Racketboy

Websites like Digg, Reddit, and Newsvine have led the way in mainstream social news and are great resources for keeping up to date on the big topics of the day. However, these big sites don’t seem to be very useful for gaming-obsessed users like myself. N4G (News 4 Gamers) is attempting to move into this space and cater to the gaming market. In theory, this sounds like a great idea, but after a brief experience with the site, it doesn’t seem to have any advantage over Digg or the larger gaming sites such as IGN.

The gaming industry is full of niches to match the various gaming tastes of the population. I’m obviously aware of this fact due to the very-specific type of gamers that frequent racketboy.com. And those that have been around the site long enough know what I’m talking about as well. Even withing the whole “retro” genre (which N4G doesn’t even have a section for), there are many different sub-cultures. There are extra-old-school gamers (those into Atari, Colecovision, and other pre-NES gaming), pure Arcade geeks, and more “neo-retro” gamers like myself who are into the more recent old-school generations.

N4G does have some advantages over Digg’s gaming section because it does have some divisions that you can browse if you are only interest in a particular (newer) platform. However, I find that N4G is a good example of why social news websites are most powerful for a broader selection of topics. Once you get down to the narrower topics such as specific gaming tastes, you need some real human connection when choosing topics of interest in order to keep the attention of today’s experienced gamer.

To illustrate how the gaming media and and how our informational tastes have changed over the years, lets take a look back at how gaming sites evolved and made a progression towards catering to niches…

Back in the earlier days of the Web, we had a few large gaming sites that served as some of the only solid resources for gaming news and information. Sites like Gamespot, Gamespy, and Happy Puppy (RIP) built up a large audience by covering the basic happenings of the industry. For most of us, this was all fine and good since the only other source of gaming infomation were magazines like Nintendo Power and GamePro.

Because of the large head start and corporate backing these large sites had, some of them still remain as a heavy traffic center, but loose a lot of relevance and focus due to their size. Flashy ads take up most of the pages and no real personality can be found. These sites may have been fine for the average teenage gamer, but those that had already educated themselves with the essentials started looking elsewhere for more depth.

In the late 1990’s the ability to publish your own home-grown website helped a lot of specialized fan sites to pop up to cater to similar fans of a certain console, genre, or a particular game. These sites started to focus more on the niches that were important to individual gamers, but it wasn’t until forums (which were trickier to set up) started sprouting up that the social aspect of Internet gaming media started to take off. My personal classic gaming growth originated primarily at SegaXtreme where I was an active member of the message board there. In places like SX, gamers were able to share ideas and work on projects to help each other enhance gaming experiences.

Unfortunately, with many of these fan sites, the owners of the site eventually lost interest and let the site die a slow death, only to be visited by people finding them with obscure Google searches.

Fast forward to the mid 2000’s and the rise of blogging. Publishing independent content became dramatically easier with software such as Blogger and Wordpress. Group blogs like Joystiq, Kotaku, and Destructoid popped up to emulate the informational functionality of the larger gaming sites while being more straightforward, having more personality in the writing, and community-building via comment systems. Smaller blogs like this one also emerged to fill in the gaps of specific niches and gaming lifestyles in a way that the larger sites couldn’t dream of matching.

Now, lets take a look at a gaming social news site like N4G. They cover essentially the same stories as a Joystiq or Kotuku, but without the consistent style and personality. It has a comment system, but the readers won’t quite have the same community bond that a smaller blog would have. And of course, like I mentioned above, the niche topics that are important to experienced gamers won’t surface on a social news site. And was is actually most disappointing is that they fall short of the large megasites like Gamespot because of their lack of organization.

For these reasons, I don’t see a site like N4G really taking off. I’m sure some people might feel at home there or enjoy the novelty of the system, but I won’t be recommending the service to anyone. If you feel differently, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Disclaimer: This post is a paid review for N4G via ReviewMe.com that helps me pay for my hosting costs and outsourced programming help for site upgrades.