Why doesn't the Escapist Review games anymore?

[IceForce]

Well, would YOU work for nothing more than badges?

 

[IceForce]

Why Defy hasn't just pulled the plug is beyond me.

Honest suspicion; they've either lost track of this sites existence which is actually scarily easy to do, or they're running out Yahtzee's contract.

How could they lose track of this site's existence? Presumably this site is still costing them money, even if only the bare minimum. Not the least of which server and hosting costs and Yahtzee's salary.

The site's costs would likely be all done automatically through some sort of automatic payment system that was probably set up ages ago (when there were still staff around). By now, everyone's forgotten about it but the payments are still going through (for now, until the money dries up completely).

I believe that's what that user meant by it being "scarily easy" to lose track of a website but still keep inadvertently forking out money to keep it running.
And it's not just the Escapist where this is happening; see Warcry's continued existence despite that site literally not being used for anything in many many moons.

Likely, Yahtzee's salary would be paid separately, as he makes content for the Escapist's youtube channel and twitch channel, both of which are not technically connected to the ongoing running of this site.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Why Defy hasn't just pulled the plug is beyond me.

Honest suspicion; they've either lost track of this sites existence which is actually scarily easy to do, or they're running out Yahtzee's contract.

How could they lose track of this site's existence? Presumably this site is still costing them money, even if only the bare minimum. Not the least of which server and hosting costs and Yahtzee's salary.

The site's costs would likely be all done automatically through some sort of automatic payment system that was probably set up ages ago (when there were still staff around). By now, everyone's forgotten about it but the payments are still going through (for now, until the money dries up completely).

I believe that's what that user meant by it being "scarily easy" to lose track of a website but still keep inadvertently forking out money to keep it running.
And it's not just the Escapist where this is happening; see Warcry's continued existence despite that site literally not being used for anything in many many moons.

Likely, Yahtzee's salary would be paid separately, as he makes content for the Escapist's youtube channel and twitch channel, both of which are not technically connected to the ongoing running of this site.

Yeah sure, but surely there has to be an accountant or someone in finance over at Defy who looks at the financial reports and wonders where the hell all that money is going. ...then again the bigger the organization the easier it is for shit to get lost.

 

[Something Amyss]

When I want reviews, I go to YouTube. There are so many people on there doing game reviews you can probably even find reviewers with similar interests and skill levels to give you a good idea of how you'll like a game. That's assuming I'm not just looking for gameplay, which is even easier to find on YouTube, even if it's a niche game gaming sites don't tend to look at.

YouTube has killed a lot of specialist sites, even if this isn't explicitly one of them. And now, a lot of those sites have put their stuff up on YouTube anyway.

 

[Souplex]

When I want reviews, I go to YouTube. There are so many people on there doing game reviews you can probably even find reviewers with similar interests and skill levels to give you a good idea of how you'll like a game. That's assuming I'm not just looking for gameplay, which is even easier to find on YouTube, even if it's a niche game gaming sites don't tend to look at.

YouTube has killed a lot of specialist sites, even if this isn't explicitly one of them. And now, a lot of those sites have put their stuff up on YouTube anyway.

Welcome back.

 

[JoJo]

How could they lose track of this site's existence? Presumably this site is still costing them money, even if only the bare minimum. Not the least of which server and hosting costs and Yahtzee's salary.

Makes me wonder what Yahtzee could possibly be making for the marginal amount of weekly content he makes. Surely his novels and games are making him far more than a review show ever could. Unless he has all the Youtube rights though with the ad situation over there that's probably not a reliable income anymore either.

I would think he'd be making far more money from his books than the Escapist could possibly be paying him. Maybe book sales aren't a reliable enough source of income so he keeps doing Zero Punctuation to fill the gap. That's the only explanation I can think of.

I don't know the specifics of how well Yahtzee's books are selling, but in general it's hard to make a decent amount of money out of book sales unless you're a literal bestseller. The profit margins are slim, and if you have an agent and/or a publisher, they'll be taking their cut too.

 

[wizzy555]

How could they lose track of this site's existence? Presumably this site is still costing them money, even if only the bare minimum. Not the least of which server and hosting costs and Yahtzee's salary.

Makes me wonder what Yahtzee could possibly be making for the marginal amount of weekly content he makes. Surely his novels and games are making him far more than a review show ever could. Unless he has all the Youtube rights though with the ad situation over there that's probably not a reliable income anymore either.

I would think he'd be making far more money from his books than the Escapist could possibly be paying him. Maybe book sales aren't a reliable enough source of income so he keeps doing Zero Punctuation to fill the gap. That's the only explanation I can think of.

