I’ve been steadily reviewing games over the last six years as a one-person operation, putting out ~4.9 reviews a month since 2012, and many things have been learned along the way. There’s more stupidity in this industry than I can even begin to describe, so rest assured that this isn’t going to be one of those guides that ultimately boils down to “get better at writing” like that’s some kind of magic bullet. After all, I spent years getting leapfrogged in search results by people who couldn’t write a well-reasoned analysis if they had a gun pointed to their head, so writing clearly doesn’t have much to do with it. Instead, this is going to shape up as more of a “why all gaming sites are the same and the entire industry is effectively a smoldering crater” article, but it’ll contain a whole lot of surprising advice that those with dreams of creating their own gaming site can leverage. One final note: all of this pertains solely to gaming websites, as Youtube stuff works much differently.

Do: cover modern video games

Individual gamers are great people who often have varied interests. There’s a remarkably big chunk of gamers (the ones you’re aiming for, as it turns out) who exist as a mindless sheep-shaped blob that’s frighteningly susceptible to marketing, though. Their focus is solely on new games, and the cycle goes a little like this: a game gets hyped, the hype builds up to a fever pitch, the blob collects a handful of the early reviews either affirming or contradicting the hype, and then they move on to the next thing. Just take a look at the following image and tell me that I’m wrong:

I’m sure Crackdown 3 will turn out to be a wonderful game, but the minimum monthly searches for it are where searches for Planescape: Torment, widely considered one of the greatest games of all time, max out. The importance of focusing on newer games over even the classics can’t be overstated, since becoming a part of the hype cycle means traffic, and more traffic has a knock-on effect that betters your site overall (mostly in the form of backlinks, which tend to increase your position in search engines). This site has grown more in the past year of focusing heavily on new and upcoming games than in the five years preceding it. The difference is staggering. As nice as nostalgia is, a 5,000-word piece about your love of something old isn’t going to do you anywhere near as much good as a 600-word piece covering something new that you barely know anything about. Because that makes sense.

Don’t: be afraid of slave labor

As I mentioned before, this is a one-person operation. That means that this is a subject near and dear to my heart, as I don’t possess the requisite lack of empathy to con a bunch of writers into working for me for free (and there’s almost no money in this, so you won’t be able to pay anyone without it coming directly out of your pocket). If you were born with misshapen scruples, though, then congratulations! All you need to do is promise “exposure” to half-competent writers who could likely already obtain it on their own and you have yourself the makings of a staff.

Let’s start with the obvious bonus of having a staff: the more people you have working for you, the more content you’re putting out. The more pages you have showing up in search results and social media, the better the chance that something gets lucky or controversial and catches fire. Much less obvious is the fact that you’ll be outright discriminated against if you lack a staff. For example, I’m not allowed to post reviews to gaming news aggregator N4G, as under their rules (and according to their admin/community manager), single-author sites are enough to render a site “personal” rather than “professional,” which bars it from posting opinion-based content such as reviews and editorials. This is just a single example of many, of course, and while things like this are an understandable attempt to weed out low-effort opinionated content, they instead have the effect of encouraging low-effort opinionated content from sites that have a bunch of chained up writers in their basement to approximate the vague outline of what a gaming site is supposed to look like. Those backlinks are handy, so you have two options. The first is to put out a lot of news—and this is something I’m personally trying to get better about. The second and significantly easier option is to enslave a handful of writers ASAP.

Do: waste all of your time on social media

To understand the importance of futzing around on Twitter instead of working on your site, you first have to understand a little about how obtaining review keys works. There are a small handful of ways you can acquire keys, but in terms of volume you’ll be dealing primarily with Keymailer. It’s a great site, honestly. The way it works is that you sign up and request keys, at which point the PR person who put the game up decides whether to accept your request, deny it, or ignore you entirely. There’s no direct contact with PR people in this process, which is the best part.

Now, you’re by no means the only one requesting a key for any given title, which means that said PR person has the luxury of picking and choosing who to send keys to, but not the luxury of spending a lot of time looking into each person. You can connect a Twitter, Youtube, Mixer, or Twitch account to highlight the number of followers you have on each (I’ve been told that most websites focus on Twitter), and this essentially works as a shorthand way of communicating one’s reach. If you have a million followers and no writing skills, you can expect to get a bunch of keys. I mean, it’s not like they’ll have the time to check. If you spend all of your time focusing on your site like I do, on the other hand, then you can expect to be denied for some truly bizarre things. I recently got rejected for a game that I’ll receive for free when it releases anyway. Again, it’s not like they have the time to check. Not all PR people are created equal, of course, and you can still get keys if you don’t have many/any Twitter followers (obviously), but the inept, myopic ones ensure that it’s easier if you spend all your time messing around and building up your social media. And if you have slaves working for you, the reduction in site content will be minimal.

