the most up-to-date content for free, but charge you to visit the archives. Gamespot complete members ($20? $25? I forget how much I paid, *last year*) get other premium perks like professionally written FAQs.

    Getting the idea now? Think: well produced gameguides by professional writers with a paid subscription. User written guides on gamefaqs have ranged from pure gold all the way down to horrid, illiterate drivel. You pick what you want to read.
    Maybe they'll even have some sort of payback system for the authors...
    • I do occassionally find an old game I'm intersted and would like to access the archives. I have to pay for access to old stuff? That seems contrary to the business model of charging for new stuff.
      • Yes, but it seems to work with gamespot. Nearly all articles/reviews/previews/news are locked after 7 days. You can always view the last 8 screenshots and the last movie posted.

        I pay $20-something a year for the privilige of viewing zillions of movies, and going back to old reviews of games I stumbled upon-- The archives are a valuable service in that respect. Besides giving away brand new conent probally keeps the traffic up to garner more advertising revenue.
      • I think the model that justifies charging for old stuff (rather than new stuff, or rather than not charging at all) comes down to this:
        the new stuff is going to attract a somewhat predictable number of hits each week, and generate a fairly predictable amount of ad revenue. The old stuff, on the other hand, will only see occasional use and generate very little ad revenue. Additionally, the longer the site runs, the more old stuff there is to keep around, and the more hard drive space that takes up.

        Informati
    • Actually, I find GameSpot to be mostly useless and never visit that site since everything I want seems to require paying for at GameSpot and really I can get what I want from GameFAQs.
    • You mean that giant blob of hyper links and advertisements that's impossible to use, compared to something that's elegant like PlanetGameCube [planetgamecube.com]?

      Granted, Gamespot covers more (I think), I just don't have time to decipher the alien interface.
      • Well, if you subscribe, *NO* advertisements. Two, there are alot of links because gamespot has ALOT of information. The gamefinder available to complete members is invaluable for finding specific titles according to exact critera. If you know what game you are looking for a simple search should get you right to where you are going.
    • Gamespot is almost the opposite of IGN, where as IGN locks new content in a magic box of money, gamespot gives you the most up-to-date content for free, but charge you to visit the archives.

      Gamespot's strategy seems to me to be more like "charge for video downloads, and other content at random."

      When they first went to a pay model, it was archival material and videos that cost money. Now I'm able to poke around in a significant amount of their archives for free (but not all of it), and I can't read any of
  • While I'm happy for gamefaqs owner, I just don't know about this. Yes, everything that is there NOW will remain free, however what's to stop C|Net from making new stuff premium for a time, similar to what IGN does?

    Not to mention, new faqs will likely become property of C|Net, thus allowing them to do whatever.

  • I think this is a good thing. Yea, I know alot of other sites just sucked after they were bought, but this one I think will be different. If you've read the whole article on GameFAQs website it says that CJayC will continue to operate the site and what is now free will stay free. Only something that will be added would be turned into service. Also The FAQs are still the property of the people who wrote them and not CNet of GameFAQs. You can remove them whenever. I say this is a good change, faster servers,
  • I use GameFAQ quite a bit, I always found it very helpful but when super-hyper-global-mega-corp's tend to buy these places up, it's not always for the best. CNET obviously know this is a popular site and there's money to be gained, otherwise they wouldn't have bought it. If they feel they can mnake a profit from it, it'll come at some loss to us.

    Incidently, I was kind of annoyed to see you had to pay for IGN's content. I was looking at MGS3 screenshots and after the 5th or so was told to see more I'd need

  • It's not a big deal (Score:4, Informative)

    by sharv ( 71041 ) on Wednesday June 04, 2003 @11:03AM (#6115733) Homepage
    And here's why... all the content on gamefaqs was written by people sitting in front of their computer/PS2/XBox/Nintendo and writing down the information. It wasn't written by "journalists", but by fans. Fans like these despise ad-cluttered, overly-designed sites like GameSpot or IGN.

