Image courtesy of Square Enix
Alex Donaldson vividly remembers the moment he was able to say that everyone who contributed to the website they co-founded, RPG Site, would get paid for their work.
“The day I was able to tell our IRC [internet relay channel, an old style of internet charoom]Donaldson said during a recent interview with Waypoint, “that the site was going to start paying for every contribution is up there with the happiest days of my life.”
It’s been a brutal run for gaming media recently. The vast majority of the staff at Fanbyte, a gaming and culture website only a few years old that had Waypoint editor-in-chief Danielle Riendeau as its editor-in-chief, they were unceremoniously dismissed. Another outlet that regularly published quality games, writing, input, it fell days later. Running any website under ideal circumstances is already a challenge, but amid a complicated economic outlook with companies pulling back from advertising, it has become even more difficult.
Last month, I reported on the challenges facing writers specializing in game guides, the compilations of tips, walkthroughs, and puzzle solutions that many use every day. In this case, a writer on one website accused a writer on another website of plagiarizing his work. This is a particularly touchy subject among smaller video game websites, which depend on driving specific waves of traffic to keep the lights on and ideally pay their contributors adequately.
“For RPG Site, the guides are the soul of the site,” said Donaldson, whose website started as a Final Fantasy fan site in 2000. “The site was successful before the guides , but what the guides allowed us to do as a hobbyist site was take our commissions and pay from pitiful “nice” to competitive with other B-level websites. Many of our peers in this space they don’t pay or give people $10 for big, thousand-word guides, and it was important for us to go beyond that. Guides have been the tool that’s allowed us to do that.”
The RPG site is niche on purpose. It’s not a website trying to attract every possible person on the internet. Chances are you ended up here, either by search or on purpose, because you like RPGs. The thing about genres, though, is that you can always go deeper and more niche. This may look good to people who are fans of this rabbit hole, but it is not for profit.
“We cover a lot of really niche stuff, Japanese games in particular,” Donaldson said. “To be frank, there’s not always a huge audience or a lot of traffic available for coverage of these games, but they’re a vital part of our mission. So a lot of this content is a” loss leader.” We pay for it and lose money on it. But that’s okay, because elsewhere on the site, the “big game” guides are making up for it.”
No other genre lends itself to guidance the way JRPGs do. Image courtesy of Atlus
Most websites make money through a seemingly simple exchange, where readers scroll through content and companies spend money placing ads on that content. But it’s more complicated than that, because they can make more money if you click on the ad. Do you remember the last time you clicked on an ad on a website? That’s where volume and total time spent on a page matter, and it’s not hard to see why writing guides for popular games work, the kind of writing that can keep people scrolling and reading for a while.
Donaldson declined to disclose details about how much the RPG site pays its writers per guide, or how much money the site makes monthly. But he did say that guides typically account for “50-60%” of website traffic, which translates into the same amount of revenue. The site also makes money by selling its internal CMS (content management system, aka what allows you to publish things on a website) to other websites. It is the “lion’s share of our business”.
Game guides have been around almost as long as the medium itself, one built around challenging players. Anyone who’s stood in line for a new game at midnight remembers a GameStop employee wondering if you’d like the strategy guide, too. The Internet age changed things, as websites like GameFAQs collected guides under one searchable roof.
“To some extent, I chalk it up to the advent of smartphones with good browsers,” said Donaldson, who also speculated that the rise in hits played a role. “If you’re sitting on your couch playing Xenoblade and something bugs you, take 30 seconds to pull out your phone and Google it. If you’re playing Persona and you want to know the protagonist’s canon name because you don’t want to make it up -yours, you can find this information very quickly.This, combined with the changes in the way Google began to rank pages (for better and for worse) meant that there was a lot more traffic available for guides. And traffic equals money.”
“The day I was able to say the site was going to start paying for all contributions is up there with the happiest days of my life.”
Logistically, Donaldson told me, RPG Site tries to ask video game publishers for multiple copies of a game before release, which is sometimes difficult. (I can personally attest to this, looking at you, Nintendo.) But multiple codes means it’s possible to split the work between multiple writers. Unlike some of the bigger websites, like an IGN or GameSpot, the RPG site doesn’t always see websites its own size as direct competitors and supports sharing pre-release information with each other to ensure they receive the details correctly.