Don’t: bother writing in-depth reviews

I’ve read a lot about how long, detailed pages are valuable and beautiful in the eyes of search engines. As someone who spent years writing long, detailed reviews, that’s hilariously misleading. I wish it was true, though. Let’s play a game to illustrate the point: my Gravity Rush 2 review (one of the reviews I’m particularly proud of) is over 6,200 words long and goes into a ridiculous amount of detail, so let’s see how many other reviews less than a third of that length outrank it on Google. First up is the IGN review, which is 1,167 words. What a great start. Then there’s the Polygon review at 1,356 words. Brilliant. Kotaku? A whopping 1,668 words. Gamespot’s review is 1,440 words, while Eurogamer’s is 1,647. Destructoid’s is 938 words. That’s part of page one. My review alternates between being on pages 5 and 6, so there’s a whole lot more where that came from. Going in-depth is a waste of effort.

Worse, all of that info means diluting your keyword. I’m not an SEO expert by any means, so I can’t tell you how bad that actually is, but I can tell you for a fact that splitting that in-depth information into multiple pages of content is much more effective. Short, sweet, and a little clickbait-y gets the job done. Granted, people don’t like clickbait, but what are they going to do? Visit somewhere else? Link to your site in outrage? Judging by history, the answers are “no” and “yes, while not realizing that they’re helping you by doing so.” Google sure nailed the crap out of their algorithm. You won’t be doing much justice to the games you cover going this route, of course, but it’s silly to think that game reviews have anything to do with games.

Do: smother your site with ads

While there are individuals out there who resent sites that bombard them with ads, staying on their good side isn’t going to pay the bills. Honestly, neither will the ads (everyone uses an ad blocker these days), but they definitely pay more when they’re clicked on by the rare few who haven’t discovered ad blockers yet, and getting them clicked on means making them visible. I used to have two ads: one tiny box in the top-right corner, and one in the footer. The size of your ads determine how much you get paid for views and clicks, though, so they got replaced with bigger sidebar ads that perform better. I don’t have answers for how to make this profitable, but I imagine it’s easier with slave labor. Morals are absurdly inconvenient in this industry.

Some review best practices

Reviews apparently don’t have to be written well (not that I’m going to stop trying or anything, but I have some simmering resentment on this topic if you can’t tell), but there are still some steps you can take to make things easier on yourself. For one thing, don’t bother making screenshots or video. I use both to back up my points, but a shockingly small number of people actually click on videos for whatever reason. It’s a lot of effort that most people aren’t going to appreciate. Of course, screenshots help reviews to “pop,” but developers and publishers release screenshots that you can use. Sometimes that can backfire and lead a bunch of publications to use an outdated screenshot where the characters look different (a whole lot of The Witcher 2 reviews used a screenshot where main character Geralt looked totally different than in the actual game), but pictures don’t have to be helpful. They’re really just there for to be shiny and make you look somewhat professional. And if you can’t find one of the released screenshots for whatever reason, just steal an original screenshot from someone like me and pretend that it’s yours. Yes, that’s happened.

Also, be sure to use review scores and structured data that allows those scores to show in search results. People are lazy and want a number attached to everything, and having Big Yellow Stars show up in search results helps your reviews to stand out from the others. If you don’t have big yellow stars, people will click on a review that does. Admit it—we’ve all done this, whether intentionally or unconsciously.

In summary, conform or die

If you’ve ever scanned gaming sites and found yourself wondering why they’re all basically the same thing, now you know. There are a whole lot of factors pushing sites to fall in line to obtain the traffic and early reviews they need to grow, and stepping out of line can severely disadvantage you. You might find that sad—I certainly do—but it’s the way things are now, and expecting consumers to make the changes to their gaming media habits that would be required to allow for more diversity in the industry is hopelessly naive. I’ll continue plugging away at this, making small concessions and inching toward mediocrity in the hope of squeaking through without the need for slave labor, but I needed to get this off of my chest and offer insight as to why game reviewing has become so bad. I’m sure there are other reasons (because things can suck for more than one reason), but these are the factors that I’ve personally encountered and that drive me absolutely batty.

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