Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Editorial Entertainment Games

Unbiased Game Reviews Through Micropayments 48

Posted by Hemos from the cool-ideas dept.
a reader writes:"Fed up of games reviewers giving in to advertiser pressure to go easy on high-budget turkeys? A group of distinguished British videogames journalists has set up an independent site called Digiworld. It's funded by an interesting micropayment system: you pay 50 pence (about 80 cents US) a week for full access, although new content is available for free on weekdays (details here). For extra geek appeal, the look of the site imitates the 8-bit Mode 7 graphics of Teletext, a British system that uses spare TV signal bandwidth to transmit pages of textual information (some of the staff previously worked on a Teletext gaming page called Digitiser). Even if you're not a gamer, the bizarre humor and characters make the site worth checking out."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Unbiased Game Reviews Through Micropayments More

Unbiased Game Reviews Through Micropayments

Comments Filter:
  • I now have a system whereby -1 Trolls now give me micropayments every time they post on Slashdot. I expect to turn my first million dollars by the end of the week (including my own contributions)
  • I don't know what kind of crack these guys are smoking, but Teletext is a horrible way for a website to look. The writing is pretty good too, I wish it was just a normal website where I didn't have to sacrifice babies to the Interface gods to read it.

    • Best Server Error Ever Award (Score:4, Funny)

      by coryboehne ( 244614 ) on Monday August 04, 2003 @12:34PM (#6607590)
      I just went there and was attempting to check out their site when I received this error,
      """
      Digi-me-don't: Unsuper Mess-up 500
      Mrrrrrr rrrrrr brrrr nrrrrrrr. Brrrrr nrrrrgh grrrrrr nrr rrrr.
      /
      Man, you've managed to bust us up good. That was no ordinary error, it was a 500 server thing, which means the Digi SCIENCE has coughed up its lungs. A report is on the way to famous technician Coleman Tillman so he can unbung the rubbishness. If you think you might know what went wrong, you can contact him: here: 500-me-do@digiworld.tv.

      In the meantime, poke listlessly at your browser's Back button or restart Digi. (The latter'll log you out, mind.)
      """

      Now, I agree about the teletext, but the error is just clever as hell...

  • Micropayments don't work (Score:4, Insightful)

    by NetDanzr ( 619387 ) on Monday August 04, 2003 @07:39AM (#6604815)
    Having unbiased reviews is certainly a good intention, but in the current competitive environment, micropayments don't work. They are moderately successful in small, niche markets or foreign languages, but not in gaming review sites written in English. If you really want unbiased reviews, you head to sites like Gamerankings that lists all reviews, and you'll find something you need.

    The only time micropayments work is if everybody else in a niche uses some sort of payment. This niche can be either topic-oriented or language-oriented. The important thing is that it has a limited audience that is unable to reach quality free content.

    • The "micropayments" in this story are bogus, so we're offtopic. But I have to address your argument.

      I hear lots of theories as to "why micropayments don't work". But that's all they are: theories. Have consumers in the U.S. ever had access to a real micropayment system? If so, I it happened while I wasn't looking.

      Micropayments would be ideal for selling web based content. Pay a couple cents every time you read an article. That generates an income flow that's a nice alternative to subscriptions and adver

      • You are right; there hasn't been a viable micropayments system in the US yet. However, I was working on one for a weekly magazine back in Slovakia where I'm originally from. The reason it worked there was because it was cheaper than buying the print version of the magazine.

        Consider this: You have a very limited audience, about 5.5 million people. 4 million of them don't understand any foreign language. You have a single magazine that catters to the political right, and thus its subscription base is re

    • At least someone is trying to make the business more honest. I was a software reviewer until recently, and discovered that you're expected to lie if a game is trash. I didn't, and it cost me my job because the publisher gave my bosses a ton of shit and cut off the supply of review product.

      I'd rather be out of work than whore myself to these assholes.
      • I'm sorry, but I think you are generalising too much. There are plenty of sites who post unbiased reviews, without demanding any payments. True, they are smaller and don't pay their reviewers, but they don't suck up to publishers, either. I write reviews for Netjak [netjak.com], and have yet to hear about a company successfully forcing us to improve a rating for a review. The same goes for plenty of other sites I know, such as The Adrenaline Vault (they made it all the way to the top of the Lucasarts black list), Fo
        • For starters, do you get FREE review product from the games companies? If so, have you honestly ever given a game a bad review? And we're talking Amiga Power levels of bad here. (Like giving a game 2%).

