Does everyone just think they can make a living playing games? Trying to search for Diablo 4 info gets you nothing but mountains of useless clickbait youtube videos. Gotta waste my time jumping thru the video just to find out the guy is dumber about the game than I am.
Like I get it, YouTube is the only place you can monetize your “game knowledge”, but still… Why are there are only like two sites with build guides and info? And those two sites don’t even have community builds, its just a couple guides written by some l33t dude we are suppose to trust. Why is there no useful discussion forums, discords, or at least something not in video format? If people care about becoming gaming influencers so much why can’t we at least come out with a new monetization platform that doesn’t suck and has a dislike button.
Anyone else sharing my rage?
I wouldn’t lump this in with the whole “enshitification” issue.
This is the end result of gamers not placing any value on the content they consume. People want free content, regardless of quality, over anything else.
So, as you would expect, what you are seeing is free content, regardless of quality, being created en masse.
It really is though. Remember back when we just had gamefaqs guides? Or actual game wikis that weren’t plastered with ads?
It’s especially apparent in the japanese gamersphere. There used to be great (grassroots) wikis for basically every Japanese game, now they’re all run by e.g. game8 and their clones.
Enshittification really does mean something quite specific and is not just a word meaning “things aren’t very good anymore.”
If you haven’t read Cory Doctorow’s essay that coined the term, definitely do. It’s a modern classic.
I mean I would argue it’s related, the reason behind it is $$$. Corporate interests have homogenized content and de-normalized diversity and community.
People who use to just post their excel sheets and research on some bb forum for free somewhere starting getting paid by icy veins or maxroll. Overtime they establish a monopoly on the content and can do whatever the hell they want.
Why make a platform that depends on the community and you get the ad views when you can adopt a business strategy that also gets you youtube and social media views while eliminating your competition.
And the youtube trend is just people trying to emulate the handful of people who managed to make it big off the twitch/youtube bag.
People who use to just post their excel sheets and research on some bb forum for free somewhere starting getting paid by icy veins or maxroll.
Maybe your expectation that people should do all that work to free is unrealistic and just a sign of your own entitlement issues?
Rofl, it’s a hobby, you do it for fun, you shouldn’t need to get paid. I also play tennis as a hobby and I love to talk to people about it without charging them money believe it or not. The fetishization with internet fame, views, and money is making gaming weird.
I mean back when I was more into gaming I would contribute. I didn’t expect money, I just did it because it was fun. I feel like there’s a big disconnect between the current generation and my generation that wrote 300 page guides on gamefaqs for the hell of it rofl.
It’s a video game, it’s meant to be fun. If you don’t enjoy writing guides then don’t write them but don’t cry that no one wants to pay you for it.
People have been doing exactly that for decades, ever since video games (or learning in general) have been a thing. Nintendo’s tipline in the 80s was free. Here is an in-depth guide to every version of tetris, complete with ascii diagrams and user-submitted cheats, released less than a year and a half after the gameboy version came out, when the internet was still a mess of rabbit holes. It’s far from new.
Both of those attracted helpers primarily or entirely for the love of the thing itself. 99.9% of communities for any topic are the same way, and one would be horrified to find out the kinds of things that people get up to in knitting circles. Insinuating it’s wrong to expect help to be both useful and accessible runs counter to human nature.
Frankly, when we’re talking about YouTube, it’s also weird. The watcher doesn’t pay either platform. An uploader running two ads on a video with a million views makes $180, and that’s if none of them is running an ad blocker (they are). Scrolling through the top Hades videos, the only ones with views that really broke more than the low thousands were the official trailers. No one is so much as buying chicken nuggets off that game unless they are the company that made the game.
From someone who jumped from Hades all the way back to trying to beat Suikoden Tactics, god fucking bless passionate text forums in general and gamefaqs specifically. I would not have have bothered with an obvious clickbait ““boss exploit”” video, but the information that there was one spread like wildfire among fans in paragraphs of nuanced Q&As. For free. Because people needed to talk about the game with each other, which they are still doing on Lemmy for free too.
Nor do I have the will to sit through what would be actual irl hours of letsplays to figure out the ancient coin is on the third floor of Obel, buried in the right-hand rubble next to the exit. Sometimes, often even, you just want the damn answer.
Conversely, not every aspect of society needs to be monetized and capitalized.
There existed a time when players made guides because they were passionate about the game, not because they were trying to hit engagement metrics or ad revenue breakpoints. The website GameFAQs, for example, holds thousands of user created guides, and many of them are extremely high quality.
Obviously this is not to say that we should expect all creators to work for free, especially if they’re trying to make a career of it, but there’s decades of precedent for passion-driven user created content and I don’t think it’s right to label it as entitlement when talking about the loss of those elements in a shift towards icy veins/maxroll paid guides.
It seems to be the combination of two things: Diablo is now truly a mass market product, not just a gamer’s delight. Games now make more money than movies. The audience to be reached is enormous and attracts the eye of infotainment professionals, and no longer just people who are really into the game and decide to maybe try a guide. These people start with the cheap content machine first and Diablo is just the topic du jour. after a while they will be on to something else.
All this points at the second topic, which is the way paid creator video platforms have evolved. There’s now significant commercial opportunity and competition is fierce. No longer does the deeper guide win but rather the one that games the algo most, appeals to the broadest audience most, and has the most production value (money) behind it.
I suspect there is actually more high quality game guide content than ever, but you aren’t going to find it with just a “Diablo” search because there is an enormous pile of cheap crap on top of it.
Yes, crappy advice on websites like gamesvideodiablo.com are at the top of search results somehow. Luckily established sites like maxroll and icy-veins are out there. You still have to watch who submitted stuff. Feel sorry for anyone that has to wade through the gamesgamerhintsnews.com sites.
The number of articles out about the latest and greatest game updates from a few hours ago which are rehashing patches released a week or more ago drive me nuts. How many times do I have to wade through multiple screens of preamble to find out that content is being recycled from week old news.
But yes, the ratio of low signal to high signal content is crazy in general. I get that people have to make a living and want to do it via communicating on YouTube/articles/… but I feel we’ve really lost access to high quality content. ChatGPT and other LLMs are going to make this wayyyyyyy worse.
Content recommendation algorithms push for length and frequency, which inevitably means meeting the quantity bar is more important than quality. Meanwhile we have really thought out high quality content buried in a mountain of clickbait and those creators both don’t get as good monetization or exposure. It’s a sad system :(. I want to see more ErrantSignal quality bar and less clickbait please.
You Won’t Believe These Top 10 Reasons Why Diablo IV Content Consumers Perpetuate Clickbait, Especially Number 9
😉
I just kick all clickbaity channels off of my YouTube feed. If this ends up in YouTube not showing me any Diablo IV stuff on my feed, so be it.
yea its pretty nuts how EVERYDAY there is a new BEST MOST BROKEN build guide. Even when the same content creator made a similar one for the same class like a day or two ago lol
Saw a clickbait with something like “<person I’ve never heard of> SHARES SECRET HACKS TO REROLL AND UPGRADE YOUR GEAR STATS”, the secret was to upgrade your gear and to reroll an attribute 😹 kinda died.
My favorite is the videos that are titled “HOW TO GET THE BEST LEGENDARIES FAST!!!” Then the content is basically 12 minutes of stretching out the statement “just play the game a lot.”