Yhatzee is in the position that NOT making money would hurt other people more than it hurts him. When he moved to the US he said something about taking responsibility and growing up.

 

[EscapistAccount]

How could they lose track of this site's existence? Presumably this site is still costing them money, even if only the bare minimum. Not the least of which server and hosting costs and Yahtzee's salary.

It's shockingly easy. For one thing small sites don't really have a 'server' any more, they are fired up on split down virtual machines by a provisioning profile. Basically you have a database cluster at the back end that's used by loads of sites and the actual sites themselves are either fired up on VMs automatically to expand to demand, or even provisioned onto multi-site VMs.

It's entirely possible, through a misconfiguration of a network monitor causing your site to become unmonitored and a failure to review your config management profiles, to lose track of a website. I've seen it before where a Zabbix cleanup rule has scrubbed URL checks and someone was multi-homing websites onto shared web hosts and scaling them out as needed, the cookbook which provisioned the front end wasn't removed so every time a site bumped its response time cap and triggered a node provision, the defunct vhost for the unneeded site was being set up on the new host.

You don't really pay for site hosting individually any more, it's not the way the industry is heading since it's more economically sensible to pay for stuff as a single resource pool and use it to its most effective potential than it is to buy baremetal specifically for every site you want to host, it all just goes onto a shared hypervisor pool, fully automated, and without per-node licensing so you can just go hog wild.

The employee salary is another matter but payroll is again normally run without too much comment, it's weirdly easy to lose an employee in the payroll system for years at a time just because when you hire 5,000 people a single low-medium annual wage barely registers.

The site's costs would likely be all done automatically through some sort of automatic payment system that was probably set up ages ago (when there were still staff around). By now, everyone's forgotten about it but the payments are still going through (for now, until the money dries up completely).

I believe that's what that user meant by it being "scarily easy" to lose track of a website but still keep inadvertently forking out money to keep it running.

Pretty much. There will be very little attributable cost to the site directly so it won't appear on many line items. The domain name and SSL certs will be bought for the longest period possible to maximise savings so probably 5 years, the hardware is likely to be a common pool, licensing the software was probably a nil cost, admin time is minimal or nonexistent owing to automation and so on. It's not til something expires or needs attention that anyone will even notice.

Even then it's not necessarily that someone will look and shut it down, they may just leave well enough alone. In the place I work we're paying for a hosted Sharepoint instance that I have no idea about what it does, but it's clearly doing something and the cost is a pittance a month so I'm not going to even risk shutting it down.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

How could they lose track of this site's existence? Presumably this site is still costing them money, even if only the bare minimum. Not the least of which server and hosting costs and Yahtzee's salary.

Makes me wonder what Yahtzee could possibly be making for the marginal amount of weekly content he makes. Surely his novels and games are making him far more than a review show ever could. Unless he has all the Youtube rights though with the ad situation over there that's probably not a reliable income anymore either.

I would think he'd be making far more money from his books than the Escapist could possibly be paying him. Maybe book sales aren't a reliable enough source of income so he keeps doing Zero Punctuation to fill the gap. That's the only explanation I can think of.

Yhatzee is in the position that NOT making money would hurt other people more than it hurts him. When he moved to the US he said something about taking responsibility and growing up.

Ok sure, but I didn't say anything about him not making money.

How could they lose track of this site's existence? Presumably this site is still costing them money, even if only the bare minimum. Not the least of which server and hosting costs and Yahtzee's salary.

It's shockingly easy. For one thing small sites don't really have a 'server' any more, they are fired up on split down virtual machines by a provisioning profile. Basically you have a database cluster at the back end that's used by loads of sites and the actual sites themselves are either fired up on VMs automatically to expand to demand, or even provisioned onto multi-site VMs.

It's entirely possible, through a misconfiguration of a network monitor causing your site to become unmonitored and a failure to review your config management profiles, to lose track of a website. I've seen it before where a Zabbix cleanup rule has scrubbed URL checks and someone was multi-homing websites onto shared web hosts and scaling them out as needed, the cookbook which provisioned the front end wasn't removed so every time a site bumped its response time cap and triggered a node provision, the defunct vhost for the unneeded site was being set up on the new host.

You don't really pay for site hosting individually any more, it's not the way the industry is heading since it's more economically sensible to pay for stuff as a single resource pool and use it to its most effective potential than it is to buy baremetal specifically for every site you want to host, it all just goes onto a shared hypervisor pool, fully automated, and without per-node licensing so you can just go hog wild.

The employee salary is another matter but payroll is again normally run without too much comment, it's weirdly easy to lose an employee in the payroll system for years at a time just because when you hire 5,000 people a single low-medium annual wage barely registers.

Huh. That seems like a really flawed system if websites can so easily get lost.

