Well here is an interesting if not entirely exciting story… Slapstic.com has stumbled across an interesting trend at the moment. Using the Alexa charts they have been able to track a serious fall in traffic to all the major gaming sites out there.
Gamepro -25%
VGChartz -30%
GameRankings -46%
Gamasutra -35%
Joystiq -43%
Destructoid -36%
Kotaku -49%
So what’s behind this huge fall? Well Slapstic.com is guessing that gamers are leaving the larger sites to look for a more personal and romantic encounter with smaller sites.
However if it’s attitude and personality that people are looking for then you can’t really go wrong with Destructoid or Kotaku and Joystiq fill the gap for professional sites so I don’t think it can be any of those reasons.
Honestly I think people are now just wary of the bigger sites and the sway that the advertisers have over them. That Gamespot ordeal wouldn’t have only hurt Gamespot (down 29%), our confidence was knocked and now we spread our browsing out a bit more so that the big gaming developers have to bribe multiple sites and not just the one.
Source: Slapstic.com
Last Updated: October 6, 2008
Snakker
October 6, 2008 at 11:11
I reckon sites like metacritic offer a more condensed overview of all of these reviewing sites, that’s why you’re seeing this kinda trend. I’ll typically quickly scan the concluding remarks from various game sites’ reviews, and only visit those with interesting comments – or that which writing style I particularly like.
ewie
October 6, 2008 at 11:37
ct is all the employees leaving bankrupt companies
gazza
October 6, 2008 at 11:59
except Metacritic is slightly broken, have a click though to some of the reviews sometime especially the 1up reviews, the scores on metacritc are not the same as they are on 1up.
SlippyMadFrog
October 6, 2008 at 12:01
I think sites like N4G is contributing to this trend as well. Why visit all the sites to get news when it can be summarized at one location.
V@mp
October 6, 2008 at 16:27
Those evil fanboys will eventually drive everyone away
🙂