GameSpot: 'We're Seeing A Big Shift'During the hubbub of CES we managed to catch up with John Davison, Vice President, Programming - Games & Metacritic at CBS Interactive. We talked about GameSpot and his thoughts on games journalism in 2012 and beyond, in part 1 of this lengthy interview.
IndustryGamers: A lot of things have been happening in games journalism the last year, with Future shuffling execs, and now Vox Media starting a new site - is this connected to changes in the game industry?
John Davison: I think it's symptomatic of a whole bunch of stuff that''s all happening at once, it's all interconnected. It's audience in general, it is games business and media. I think what Vox was very smart about was that they found a group of people that had very strong personal brands and I think media brands have been waking up at different speeds to the importance of establishing their reporters as personalities. I think if you look at it that way, and look at who they've got, I think that gamers know who they are. I think that's a big part of why everyone's reacted the way they have. It's a bunch of big names. It's a bunch of people that you've heard of, and I think what it shows is that the change in the media space is that readers don't respond to monolithic brands anymore, they want to talk to people. It's more important than ever for reporters to have a personal brand that exists within the larger one. We're thinking about it a lot and we've been doing a lot over the last year to push our editors out there.
We're seeing a huge shift in behavior towards the way people consume content in general. At E3 last year we saw a 40% increase in video views, we also saw a decrease in page views, so there was a consumption shift. Also in the time of day, we're seeing that people that are really into games, people are opening a livestream, and putting it in a tab in their browser window, and they'll listen to it while they're doing work. If they're really into games they want to consume it as it happens, they want to participate when they can, they want to be able to move in and out of it. So it's very different from print. Buying a print magazine is implicit loyalty. I have chosen you to tell me about this thing I care about. Whereas online it's “I really want to know what's going on with Skyrim, Google please tell me or YouTube please tell me. Who's got the best stuff? I don't know who, I just want cool stuff. Or I've heard that there's this specific thing in this game and I want to know more about that, how do I find that? So the discovery patterns have changed, the way that we serve things up have changed; I think we're seeing a big shift in consumption behavior and delivery behavior and it's healthy. You can't keep plodding along the way that you used to, and you can't just make a magazine and put it on the web. You've got to start a conversation, you've got to be focusing on what people are going to want to talk about.
IG: So it's time for rethinking. Are you planning to be in a constant state of revision? Do you have a master plan?
JD: In the last three or four months we've been through this period of experimenting a lot. Let's see where the viewer's tolerance is for types of content. How much opinion do they want? Getting the balance of information and entertainment, frankly. We've done a lot of experiments like building original video programming that is not about a game, it just uses a game as a hook. What is it that the audience is really looking for? Around the launch of Battlefield 3 we launched a reality show called The Controller that was an 8-part - it was a partnership with us and EA and with Bunim/Murray (they do Project Runway and Real World). It was a big production and it was about Battlefield 3, essentially, Battlefield 3 was the hook, it wasn't the subject. It was a way of illustrating that these games can inspire so much more than us just telling you it's got this many maps, and this is how you do this. I think gamers are, particularly the really passionate guys, they're discovering a lot of the fundamentals on their own or between themselves, so I think the media's job is to enrich that now rather than simply to deliver.
The thing I'm banging on with my guys is that the commodity business is just dead. Just slinging screen shots and trailers, it's boring, and it's not doing anyone any favors. We need to be able to interpret and illustrate why this is either a part of something larger that's happening, or it's indicative of a certain way of thinking. It's an interesting time to be experimenting right now because the readers, their appetite is more voracious than ever. They're also very focused in a way that they haven't been for a long time. We've always talked about games as being either hard-core or casual - there's that sort of weird, enigmatic middle ground that no one could define, that people would keep coming up with different words for. We're also seeing there's this sort of super behavior that sits on top around a certain number of games. That list is maybe half a dozen titles and it shifts maybe every 12 to 18 months; lately it's been Call of Duty, Halo, World of Warcraft, Starcraft, MineCraft, League of Legends. This year, that list is likely to morph into Diablo III being in there, maybe DOTA 2 being on that list. Where the audience appetite is constant, where it's like they just can't consume enough. They may not even self-identify as gamers, but they do self-identify as “I play WoW.” I think there's a new need there as well, and again, it's about enriching their overall love of the experience with stuff. We have to leverage the access that we have, and the expertise that we have to be able to give them what they really need.
IG: How do you review a game like League of Legends that's constantly changing?
JD: We can't just sit in a room with four or five us and go “How are we gonna do this?” We've got to go to the audience and say “You guys, there's millions of you and you're super passionate, we want to be able to provide coverage, do you even need us to review it? What do you need from us?” I think that we have that opportunity, now more than ever, for the media to be a conversation with the readers. That's how I think all of us will be adapting over this year certainly and moving forward. There is a huge opportunity around this game, that maybe the way that we used to bucket content is not what the audience necessarily needs any more.
IG: It means you have to look at everything, you can't just assume anything.
JD: You need to be able to identify when maybe you walk away from some stuff as much as you plunge all the way in. There are some things where the reader says, “Yeah I totally get it, you don't need to tell me.”
IG: You only have a certain amount of resource, and creating video is a lot more resource intensive than just one guy writing something.
JD: Also understanding the right media for the right message. We have more than just words and videos, we have tweets, we have Google +, we have Google Hangouts, we have livestreaming. So now when we're looking at an opportunity to talk about a game, what's the best use of our time, what's the best use of our audience's time, to get the message out about this. There are some things where previously we might have just been going through this grind where, we're just going to preview everything and then review everything, but maybe the best way, for some games, is we're going to livestream it for an hour, and have a couple of editors talk about it while they're playing it. Because you may be familiar with a lot of what's going on, but you just need the conversation. We can engage the audience in communication during the livestream so there's a real community bond. And then we can publish that video either in its entirety on-demand, or we can carve it up into the more poignant moments.
One of the great things about doing live video is that you get multiple hits off the same effort. We had a great example just before Skyrim came out. It was either the day it came out or the day before it came out, we had code, we did a 12-hour livestream of it, and we let the audience direct it. At that point, I don't think anyone that had been playing it pre-release had seen that you could get married. So someone in the audience, in the live chat, who's been saying “I heard you can get married. Can you go find out how to do that?" For the next hour or so of the livestream, that's what the guys did. We had a guy in the background who was Googling, and calling people, and talking to the heads of studios and saying “You need to go here, you need to get this amulet from this dude, and you need to go do this.” They played the game, they went and got married in the game, and the guy that triggered that, his relationship with GameSpot and the editors of GameSpot was changed forever by that. Because he shaped the entire direction that this went, we were able to start talking about something that no one had really talked about in the game up until that point. It's a very different way from the old way, which was I'm up on the mountain and I'm going to tell you what's important.