 

[CritialGaming]

You might want to look a little harder; here is Kotaku's article on lootboxes, titled "What You Need To Know About Shadow of War's Controversial Loot Boxes"

https://kotaku.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-shadow-of-wars-controversia-1819293793

Which isn't in the review. That is a separate article. I'm saying that there needs to be mention of the impact that the lootboxes have on play during the review. Because surely it effected the experience somehow.

 

[CritialGaming]

Well, would YOU work for nothing more than badges?

Yes I would. I have a full-time job and I would willingly write reviews and articles in my free time if it meant re-building a community here to have discussions with. I wouldn't work for free if I was on a demanded schedule, but in my own time, at my own pace I would glad submit content.

 

[EscapistAccount]

Huh. That seems like a really flawed system if websites can so easily get lost.

Like any technical system it requires oversight by trained and conscientious staff. The system is damn near magical but like any force multiplication system it allows you to fuck up quickly and easily at a gigantic scale.

What I described there isn't the entire system, it's a small section of a management framework but it's the section most relevant to what we're discussing. In practice you're supposed to have a business flow that helps you remove defunct configuration and you're ideally not auto-wiping services from your monitor because that's a dumb idea.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Huh. That seems like a really flawed system if websites can so easily get lost.

Like any technical system it requires oversight by trained and conscientious staff. The system is damn near magical but like any force multiplication system it allows you to fuck up quickly and easily at a gigantic scale.

What I described there isn't the entire system, it's a small section of a management framework but it's the section most relevant to what we're discussing. In practice you're supposed to have a business flow that helps you remove defunct configuration and you're ideally not auto-wiping services from your monitor because that's a dumb idea.

Still it's an example of why human oversight is still extremely necessary. However that still leaves me wondering about the ownership of the domain itself. Domains still need to be purchased on an individual basis (I assume), and while auto-renewal can be set up, I have to wonder if there's no one looking at Defy's finances I wondering why they're paying for ownership of the escapistmagazine.com domain. I suppose that's something that also could be lost in the shuffle, but that means their finances are poorly managed if they're paying for ownership of domains they don't even know they have.

 

[PsychedelicDiamond]

I'd do it and I don't even expect to be paid for it as long as I get the games themselves for free and don't have a super strict deadline. I like games, I like writing, I have a lot of unpopular opinions people on 4chan's /v/ can have 500 replies long threads about. As far as I'm concerned it's what I was born to do.

But, like, yeah, obviously noone on this site has any intention of hiring new contributors, that much is pretty obvious.

 

[EscapistAccount]

I suppose that's something that also could be lost in the shuffle, but that means their finances are poorly managed if they're paying for ownership of domains they don't even know they have.

My company owns all its domains, all its defunct domains and a load of domains that look similar to our domains, the SOP for this kind of thing is that if you have a dead or dying brand you keep its domain for years, it prevents someone buying it and setting up a 'Defy sucks dog balls' site on that domain. Owning old domains isn't necessarily a huge issue for a company, they're not very expensive to keep on individually at around ?10-15 a year and paying that extra ?75 for a longer decommission can be well worth it.

At this stage I suspect Defy haven't actually forgotten about the site, but are instead either running the clock out on it or are keeping it around in case they ever want it. I was more pointing out how websites actually totally can get lost like that. In reality if I owned the Escapist I'd slap it on life support just in case I wanted it at any point, it was a big deal at one point so it's probably worth keeping around just on spec.

BTW those question marks are gbp, I keep forgetting this site doesn't seem to do those any more.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

I suppose that's something that also could be lost in the shuffle, but that means their finances are poorly managed if they're paying for ownership of domains they don't even know they have.

My company owns all its domains, all its defunct domains and a load of domains that look similar to our domains, the SOP for this kind of thing is that if you have a dead or dying brand you keep its domain for years, it prevents someone buying it and setting up a 'Defy sucks dog balls' site on that domain. Owning old domains isn't necessarily a huge issue for a company, they're not very expensive to keep on individually at around ?10-15 a year and paying that extra ?75 for a longer decommission can be well worth it.

At this stage I suspect Defy haven't actually forgotten about the site, but are instead either running the clock out on it or are keeping it around in case they ever want it. I was more pointing out how websites actually totally can get lost like that. In reality if I owned the Escapist I'd slap it on life support just in case I wanted it at any point, it was a big deal at one point so it's probably worth keeping around just on spec.

Well I don't know what the going rate for the escapistmagazine domain is, some domains are more expensive than others. I don't imagine it's that much though.
I suppose it makes sense to hold on to ownership to prevent anyone else from using it.
I also can't really talk. I also own a domain and have a website that I haven't touched in years.