My boss has got himself in hot water on twitter. This isn't anything new, but it is pretty frustrating
There's a huge backlash happening from people who are blowing up over what is effectively "I don't like the idea of paying for content creators to drive up fake engagement, so i'm just going to accept this is what the landscape looks like now and accept we won't have youtube coverage going forward"
Still, he did also dismiss the efforts of people who made content for free, and that was a dick move. It's very ungrateful for people who did put passion into making content about the game for effectively just a steam key on the company's part
Firstly, I want to get something straight, the money being asked for is $18,000 for a 20 minute video. This isn't chump change, it's more money than a whole booth and logistics at a games show like Gamescom.
Secondly, A common response here is that content creators are doing a job, and yeah, they are, that's why there's patreon revenue, ad revenue, twitch subscriptions, merch etc etc etc
Taking half an employee's annual salary for a video is not upkeeping a creator's cost of living, it's an ad, and that's not what we want, not what the company does. If you're asking that kind of money before you even boot a game then even your best shot at an unbiased take will be disingenious, because paid promo and honest criticism do not mix, you only have to look at the Kane & Lynch/Gamespot debacle from a decade ago to see that. It's literally the reason that the website Giant Bomb exists. It's the reason for the "IGN 9/10" meme.
Ultimately, it just stinks. Mike has communicated things badly, but if content creators have to be paid influencers to survive in todays industry, fine, that's the landscape, but he's not willing to pay half the annual salary of a QA to get a 20 minute advert pretending to be genuine praise of a game.
What I find interesting about all of this, is if 18k is the going rate for this kind of coverage, how many publishers and developers are already paying for it?
This is also kind of funny, in light of those "here's what you can do, to help get coverage from streamers" threads you see every once in a while, when there's another wave of outrage about the impossibility of getting attention for your work. On one hand, you're being told that you have to write your message in a very meticulous way and then actually the most reliable way to get coverage is to attach an amount of money to said message that's more than what I get from the welfare office for an entire year.
Sure, get paid for your work. But paid coverage makes things even worse for smaller game creators and it also makes it worse for smaller streamers, who have not the audience and reach to demand these sums, but are pressured into also playing this type of game.
And that doesn't even mention the part of how well the audience is going to be informed about the fact that the video is essentially a commercial and all that.
I wish that just once, videogames would not try to make things worse for those that exist on its margins, you know?