    The result? The faq-writing "scene" will just migrate to a new site. All you people bitching, get off your duffs and get some hosting offering MySQL and CGI access. It's all plaintext, it's not hard to store. Recreate gamefaqs somewhere else. It's not going to be hard.

  • What I'd pay for (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Enrico Pulatzo ( 536675 ) on Wednesday June 04, 2003 @11:28AM (#6115974)
    a pdf of the manual for console games. Renting games from blockbuster requires a trip to gamefaqs to figure out what all of the buttons do. It'd also be cool to get some old 8-bit manuals too.

  • Ownership of a community-run site (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Wednesday June 04, 2003 @11:48AM (#6116129) Homepage
    GameFAQs presents an interesting business dilemma. The proprietars don't own the resource people come for. GameFAQs consists of FAQs which are written by amatures and whose work the authors retain the copyright upon. As an author of several pieces on that site, GameFAQs has no more right to sell my work than any other publication.

    So what is being sold? A well-respected name, first of all. The rights to control which directions the site takes. The ability to more tightly integrate with Gamespot.

    Is GameFaqs going to change? I tend to doubt that. As a community-driven site, I would expect that major changes would cause a backlash, and a backlash on community sites means that you not only have less visitors, but you have less authors, which in turn reduces the visitors even further, and so on.

    Why would C-Net, the company that bought news.com, gamespot.com, zdnet.com, and just about every other techie site out there, buy GameFAQs? Because GameFAQs is both a good property and is profitable. The owner actually makes a living with ad sales, enough of a living to go on vacation. It's profitable, it's shining, it's relied upon by many, many gamers... It could be used to drive traffic to Gamespot, it could serve as a gateway to Gamespot's paid professional FAQs, or it could just have been bought because it was shiny and well loved, and C|net loves to buy shiny things.

    I'm not too worried here. Good decision, GameFAQs guy.

  • Since all the submitted faqs are copyrighted by the author, not any particular website, they could be hosted elsewhere. Perhaps a "tip jar" system to help the cost of hosting, or a distrubited server system where documents are on a series of mirrors all over, and a php or cgi script redirects the reader to a mirror...?

  • more info on faq submitters (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    http://s3.cgi.gamefaqs.com/boards/genmessage.asp?b oard=4&topic=8340244

    Looks like the sky may not be falling after all.
    • Wow, I can't believe how much reading

      "error '80020009'
      Exception occurred. /boards/genmessage.asp, line 49"

      calmed me down. =)

      IMO one of the best things CNet could do for GameFAQs is to redesign the layout. Even the foul Ain't It Cool News is slightly easier on the eyes, and just about every website on the planet is easier to navigate.

  • More CNet Acquisitions (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 04, 2003 @01:49PM (#6117307)
    If you head on over to GameRankings.com [gamerankings.com] you will see a note on the bottom "Copyright 1999 - 2003, CNET Networks, Inc." GameRankings (alongwith GameFaqs) is one of the most useful gaming sites on the Internet. CNET is quiety gobbling up gaming sites it finds interesting.

    GameFaqs has a really great selection of FAQs but its problem is that it does not 'own' any of the FAQ submissions. GameRankings mainly owns a database filled with statistics and although not easily replicated there are alternatives.

    I prefer GameTab [gametab.com] to GameRankings (and to a lesser extent MetaCritic.com [metacritic.com]). GameTab is not owned by a large company like CNet and has a much nicer design and set of user features. It also uses quotes in its review summary pages and quotes help me decide much more easily than raw numbers whether or not a game will be to my liking. So for now on I'll be supporting GameTab (but I'm sure I'll go to GameFaqs because as of yet there is no nice alternative to that site.)

  • Whoa!! Slow down Slappy (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JGag21 ( 678945 ) on Wednesday June 04, 2003 @04:41PM (#6119036)
    Jesus Christ you guys are blowing this way out of proportion. Think about this from a legal standpoint. If every single "FAQ" on that site was contributed with no credit to the author other than to share his "work" and to look "cool", there is absolutely no way that you'll ever be charged for that service. Do you think the current owner of that site, or CNet want thousands of legal threats? Stop worrying, it's nothing like IGN or GameSpot they hire people to write "professional" editorials and reviews for games, and get Koo "exclusive" media.
    • A lot of FAQ authors don't have a lot of money to pursue a legal challenge if CNet decides to wiggle out of the agreement (unless it turns into a class-action lawsuit).

