Kyle Orland’s Workblog

The comic book and videogame industries are pretty similar. Both rely on niche support from big-spending, highly dedicated fans. Both are slowly expanding in the mainstream market. Both have been revolutionized by the internet and are struggling to find a business model that includes digital downloads.

Yet while independently owned specialty shops dominate the brick-and-mortar comic book business, the videogame retail space has increasingly become synonymous with one name: GameStop. The slow conglomeration of mini-chains like Babbage’s, Software Etc. and FuncoLand came to its monolithic conclusion in 2005 when GameStop’s merger with EBGames gave them a full 25 percent of the videogame market (a share that’s surely increased with the chain’s nonstop expansion in the years since). The remainder is almost entirely taken up by big box retailers that sell videogames alongside unrelated products like electronics and home supplies. For most consumers, the small, mom-and-pop game shop is a thing of the past, if it was ever a thing at all.

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A photo gallery detailing the ten biggest moments in the console wars thus far.

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A look at video game’s battle royale between the Nintendo Wii, PlayStation 3 (and the two-year-old Xbox 360) on their one-year anniversary.

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Magazine publishers say that readers want longer features and in-depth articles as a counterpoint to the short, bloglike pieces they find online. But Kyle Orland, a freelance journalist who writes a media coverage column for Gamedaily.com, wondered if that strategy was working, saying that when a large feature is published, it doesn’t get read.

“Attention spans are just getting so small that readers don’t know what they want,” Mr. Orland said.

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While most gift guides tell you what to buy, Media Coverage helps journalists figure out what to do with the freebies developers and publishers buy for them.

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Making money in the video game business is usually a pretty simple proposition: you make a game; other people pay to play it. There may be some middlemen like producers and retailers in there, and the actual payment could be a purchase, subscription or rental, but when you boil it down, the pay-to-play model has defined the business of video games since the days of the arcade.

But the world of free-to-play browser-based Flash and Java games has largely thrown this business arrangement on its head. This is partly because it had to. People have been trained by sites like Hotmail and Google to expect web services — even good ones — to be free to use. The New York Times recently abandoned its Times Select online subscription service, possibly after realizing that people weren’t willing to pay good money for the kinds of opinions that were available for free on hundreds of blogs. Similarly, any online game site that starts charging money for content risks losing players to the myriad free alternatives.

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Media Coverage takes a look at the latest issue of America’s only unofficial single-company video game magazine.

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In this Episode of Press Start Kyle Orland and Ralph Cooper give their official review of Halo, Metorid: Corruption, and discuss the Red Rings of Death.  We might throw a couple of other topics in there too!

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Media Coverage asks you to put down your copy of Halo 3 and come read about other people writing about Halo 3.

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Media Coverage continues its look at those bits of game writing that just rub some people the wrong way.

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