          I won't name the game company which is now deceased which gave me shit, suffice to say everyone who has read the review felt it wasn't that bad. In fact my editor loved it. Then when the company gave him a load of shit, he turned on me, said it was bad etc...

          As for micropayments, you never know. I'm far fro
          • The site I write for is very small, and still we get free stuff. We got some nasty responses from Lucasarts and Electronic Arts so far; in fact, EA almost managed to shut us down. Still, we do get free games, most notably from Dreamcatcher. As it so happens, I'm the one on the site who likes adventure games, so I get to review all of them. My ratings of these games range from 40% to 80%. Not a single one so far became a top pick, and there were quite a few we didn't even include a buy link to, because

  • This is marketing bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BobTheLawyer ( 692026 ) on Monday August 04, 2003 @07:50AM (#6604875)
    80c per week is not a micropayment: it's just a low subscription fee

    A micropayment is when a vendor charges an amount which is almost imperceptible to the purchaser. The example normally given is a teenager paying a few cents to listen to one-time-only Britney Spears single on their mobile phone.

    Mobile phones are ideal for micropayments, because their fee structures are designed for charging lots of small amounts. Credit cards are not, and the fees merchants are charged reflect this, which is why this website uses Paypal and Nochex. Personally I wouldn't trust either: they are as fragile as any other internet business and when they go bust you are most unlikely to see your money again. (And, getting off-topic, it's scandalous that they are effectively acting as banks but not regulated as such - expect much wailing and gnashing of teeth when people lose money.)

  • gah. horrible site design (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, 2003 @08:04AM (#6604957)
    If I'm going to pay 80 cents a week, as low as that is, I want to be able to read the site. God, the design of that site is *horrendous*. I gave up after the second 'tour' page and just started randomly clicking. It turns out the entire *site* is just that bad.

    I've got a 1920x1200 screen but their pages display about 30 words per page, have awful colors and one of the stupidest navigation systems I've ever seen.

    I can only imagine that a half-decent game review will take up perhaps 3,000 words which, at the words per page rate of the examples I saw, would take probably 50 pages - not including any screenshots they may want to offer.

    Gaaah. My head hurts.

  • MicroPayments (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Johnny Mnemonic ( 176043 ) <mdinsmore.gmail@com> on Monday August 04, 2003 @08:04AM (#6604965) Homepage Journal

    Simply paying for content isn't enough to make it unbiased; I pay for subscriptions to Electronic Gaming Monthly and IGN, and that doesn't guarantee bias-free reporting.

    The only thing that would help is to have ad-free mags, which means that the readers would have to pay enough to support the entire costs of the mag, and I don't see that happening with micropayments. And even at that, it would only be part of the puzzle--developers would still be able to hold out carrots like "privileged access to employees", "exclusive first reviews" and access to games and hardware to hold over the head of reviewers they don't agree with.

    • Re:MicroPayments (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      >The only thing that would help is to have ad-free mags

      Digiworld IS ad-free. That's the entire purpose of the micropayment system. If you read the site's FAQ, you'll see that the whole reason it was opened was to provide the first ever truly ad-free professional games journalism in history.
      • Site design like that does NOT qualify as "professional journalism" by any stretch of the imagination.

        Hell, it makes the evil purple of Slashdot Games look positively well-designed.

    • Re:MicroPayments (Score:3, Informative)

      by Eustace Tilley ( 23991 ) *
      Consumer Reports [consumerreports.org], which accepts no ads, has been in operation since 1936. The online version is $24 per year. I think it is fair to characterize $2 per month as a micropayment (the Digiworld subscription is roughly 89 cents per week), so this is proof by example that the business model can work.
    • It's not _just_ ads, although that's certainly part of it. The pre-release review copies offered by game companies to those review mags/sites they get along with are also a big factor.

