IGN: 'The Waters Are Calm'Since the news broke last week about several well-known editors leaving their web sites to join Vox Media in forming a new site to cover the game industry, speculation has been buzzing. Fuel was added to the fire as Chris Grant made it clear they would be hiring away more people this year as their site (still in the works) plans to expand. How will this affect existing sites that cover the game industry? What's going to happen in 2012 to games journalism? IndustryGamers spoke with Peer Schneider, Senior Vice President of Content Publishing at IGN Entertainment, to get the perspective of the largest game site in the industry.
IndustryGamers: The traditional video game business just closed its third straight year of declining sales at retail, yet mobile, social, and digital revenues are booming. Are these changes going to affect games journalism? How is IGN responding to these changes in the game industry?
Peer Schneider: For us, the metric that matters the most is whether more people are playing games now than in the past -- and that's clearly the case. Aside from the "traditional" games sold at retail that we know and love, digital, mobile, free-to-play, and social games all represent opportunities of growth for us. It's challenging, because when it comes to attracting a mass audience on games media properties, what works for, say, Arkham City, may not work for a major social game or an iOS game -- or even Minecraft, for that matter. But it's also tremendously exciting as it forces us to experiment and try new things.
One example of how it affects game coverage in our realm is that we're paying more attention to titles that fall outside the old news/preview/review cycle. Take League of Legends. The game has evolved a ton since it first debuted, but we all wrote one review of the game back in 2009. That's hardly meaningful content for potential new players, nor does it address the needs of all those who are already enjoying the game. So we've shifted gears and started to experiment with new content and initiatives.
The IGN Pro League is an example of such an experiment, as are new video shows dedicated to digital content, daily app store updates, more post-release content, a bigger emphasis on integrating voices from our community, or even initiatives like our Indie Open House program. Games coverage is no longer just about writing previews, reviews and digging up interesting news, it's about coming up with great content and tools that support and engage the various – and often very different – game playing audiences.
IG: There have been a lot of changes in games journalism in 2011: Future losing money and shuffling execs, GamePro shutting down, many editors leaving from various companies. Will this continue in 2012? Why?
PS: If you compared it to other verticals, I think the waters in games journalism are actually pretty calm. I also think what's going on at print-focused media companies is a little different. Will we continue to see movement like this in 2012? Sure. We're working in a pretty young industry. As it matures and the gameplaying audience continues to grow, you'll see companies shifting their focus and new businesses popping up. That means opportunities to try something new and different for budding games journalists. Some editors may switch companies for the opposite reason, because they love playing and reviewing a certain type of game and want to keep doing it. Then there are journalists who started writing about games in the '90s when they were 18, now have families and are looking for different roles. Some of our former editors, for example, are working at prominent game developers and now give us crap about review scores.
IG: How does IGN see the state of game journalism? Is everything fine or do some things need to change?
PS: It depends on what you're talking about. If you're talking about the "mechanics" of journalism – sourcing, research, disclosure, separation of church and state, and so on, I think gaming-focused properties are actually ahead of other media covering entertainment and reviewing product. But there's always room for improvement.
Games journalism has certainly changed a lot in the last decade, and it'll continue to change and evolve. Our mantra from the get-go has been to inform and entertain. We're pretty comfortable with that approach, but that may not be right for every games media site. Last year, we hired a long-time games journalist, Colin Campbell, formerly of Edge and Gamasutra, to head up news coverage at IGN – but we also create lots of content that's strictly there to entertain, start discussions, and highlight gaming culture.
IG: In a recent interview with us Chris Grant, former editor-in-chief of Joystiq, claimed that IGN's platform from an editor's perspective was "a hodgepodge of different services, different platforms, and different technology that are all sort of glued together to make something." Is that a fair description of your site? Are you planning to make changes at IGN for the coming year?
PS: There are components in our CMS that are 10 years old. Back then, the only way to create a customized network like ours that could scale to an audience size of more than 40 million users was to build the tools yourself. It was one CMS supporting all the different use cases, including articles, games and entertainment dbs, video, images, forum management, and so on. It's a very different time now. Instead of creating a new mega CMS from scratch and trying to squeeze our site into it, we've been tackling our biggest use cases separately. When it's done, the experience will be seamless for our editorial staff, but the technology behind the components will be tailored towards the content type. A video is not like a wiki. But they're both major components of IGN's future.
IG: Does IGN feel there's an opportunity to grow their audience in 2012, and if so how does IGN plan to do that?
PS: We believe that gaming will continue on its course to becoming true mainstream entertainment, like music and sports. The IGN Entertainment network of sites already reaches one in four 18-34-year-old males online – but there’s still room for games media to grow, and we hope to be a big part of it.
We see our core website as the anchor to help the cause of getting there – but it's just one tool of many. Video continues to be our top priority. Our main YouTube channel already has a larger audience than the three biggest gaming blogs combined. We were truly surprised by the growth ourselves. We thought publishing video content on YouTube would cannibalize the video views on our own site, but we effectively doubled the video-viewing audience for our network. More people watch our video tips show, IGN_Strategize, on Xbox Live than on the web. Our IGN Facebook posts often have as many comments as the articles on our site. There are plenty of opportunities for audience growth as long as we can figure out the right content for the right user and build a scalable way of getting it to them.
