Vox Media's Video Game Website: Another GameTap In The Making?Vox Media raised eyebrows this week with the announcement that it plans to launch a video game focused website to stand alongside The Verge and SB Nation.
What’s especially interesting is the talent the company assembled, a veritable who’s who of video game journalists, including Chris Grant and Brian Crecente, former EICs of Joystiq and Kotaku, respectively.
That said, it’s no surprise these new hires and the gaming community are already thinking big.
In a recent post, Chris Grant says he approached members of Vox with the goal of hiring a “supergroup”, while Crecente describes this new site as “the next big thing.”
Video game blogger John Nieves even went as far as to coin a new name for the tandem, “Chriscente” on Twitter.
Now consider the other journalists, Griffin and Justin McElroy (Joystiq), Arthur Gies (Rebel FM), Russ Pitts (The Escapist), Chris Plante (UGO) and Russ Frushtick (MTV). On paper, it would appear Vox formed a dream team.
Not so fast.
“There is an abundance of competition in game journalism now... it's a bleak, tough world for new sites.” - Doug Perry
“Media is a tough business these days,” said games writer Dana Jongewaard. “Most media business models are based on the number of visitors/subscribers, which means there's been an impact on most media companies' bottom lines, and the Vox Media crew will face those same challenges. It's not enough anymore to just make great content and trust that readers will come. Most journalists these days also have to figure out how to market their own content too.”
Jongewaard, a former Official PlayStation Magazine editor, speaks from experience. In 2007, she was part of a similar dream team at GameTap, a gaming service that chose to launch an editorial component, and did so by plucking talented writers from various publications. The list also included GameSpot news editor Curt Feldman, GamePro editor Wes Nihei and longtime IGN editor Doug Perry, who served as GameTap’s editorial director.
“Our team,” said Perry, now editorial director of Metacafe, “was part of a bigger organization, Turner Broadcasting, and our goal was to create content that lived on its own, but was also curated to focus on classic games, such as those found in the GameTap library. Our editorial challenges were multifold, from really basic things like explaining to the executives at Turner, a traditional TV and movie company, the importance of SEO, to making the transition ourselves to a more fluid social media and video-driven editorial landscape. In general, we should have adapted more quickly and with greater ambition to the emerging popularity of social media and video.”
Unfortunately, GameTap’s venture did not last a year, as it laid off its newly hired staff in mid June 2008.
“Turner lured us in with its deep pockets and commitment to the game industry,” said Perry, “but GameTap was a gaming service before it was an editorial product. It was doing OK as a product (though it paled in comparison to say, Steam), but game sales, which were centralized into Turner's bigger corporate team, were never realized in a profitable way. That, and sales at Cartoon Network, which was the number one kid's network in 2005, slipped significantly in 2008. Its decreased sales, which preceded the recession, damaged GameTap's prospects, too.”
This ultimately played a huge role in the company’s editorial aspirations.
“Turner's honchos probably had an escape plan if GameTap didn't increase its profits at some point,” said Perry. “When GameTap didn't show promising ad sales, didn't show profit in its core business, coupled with overall poor sales at Cartoon Network, Turner decided to consider selling it to Metaboli. In spring 2008, Turner let go the marketing, video and editorial teams (and others), paring it down to a minimally functioning site. In September of that year, Turner completed the sale of GameTap to Metaboli.”
“From my perspective, the big challenge that we faced, and didn't overcome,” said Jongewaard, “was that GameTap itself existed as a standalone client, while the editorial content lived on a website. There wasn't a great way to connect the two, which meant that a large part of the built-in GameTap audience may never have even known that there was an editorial component.
Thankfully, she doesn’t see the journalists at Vox running into this problem.
“GameTap was a gaming service that was attempting to implement an editorial component, while Vox is an existing editorial site that's branching out into a new area of coverage. It's a pretty substantial difference. A media business model is very different from a game service business model, so the existing Vox team (presumably) already has a system in place that allows them to make money from an editorial system.”
That said, it remains to be seen whether Grant and Crecente, former rivals in the blogging space with different approaches to coverage and editorial, will be able to coexist. Instead of hiring one superstar and then building a solid core around this person, Vox essentially hired at least three former EICs, leaving us to wonder who will be in charge of giving orders, creating the site’s editorial focus and dealing with conflicts that may arise.
It’s something Grant addressed in a recent IndustryGamers interview.
“I’m sure we’ll butt heads, I kind of hope we’ll butt heads on some things. It’s not about disagreeing, it’s about being respectful. I think each of us has enough to teach the others that everyone is really excited to get started and see what we can learn, what we could do together that we could not have done separately.”
On that note, which writer(s) do the heavy lifting? Ultimately, new websites need to post as many articles as possible on a daily basis to satisfy the demanding 24/7 news cycle. Can they transition from being managers to full time writers? Perhaps they won’t, considering Vox still has plans to hire additional employees.
Said Grant, “The initial worry from everybody was ‘Sounds like a lot of chefs in the kitchen.’ Somebody told me ‘There’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen,’ and I said, They’re not cooks, they’re chefs! It’s even worse.”
Jongewaard doesn’t appear worried.
“I think it's great. There's been a lot of consolidation and closure over recent years, so any time there's a new voice added to the landscape, I think it's a positive thing for the health of games media.”
Perry, however, sees many challenges ahead.
“For any new team today, especially guys like Crecente and Grant, I would expect them to intimately know how to manage social media aspects of their jobs, using their skills at previous blogs to corral their Twitter followers to transition to the new site. If I were them, I would pay game-savvy and talented programmers to research and build a robust and scalable CMS, too, something we didn't have at GameTap (OK, ours was depressingly primitive). Or, more cheaply, customize the heck out of Tumblr or WordPress.”
This reliance on social media, Perry feels, is essential to building a strong brand.
“There is an abundance of competition in game journalism now, and with sites like AOL dropping their freelancers and then turning around and asking them to work for free (or for peanuts), along with the proliferation of not just American, but worldwide blogs and YouTube channels, it's a bleak, tough world for new sites.”
“Sites today,” he continued, “can't just build trust-worthy editorial, which is crucial (see GiantBomb for a great success story); they also need to reach out to an audience on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter, for starters, and drink beers or Rockstar or lemonade with their fans at PAX.”
Ultimately, how the team deals with this heavily depends on the type of website they want to create.
“If it's an industry news site, there are some standard items I would put on my checklist: it had better break lots of news stories, digging beyond the standard PR release and asking questions that irritate PR people, because if they're upset, you know you're doing your job.”
“If it's a culture site,” continued Perry, “it had better include lots of video, dive deep into social media and be as transparent toward and inclusive of its fan base as possible (like Bitmob). Also, it's pretty clear that one needs a dedicated channel on YouTube (and dare I say Metacafe) to expand traffic beyond one's own site, as Google search has more or less replaced the days of bookmarking. If you look at YouTube, Machinima and IGN dominate YouTube's game searches, and they make money from it. Machinima is an extreme example of that YouTube success.”
In addition, “thinking up a smart approach to covering mobile and social games is one of the tougher areas to tackle, but it also is one of the bigger opportunities for new media to explore.
On that note, we look forward to seeing what Grant and his team have in store for gamers in 2012, and more importantly, whether this new and mysterious site can succeed at all.