  • why pay? (Score:3, Informative)

    by roegerle ( 694906 ) on Monday August 04, 2003 @08:10AM (#6604991)
    why pay when there are sites like www.snackbar-games.com [snackbar-games.com] honest and humorous reviews...enjoy

  • Slashvertisement (Score:4, Funny)

    by DavidLeblond ( 267211 ) <me@davidleblon d . com> on Monday August 04, 2003 @08:16AM (#6605035) Homepage
    Here are 2 tips on how to spot a Slashvertisement:

    1. The submitter's name is "a reader"
    2. The article praises the site's design, when the site's design looks like it was done by a five year old.
    • The article praises the site's design, when the site's design looks like it was done by a five year old.
      As does what content I could find.

      I actually like teletext, visually and as a concept. This is not "just like" teletext, it's just a crap template with a non-proportional font. Bring back Gif News [funet.fi].

  • was a teletext based service which had a pretty cult following before it was shelved (dont know why)
    Before clicking on the link I was quite happy to see the return of some of the (excellent) reviewers in an online format.
    I was fully prepared to shell out my 50p a week to read the site, however the design is so abismal I refuse to pay that (very) small price.
  • It astonishes me how many people just don't get it. It is an emulation of Teletext, because that's where Digiworld's roots lie. Digitiser, it's Teletext-predecessor, was funny not only because it had excellent, sharp, honest writing, but because it had hilarious characters drawn using the teletext limitations.

    If Digiworld did not use the teletext style it wouldn't be able to carry off the characters in the same way.

    I'm just astonished that you guys can come up with all these excuses not to read it. Jus
    • Chief, you need to calm it down. The site violates every single human interface design idea in the book. That's fine. But give me an option to turn the display off and read it the way the web was intended, and I'll be a happy bunny.

      I love Digitiser as much as anyone, but to say that just because it was Teletext needs it means to be Teletext is an insane argument. Paul Rose (Mr. Biffo himself!) did plenty fine when he launched the now-defunct Bubblegun.com using the aforementioned characters.

      It is fine j

    • The site may show some "truly independent journalism", but that doesn't automatically translate into good journalism. Good journalism is not only good writing, but also getting the message across in a readable format. While some may enjoy the endless scrolling through monstrous letters and a very narrow review column, others would rather go to other independent review sites like Netjak [netjak.com], Quarter to Three [quartertothree.com] or Four Fat Chicks [fourfatchicks.com], whose reviews are easier to decipher.

      (Personally, I'd like to see a sample review

      • It doesn't cost anything to sign up and you only need to put in a username and e-mail address. You only have to pay if you want to read the Weekend edition or any back issues. Soon they may only allow the first week to be visible to un-paying readers and lock the newer content - they don't want to do this but are going to have to. So there's absolutely no risk. Also, you can get a full refund of any unspent money at any time.
  • Forget paying professionals for reviews - games or movies. I use to write them for a magazine and can tell you that my opinion is no better than yours.

    The *best* sources for reviews of games are the comments on Amazon or EBGames. Amazon is particularly good for getting reviews because you can sort them on how helpful they have been rated. I typically look at the reviews that were voted most helpful and for the reviews that are lowest rated.

    Another great source are the newsgroups and various game boards o

  • Teletext, a British system that uses spare TV signal bandwidth to transmit pages of textual information

    I assumed Teletext was a fairly common system. Do you not have it in the US | $YOUR_COUNTRY ? If not, anyone know why?
  • Does anyone have irrefutable proof that a major respected game reviewer/site has taken money from a publisher to jack of review scores? I've never read an article or news story anywhere that proves beyond a doubt this has happened, at least to any reviewer or site that anyone gives a crap about. Does anyone on /. have a link on this at all?
  • It's still widely in use and extremely popular all across Europe. Every TV station has its own editorial department and most of them publish news 24 hours a day - like the web, but since the 80s...

    Can somebody enlighten me if there is Teletext in the US, too? If not, how did you have news, program guides, last minute travel offers and subtitles?
  • I've been doing the same thing [wickedtoast.com] for a year and a bit now, and I don't charge. Maybe if I start charging, I'd get Slashdotted too? Hmph.
    ---
  • Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net], Grumpy Watkins [uklinux.net],

Slashdot Top Deals

"Your stupidity, Allen, is simply not up to par." -- Dave Mack (mack@inco.UUCP) "Yours is." -- Allen Gwinn (allen@sulaco.sigma.com), in alt.flame

Close