BowAndAxe

The other day I was viewing steam and to my surprise found that TotalBiscuit is currently the most subscribed Steam Curator. His following is bigger than all major review sites combined.

Do you think that this has anything to do with some websites being out of touch with their consumers?

The first ever TB video I watched was a 1 on 1 interview where TB asked a developer some pretty hard questions. At the end of the video I came off with a sort of impression "man he was being a bit of a dick to that guy, whats his deal, why do people like this stuff?"

I didnt plan to watch any further TB videos after that, his style just wasnt my thing. Afterall, I can just read what my favourite website has to say about the game. But then I read a press interview, and I asked myself, why isnt the website asking about framerate? Why isnt button mapping being mentioned?

I guess I sort of realised that TB wasnt being a complete dick, he was just asking hard questions that were relevent to him and his fans. I know the Press sometimes have to do a complicated dance so that they dont offend the Publishers/Developers, while at the same time trying to get some hard and relevent questions in, but over the last year Ive felt a little let down with it and feel like a lot of my favourite websites are feeding the hype machine a little too much with not enough content to help inform the consumer.

So I guess my questions are:

• How do you feel about this stuff?
• Do you think what consumers expect from the Gaming Press has changed?
• As a Journalist yourself, did you ever feel like you had to tread a fine line between asking consumer firiendly questions, while at the same time not pissing off/getting blacklisted by the developers/publishers?

Cheers for the time!

thankyou for the answer :)

I was going to follow up with asking wether you think we'll be seeing more and more Journalists/Reviewers move towards Patreon or some sort of subscription model where the consumer directly funds the Journalist (to hopefully keep the interest on protecting the consumers). But it seems like youre way ahead of me!