      This is not much different than Escient buying up cddb and taking away all the user-submitted tracklists.

  • Monopoly (Score:2, Interesting)

    by willr7 ( 249366 )
    You know Ziff Davis? Well It's web company is zdnet. Remember them?

    Cnet bought them a couple of years ago.

    Ziff Davis also owns Computer Gaming World, Electronic Gaming Monthly , Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine, GameNOW, and Xbox Nation.

    And you know what websites Ziff Davis runs? www.gamers.com and www.gamespot.com , the latter of which has implemented a pay system recently for people who want all the content.

    Now they buy this, doesn't make much sense, they're already on top, why do it?

    • Sorry, but you're wrong (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      As a former employee of ZiffDavis, here's what happened:
      late 1999: Cnet buys www.zdnet.com, not ZiffDavis publishers, which is owned in part by a huge japanese bank and by the ZiffDavis publishing house (e-news, pcmag, CGW, EGM, etc.)
      sometime in 2001: ZiffDavis launches www.extremetech.com, to accompany www.pcmag.com. Both sites publishes news and tech reviews. Most of pcmag editors and analysts stay with www.pcmag.com and www.extremetech.com, while www.zdnet.com gets a new set of analysts, and some of them
      • Just checked it out on finance.yahoo.com

        They are two different companies, but - How come most of the editors who write for CGW are the same ones who write for gamers.com & gamespot.com?

        If they are two different companies, why would either one let their employees work for the competition?

        And why the f*ck does zdnet take you to links on cnet, and look exactly the same??

        I dont think your right anymore, anonymous coward.

  • I Trust CNet about as far (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jermomma ( 657469 ) on Wednesday June 04, 2003 @07:31PM (#6120094)
    as I can throw them. A couple of years ago, their builder.com [builder.com] had a free message board, The Builder Buzz, that was an excellent source of knowledge for all things related to web design/programming. All of the content was user created. Then, when CNet realized they were bleeding money, they decided to cut everybody off and charge for access to the Buzz. We could no longer access the posts that we had written, some of which we spent a great deal of time on.

    Hopefully, this won't happen to gamefaqs, as it is another one of my favorite sites. I do think there is a glimmer of hope due to the fact that the licensing of the FAQs on gamefaqs is spelled out pretty plainly, but frankly, I would not put it past cnet to pull some legal trickery to get around it.
  • Were cnet the people who destroyed winfiles.com? Anyone know an alternative to gamefaqs?
  • bad bad bad things are going to come of this.
  • Speaking as a GameFAQs contributor (see my Metroid Prime FAQ under the name "Deflux"), I have to admit that this news had me worried at first. However, after speaking with several people and reading everything there was to read about this, my concerns have gone away.

    CJayC, the guy who was running the site solo, addressed all of the FAQ contributors on a message board shortly after announcing the news on GameFAQs. Hereâ(TM)s a snippet:

    First of all, let me re-iterate that none of your content has b
  • to go suck down all of the FAQs from there. They might not be free in a couple of months.

    "What? You mean these people aren't PAYING for stuff they can find free elsewhere? We have to start charging them!"
  • I got banned in march on the saturday after black LUEsday (March 8). I heard what dark cobra wrote about CJayC was hella funny.
  • I'd bet what they have in mind is making the entire site become a premium service. Though perhaps we MIGHT possibly get to see some reviews and ads (not to be redundant) for free.
  • While I'm dismayed at this turn of events from a reader's standpoint, it's no secret that FAQ authors are grossly underappreciated.

    If any pay-to-access viewing is going to take place, I can guarantee you the intelligent writers of GameFAQs will be requesting some compensation of their own...

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