“I also try to take a lot of the tedious stuff personally: SEO [search engine optimization]data entry, article formatting, out of contributor and I do it myself,” he said. “At the end of the day, the buck stops with me, so I don’t mind doing the boring stuff , but I own the site.”
When Donaldson was a kid, money wasn’t part of the equation. No one got paid to post a tutorial on GameFAQs, for example, and a huge problem in gaming media, which caused many talented people to leave the field, is the sheer inability to get paid well as people age and take on more responsibilities, such as having children or running a home.
“We were just kids making a Final Fantasy fan site,” he said. “We really didn’t know what we were doing. We were always making guides though, because that’s what FF/JRPG fan sites did.
Many Japanese RPGs have complicated and convoluted paths to unlock secrets. Image courtesy of Square Enix
Which is true, and never better reflected on sites like GameFAQs than an old golden rule: the longer the ride, the better. Remember, GameFAQs is a site that not only hosts game guides, but one of the key facts it reveals about each individual guide is who it’s written by and how much hard drive space it would take up. Which leads to the second golden rule of GameFAQs: the higher the KB number, the better the guide.
Up to this point, RPG site guides aren’t usually comprehensive books and instead are guided by what players are looking for, which itself depends on what results Google is turning up. It’s a tool Donaldson uses as the site’s boss, but these days it’s also useful for writers.
“We use SEO tools and our own knowledge to try to predict and analyze what people are searching for,” Donaldson said, “and then do a thorough job on those topics, rather than trying to be everything to everyone “.
In other words, instead of having 50,000 words explaining how to get from one chapter to the next in a sprawling game like Persona 5, they write how to avoid the bad ending or how to increase your relationship status with a specific character . as fast as possible.
“Google tends to make a few updates a year to various elements of how it works that affect search,” Donaldson said, “which in turn affects your website’s ranking. It’s a domino effect from hence: search equals impressions, which equals ad dollars, which equals budget, which equals content production, and so on.”
Guides are “evergreen” content that people can find long after a game’s release. Image courtesy of Sega
Talk to anyone about running a modern website and you’ll hear “Google” pop up every few minutes, because of how important a company’s search engine traffic is to results. But Google and its search engine are not static; the company is constantly changing its algorithm and what it shows, rewarding and punishing websites that do and don’t.
“The nature of Google’s control over the search industry and how it means they can kill a site, accidentally or not, is a topic for another time,” Donaldson said.
The big a-ha moment came during the original PlayStation era, and more specifically when games like Final Fantasy embraced the spectacle, resulting in some spectacular scenes.
“This was pre-YouTube,” Donaldson said, “so if a fan wanted to re-watch a bad scene, their best bet was a slow download of a 56k+ .mov. But hosting that’s why it was expensive, and that’s what prompted us to put ads on the site. It was a shitty moment, though, wasn’t it? We knew guides were popular, but imagine us, early teenagers, realizing suddenly this was real money. Not a lot. But, you know, enough to pay for site hosting and buy some games, and give some back to the others who helped. For me, it was also the point where I realized, oh man, I can get paid to write about video games.”
The moment my parents took me seriously about writing about video games in my teenage years was when a paycheck came along based on the generous ad revenue the website was contributing at the time. (It was the late 1990s, a different era for the Internet.) The paycheck was big enough that I could only spend a fraction of it; the rest went to a university fund.
“When I was 13 and doing fan sites,” Donaldson said, “everyone was doing it for free, for love. So there were no expectations; life always came first. Even if everyone’s paid now, there’s a fun, collaborative energy of that era I want to keep, and as long as everyone is happy, compensated, with the place in the black… it’s great. That may mean we never have an office and a full-time staff of seven , and we can’t afford huge commissions that the big sites can give, but they’re the breaks. I’m proud of what we have.”
Follow Patrick Twitter. His email is patrick.klepek@vice.com and he is available privately at Signal (224-707-1561).
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