Gaming irks

[Brad]

Bring back cartridges

[phillv85]

I pretty much exclusively play short games. I pushed the boat out recently and played Necromunda: Hired Gun which is about 10 hours long. I played all 12 minutes of The Terminator on Mega Drive the other day and was satisfied when done.

[Cassius_Smoke]

Parts of games were you are captured, lose all your equipment and have to escape/survive with just stealth.

[kryss]

Parts of games were you are captured, lose all your equipment and have to escape/survive with just stealth.

So every Far Cry game?

[Brad]

Quit Game

All progress since last save will be lost. Are you sure?

And absolutely no idea when the game last saved.

[Neon Ignition]

Eurogamer Premium
Whilst I don't have an issue per se with them introducing a subscription service to monetise the site (as much as that usually feels like it's heralding the beginning of the end) I immediately get the sense the reader experience will be ruined soon. It's like a pre-emptive irk, if they make changes to properly handle it sure but clicking on the front page on my phone immediately sees news stories bumped because of the red labelled Premium content articles which basically means the site can quickly become less user friendly. I get it... but it's still a dark omen. DF does gods work but Eurogamer largely copy and pastes news updates from Era so I guess it's clear where this road ends.

[Mayhem]

Plus they removed the forums recently, so I wonder if they will only be there for subscribers.

[Asura]

Eurogamer Premium
Whilst I don't have an issue per se with them introducing a subscription service to monetise the site (as much as that usually feels like it's heralding the beginning of the end) I immediately get the sense the reader experience will be ruined soon. It's like a pre-emptive irk, if they make changes to properly handle it sure but clicking on the front page on my phone immediately sees news stories bumped because of the red labelled Premium content articles which basically means the site can quickly become less user friendly. I get it... but it's still a dark omen. DF does gods work but Eurogamer largely copy and pastes news updates from Era so I guess it's clear where this road ends.

Maybe... But at the same time, with the way many websites are these days, crammed full to the gunwhales with ads, soft popups and the like, I hope more sites start to do this instead...

... but opposing that, £6 per month is quite a bit for what they actually offer. I wonder how many people will pay? Part of me wonders if more of these sites should pitch it at something like £1 per month; I think they'd get a lot more subs.

[wakka]

£3.99 per month is the base price for ad free, which I think is fine. It’s what you’d pay for a magazine, and in a month of Eurogamer you’re getting more than a magazine issue’s worth of content.

I think the problem with £1 per month is that you have to work on the basis that 99% of users won’t ever pay a penny. But the 1% who are willing to pay something, you can probably tap up for more than a pound.

[MartyG]

Maybe... But at the same time, with the way many websites are these days, crammed full to the gunwhales with ads, soft popups and the like, I hope more sites start to do this instead...

... but opposing that, £6 per month is quite a bit for what they actually offer. I wonder how many people will pay? Part of me wonders if more of these sites should pitch it at something like £1 per month; I think they'd get a lot more subs.

Ten sites do this that you read, that's then £60 a month. If there was an aggregated package for £6 shared by the participants then maybe. Paywalling websites has only worked for a very select few - maybe they'd have been better with a separate patreon with some extras, rather than slicing off content (although I haven't actually looked to see what content they are paywalling).

The trouble with gaming content is there are hundreds of sites doing it, so unless your content is king, people will just go elsewhere, especially if that content was previous available on the other side of the screen.

Edit - okay, so not content screened no ads but early podcast access? So podcasts will now be two weeks old when available to all and any news content well out of date two weeks later. Linus Tech Tips gave up doing earlier access to their content via their Floatplane platform ahead of YouTube, they're probably in a better position to be doing that.

Given it's owned by Reed who own a few different magazines, an aggregate package of their different sites would make this more appealing - but given the ease of ad blocking anyway, there's not really much to encourage people to pay up. That £4 is probably more per person per month than they get from ad impressions I'd imagine.

[Asura]

£3.99 per month is the base price for ad free, which I think is fine. It’s what you’d pay for a magazine, and in a month of Eurogamer you’re getting more than a magazine issue’s worth of content.

I think the problem with £1 per month is that you have to work on the basis that 99% of users won’t ever pay a penny. But the 1% who are willing to pay something, you can probably tap up for more than a pound.

Hmmm, fair.

I need to look at what they're offering; it depends on the quality of content.

I follow a number of places via RSS and you can see, so much of their material is just PR that's rephrased with a bit of a spin on it. I would need a lot more than that.

[wakka]

They're not great for news. Slow and a lot of stories are lifted from press releases or Era/Gaf. Likewise their articles, usually on the weekend, from 'contributors' are generally not good.

It's the editorial stuff from the core team - Christian Donlan and Martin Robinson in particular - that I enjoy. Their reviews and features are always well written and tend to have an interesting perspective. You can tell they're passionate and also very knowledgeable.

As a whole the site's output is a mixed bag, but I do think we've all gotten too used to journalism and writing being free of charge. So I don't have an issue with them trying this out. It's kind of like a Patreon really. A way of giving them some support and then receiving a few little bonuses on top.

They are the website that reminds me most of the games mags I grew up reading, so I like that about them too.

[MartyG]

I think I'd question it being free of charge - the sites have been ad and sponsor supported, so it's never really been free as such. Even back in the magazine days, much of it what advertisement supported even with the cover charge.

It does make introducing a priced tier to content that was perceived as being free more difficult tho, for sure.

[wakka]

But as you point out, magazines and newspapers have adverts in them anyway. We used to pay a fee on top of that, but now we don't.

[Neon Ignition]

The biggest issue really is how one false move will lead to them losing audience share and that lost userbase won't return. The internet is just too big and too open with too many workarounds. Literally anything of interest gets posted on Premium and it'll be out in the wilds and being discussed within minutes.

The other issue is that whilst what they're doing is much like a magazine, magazines themselves are on deaths door. It's effectively them mirroring a dead medium that they themselves replaced. When people are already being pulled pillar to post on subs for things that I imagine are valued by their audience much more it'll be interesting if we ever find out if they gains through the no doubt small sub numbers outweigh the potential audience losses.