Let's play game journalist.
It has been noted that game news websites, video channels and the like have been focusing on fewer and fewer titles on average these last few years. There have also long been questions of the efficacy and impartiality of such as well. What effect this has is up for debate but does see smaller things slip by the wayside, some often bizarre pushback, and others not achieve the measure of success their quality would predict. Going with the popular adage "if you want something done right then you gotta do it yourself" we decided to put together a little guide on the various sources of information available to the would be citizen journalist and list them all along with a general industry breakdown, and a few choice methods you might employ to get that bit more information and make sense of what you do have. Most of the methods are available for free in one form or another and yield a lot of what you might have seen over the years, both in games and at the world in general. To that end we invite you to share with the world what you found out about new games, old games, upcoming games and the history of it all, be it games that cost and earn more than the GDP of quite a few countries, or nice mods you found that allow you to still play some styles of game you enjoy.
Right now this is the first real attempt at a public release so we welcome comments, criticism and suggestions for further topics, new methods or expansion of existing ones. Never the less we hope it still finds itself being somewhat readable and informative.
Contents overview
Code:
Part I Introduction to journalism
1 Primary Sources
2 Secondary sources.
3 Specialist skills and expensive tools/data
4 Veracity of sources
4.1 Correlation vs causation
4.2 Wire services and story verification
Part II Generating a list of things to watch
5 Direct sources
5.1 More narrow interests
6 Indirect sources
6.1 Intellectual property
6.2 Legal stuff (finding it, reading it, knowing what to look for)
6.3 Game rating, classification and censorship boards.
6.4 Game translators, game guides, game testers and related concepts
6.5 Electrical standards testing
6.6 Leaks and after action reports from game developers, publishers and related parties
7 User comments, comments from notable figures, meta analysis and in game events
7.1 On the nature of comments
7.2 Meta review ranking sites
7.3 Notable events within games
Part III Business stuff
8 Stock markets
Going long
Shorting and short selling
8.1 Popular stocks and basic ideas of stocks
9 Game company income streams
10 Earnings, financial statements and investor reports
Investor relations. Investor reports, earnings predictions and matching thereof.
10.1 Profit, income, expenses, expenditures, and loss
10.2 Credit ratings
10.3 Investor calls
10.4 Investor removal of funds/investors pulling funds
11 Bankruptcy
12 Subsidiaries
13 Mergers and buyouts
14 Further accountancy and business lookup
15 Hollywood accounting and the construction of the game industry
15.1 Game industry makeup
16 Lobbyists, industry groups, unions and you
17 Game sales and sales windows
17.1 What should a game cost?
17.2 Game of the year and compilation editions
17.3 Amazon and gamestop listings and the nature of placeholders
17.4 PC download market, also console online premium services.
Consoles
17.5 Popular physical disc/hardware retailers (online, brick and mortar?)?
Main bricks and mortar retailers, and some notable regional online, for the various countries.
18 Consumer and morality advocacy/activism groups
Part IV General interest section
19 Game information databases
20 Game conferences and you
20.1 Notable game industry conferences
20.2 Smaller conferences
20.3 Hacker conferences
20.4 Game jams and Tech demos
20.5 Trailers and stage demos
20.6 Awards and awards shows in general
21 Science journals
22 Competition/“esports”, challenge runs and speedrunning
22.1 Competitive gaming and esports.
23 Gambling
24 Data analysis
1) Unintended uses of a game, website, API or similar.
2) Game playing
3) ROM hacking analysis of files
24.1 Historical analysis
25 Test groups, focus groups and surveys
25.1 Surveys
25.2 Focus groups
25.3 Test groups
26 Review codes, embargoes, and riders
27 Game theory and general design of games
28 Market segments and game genres
Part V Useful tools and analysis methods
29 How to use a search engine
30 Spreadsheet absolute basics
31 Advanced text manipulation
31.1 Column mode in notepad++
31.2 Regular expressions
31.3 Using grep, awk and sed
32 Archive.org’s wayback machine and caching services
33 Website analytics and web metrics
Google trends
34 News alerts
35 Web robots, crawlers and spiders
36 Metadata
37 Google books
38 Google groups (usenet text search)
39 New websites/domainsA download is available on this thread and the download section, other mirrors to follow. Feel free to copy and share if you want to.
Last edited by FAST6191,
