How Gaming Sites Earn Money By Wasting Your Time

Remember the days of browsing IGN or GameSpot for all the latest video game news? Or maybe a well-written review of that new Kane and Lynch game you saw an advert for? Well, the only ads we get nowadays are for articles on gaming sites whose sole purpose is to show you even more ads. Ever notice after you've been browsing nexus mods for the latest of Skyrim's skimpy armour sets, or maybe just checking to see if someone made The Outer Worlds a good game yet, you swipe over to your Google newsfeed and get barraged with headlines like: "Reddit user finds amulet of Talos with op enchantment" or "Skyrim players are only just realising becoming the Dragonborn was foreshadowed from the start" …what?! You mean it wasn't just in the fucking announcement trailer? 

So, what sickeningly shite sites like thegamer.com are doing is trawling Reddit fan communities and writing whole articles recounting the exact same story that a random Reddit user posted on their professional journalist website. I get it, Reddit has become the place to be and views are dwindling because people don't see as much need in visiting these kinds of sites but Jesus, have some basic level of integrity. What’s more, you know this is incredibly lucrative. Their business model is getting clicks through highly targeted ads based on your search history. Once you've clicked, they've earned their money, at the expense of your time. 

Case in point: I recently checked to see if there were any updates for the Age of Empires III Improvement Mod, which can only be played on the classic version of the game. This mod is huge, it changes basically everything about the game for the better, but the main reason I'd play it over the so-called definitive edition is the improvements to AI, something which we should have fully expected from Microsoft when they re-released the entire series with nothing more than a slight graphical upgrade and some new empires to play as. Unfortunately, it seems the improvement mod is not getting updated further but that got me curious; are there any mods being developed for the definitive edition of Age Of Empires III? A Google search immediately brought up a gamer.com article entitled "The Best Age Of Empires 3 Definitive Edition Mods." Well, I'd seen a few shitty articles on there but surely this should tell me exactly what I needed to know, right? 

This article lists 20 mods, the majority of which are either completely dead or have not been updated in years, which is funny…because the Definitive Edition of AOE3 came out at the end of 2020. 

That’s right, despite the title, these mods are all for the classic edition of the game, surely a mistake you’re probably thinking? Well, seeing as the article has been updated twice since its initial release, once in December 2021 and again in January 2022, I highly doubt the authors of this article didn’t notice such a huge blunder. They knew there were no mods for the definitive edition, but in their SEO and keyword research, they saw that around that time people were searching for exactly the thing I did when I found this article. At least that’s what I think…You can decide for yourselves…I’m definitely correct though. 

As I read through the article something even worse became apparent though. I have been interested in the recent progress of AI technology in both the art and writing worlds and though I’ve never used them myself, I’ve watched YouTube videos and tutorials on how people generate ideas and even intros and outros for blog posts. Mostly these people would use this as a jumping-off point to then create the bulk of the creative work themselves, or so I’d like to think. Often it would be evident if someone were to have generated a series of paragraphs based on games that were highly searchable at the time, you might get something like: 

“Magic: The Gathering - 10 Best Cards For A Dinosaur Deck” - thegamer.com

or even if you were to ask an AI to write the first paragraph of an article you wanted to write on Age of Empires III you might get: 

“Since the launch of the first Age of Empires in October of 1997, the series has remained highly successful as it paved the way for the modern RTS genre. With the recent release of Age of Empires 3: Definitive Edition, fans of the classic civ builder have seen more and more great content added to this classic game as the years went by.” - thegamer.com

Content….more great content. Like the content that they added to the definitive edition. The new empires and all that. Not mods, because the AI didn’t know to write about that. Again, you can all make up your own minds….but I am 100% correct. 

You see, I’ve always been pretty serious about this YouTube channel, I’d have loved for it to become a career and so have spent an embarrassing amount of time researching SEO, clickthrough rate, viewer engagement etc. from every YouTube guru you can think of and let me tell you the one and only thing I’ve ever learned from my endless hours of research. It’s all a load of shite.

I'm forever discovering new channels, not too dissimilar from my own, that have put out 5 fucking videos on YouTube and have thousands and thousands of views and subscribers. And hey! I’m not begrudging them of that, it’s awesome, I’ll subscribe, I’ll watch and enjoy your videos, despite seeing you have no tags and your description doesn’t reference the title and all the other hundred things that I wasted my life doing for years.

I also know there are channels way better than mine with less, obviously…but we can stand in solidarity knowing we are all at least better than the downright offensive gamer.com and their garbage, fake, scummy articles that still come up as the first result in a google search. We all deserve more followers than the 2.9 million that follow them on Facebook. 

This is what happens when SEO, search engine optimisation, is put higher than the quality of your work. When the writer is so desperate to insert searchable keywords into their article that the sentences start to flow in an awkward way that’s a chore to read and the headline suggests something that is not even close to what the article says. This is the absolute pinnacle of creative bankruptcy and yet whenever I look at my google newsfeed or visit social media, these articles come up over and over again. So what if people don’t even like these articles, I’ve clicked on them and so have you and that’s all they care about. So the big corporations can look at their charts and say look how many people saw our advert for cruise ships, protein shakes, or fucking viagra. I've already got enough, cheers! Interested in modding the game you probably bought twice? Well, you better also be thinking about buying this other shit at the same time. 

Can you blame them though? Under capitalism, can you really blame a struggling website for shoving out as many bullshit articles as they can in order to maximise profit to pay a few nerds a basic wage? No, even though I’d never put out art that I’m not proud of myself, we always have to blame the ultimate enemy of art and creativity, the source of most of the shittiest things in this world, not limited to AI-generated articles about Age of Empires Mods. 

Capitalism is to blame….but I guess at this point you’re just wondering: are there actually mods for the Definitive Edition of Age of Empires III?

I don’t have a clue…I guess you’ll have to just google it.