This is something I've noticed for a while now, but haven't been able to really describe. This shift away from clickbait headlines towards cryptic headlines that just refuse to tell you what they're talking about. Like The Best Part of Alan Wake Is Now On Youtube or The Best Soulslike Of 2023 Just Got Easier. And those are just a few that I've seen today. Maybe it will fade away like the worst clickbait headlines did or they'll just keep getting so cryptic and opaque that one day the headlines will be: Something Just Happened.
I’ve literally taken to pasting the articles into GPT and asking it to summarize the articles. I imagine they will be the next causality in the coming AI wars.
I would honestly be inclined to pay for a non bs news service, no clickbait titles, no SEO bs in the article which makes it 30 times as long for no reason. Just facts
I mean, they are literally clickbait. They want you to wonder what the best part of Alan Wake is or what the best soullike of 2023 is. It’s just an evolution of clickbait, but it’s still very much clickbait.
I’ll be honest, I am quite surprised they had 180 workers left there after the continuous stream of tepid stuff they’ve put out over time.
Still, sucks for the people working there, becuase I bet a lot of them at least started really driven and motivated before corporate ground their will down.
Another example of under funded giant corporate projects and then shocked Pikachu that they aren’t wildly profitable. They’ll never understand you can make a wildly profitable game, but it requires investment
Or just y’know: provide a service, make a profit, provide people with stable jobs, keep on going. I know it sounds crazy, but you don’t have to have all the money…
It does require some actual inspiration as well. Companies are setting up production lines and wondering why solid gold doesn’t just plop out the end when they switch it on.
Unfortunately that’s not just gaming related news, but all news (and non-news).
It’s by design. It leaves you wondering (and ideally click on the article).
What I actually would like to know if journalists, or whoever writes the articles, are picking these headlines consciously or if they’re following guidelines. I can imagine both scenarios.
If you click on the article, spend two seconds on it, and don’t actually read it, have you actually fulfilled the marketing goals of the web site?
For one, you haven’t actually read anything, so there’s nothing to register “this is a good web site with good content and I will read their articles in the future”. No reputation bump from it.
And two, you didn’t have time to actually see the ads, that is, if you didn’t already had an ad-blocker in the first place.
The goals of clickbait don’t actually align with the goals of their profitability.
Well, obviously someone did the math and figured out it’s better to have these titles than not. So I’d say you’re wrong.
If the title makes more people click in the first place and the amount of people who stay to read at least until they know they’re not interested, is bigger than the number of visitors if they had a normal title… the stupid title wins.
I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one that’s less likely to click on articles like that! If they’re not going to give me an idea of what I’m clicking on, I generally don’t read it. It’s usually possible to find a few websites that have informative headlines.
You are not the only one but there are enough who actually click those titels so it is worthwhile for them to write in this manner and they don’t care about the few of us.
I think for that title to accurately reflect the overall complaint it would be something more like “I Don’t Really Understand What This New Movie Release Was About, And It Wasn’t Good, But I Didn’t Hate It” or to use the lower level comment’s example “You Can Finally Fall for Your Favorite Character In This Dating Sim Based on a Popular Recent Release”.
Where the title is intentionally vague so that you need to read it to even understand what they are talking about. The original titles could be easily summarized as “Opinions on Five Nights At Freddy’s movie” or “Dating Sim based on character from Armored Core 6” just based on the title alone. So if you are aren’t interested in either of those topics, you can easily skip reading.
I like watching it. But i like to see the faves I played throughout the year get recognition and hear a little bit from the Devs when they receive the awards. Announcements are a bonus for me. Plus I prefer to watch things fully even if they had already passed rather than just looking up the winners (in the case of the game awards). It would be like being into a sport but just looking up the results the next morning instead. I prefer to watch the full game unknowing of the outcome, and I take that mentality with me with both award shows (that i care about) and even Nintendo directs and it’s counterparts (which admittedly the game awards is half of)
The main problem with the Steam awards is that they don’t respect the actual release dates. For example, Red Dead Redemption 2, a 2018 game (or a 2019 game if you go by PC only) was named the Steam GOTY in 2020.
Steam also had little to offer in the years that were heavy on Epic exclusives and great games like Kena or Control, resulting in it being hard to think up a nominee.
Moreover, if I remember correctly, they also bar prior winners from their “most supported game” type category, which makes no sense because some games, like Euro Truck Simulator 2, get regular content and technical updates to this day. On the other hand, The Witcher 3 recently won in a category despite having been untouched for years.
Yeah the dates thing is an issue but it is because they take the Steam release of the game. That and they take from the last award to the next one not a calendar year. So RD2 was a 2020 game awards on Steam.
But yeah it feels weird I agree.
The most supported one I understand but the idea is to not have the same game every year even if it has been supported plenty otherwise Terraria would still be there…
The Witcher case I do not know… But the issue there is like any public voted stuff people don’t always vote based on category but they vote what they like. Or maybe they only played that game of the category so they vote that one etc… Some places might play with the numbers around behind the curtains and choose another one if it doesn’t make sense… but that also doesn’t feel right.
Hitman VR won the VR title despite being a bad port to the best of my knowledge. Because people without VR saw it as an option and said that sounds cool then picked it.
I love how the comments so far are complaining about “clickbait headlines” when in the article he says he doesn’t consider these to be “clickbait” because the definition doesn’t fit these.
That’s probably because the definition is a personal one. In the very literal sense of the word, a headline baiting you into clicking onto it needlessly is clickbait. It baited you into clicking.
And while the author is free to use a very narrow definition, it’s entirely reasonable - and has as far as I can tell become the norm - to define it as any headline where the article only says something that would have trivially fit into the headline to begin with.
So for example, this very article could be better titled “Clickbait has made video game headlines exhausting to read”, and without being longer it would convey the crucial part of information - why is it exhausting?! - without someone having to first open and scan the article. Which, if the article were well-written, they’d still want to do, assuming the subject matter is of interest to them.
And that’s the thing: clickbait precludes being allowed this choice. By not telling you the crucial piece of information, you are forced to open the article (generating ad impressions!) to find out whether you want to read it or not, often wasting time diagonally scanning said article.
I love how this headline, too, doesn’t tell us what it’s about. But fair enough, it’s a good way to poke fun at the clickbait problem.
And frankly, the shitty part is that by now clickbait headlines/titles have become utterly ubiquitous. To the point where most users will no longer even notice, because they’ve become 100% of headlines.
It's just a celebration of videogames, an event for fun, an average of opinions. There is nothing to fight against or try to prevent. Simply put, if you don't like, don't watch it. To me it's a relaxed day and I like watching that event. Don't ruin it for others, because you hate it.
There are many Award shows and events for Games. What about them? Do you hate them all?
No, it was just especially egregious with Amazon in this scenario (and often in general with them …)
They had some promising technology and talent, but focused on what creativity they could cram into the flywheel instead of coming up with something good that could then later feed back into the ecosystem. The latter process can yield surprise successes like the Amazon Echo.
aftermath.site
Aktywne