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Denver, 8:02 AM
Thu Nov 12
57 posts in the last 24 hours
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01/21/09
01/21/09
Assets, for example, don't create themselves. And every asset you create for the web site is time taken away from the game. Every person you have working on assets for web sites is a person who could instead be working on assets for the game. (I'm not talking about design and UI, I'm talking about things like illustrations, renders, etc.)
Ditto for "content", which itself is a word that gets abused by people critiquing web sites. What is "content"? Usually when people say "content" what they really mean is "assets" again, and that goes back to the same point above.
If instead you mean videos and screenshots, there are a couple issues there too, the biggest of which probably being exclusives that are given out to various publications. A publisher might promise 10 exclusive videos to 10 publications - well, how many videos do you think can be produced in a day??
In the end, most of this stuff just comes down to resources, and the question is "do you want people working on web sites or do you want people working on games?" It's really that simple. And most publishers will put the minimum resources towards the web site that they have to.
UI and navigation and whatnot is a different issue, and that just comes down to planning.
Flash abuse is usually because some executive thinks Flash is "sexy" and foists it upon the web team against their will.
01/21/09
The guy who wrote it seems to think official sites are competing somehow against sites like GameTrailers (or presumably IGN/GameSpot/Kotaku, etc). That's not the case. In fact, most publishers will use third-party sites to do their work for them. If you see 10 gameplay videos on IGN but only 5 on the official site, that's not an accident or a mistake. It's because IGN promised a certain level of coverage for the game if they got 10 exclusive videos, and the publisher decided (probably rightly) that they'd get more eyeballs and more exposure for their game by providing IGN with that exclusive than they would by putting those videos on their own site.
He's just misunderstanding the relationship here. To a publisher, sites like GameTrailers and IGN are promotional vehicles just like the official site is, and in most cases they're more effective than the official site is. In a lot of cases, the official site only really exists as an obligation more than anything, as in this is a product that the company has, so you need to at least have a page up about it somewhere on a company server. But the main promotion is usually done on third party sites.
01/21/09
01/21/09
What's the deal with the comment system becoming very laggy when posting larger comments?
Agreed with the article. The Wheelman site is the most recent one I've been frustrated with.