this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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I wouldn't lump this in with the whole "enshitification" issue.
This is the end result of gamers not placing any value on the content they consume. People want free content, regardless of quality, over anything else.
So, as you would expect, what you are seeing is free content, regardless of quality, being created en masse.
It really is though. Remember back when we just had gamefaqs guides? Or actual game wikis that weren't plastered with ads?
It's especially apparent in the japanese gamersphere. There used to be great (grassroots) wikis for basically every Japanese game, now they're all run by e.g. game8 and their clones.
Enshittification really does mean something quite specific and is not just a word meaning “things aren’t very good anymore.”
If you haven’t read Cory Doctorow’s essay that coined the term, definitely do. It’s a modern classic.
We used to make build guides for Diablo 2 for free and it worked well. I'd say this is more a sign of everyone trying to monetize everything.
I mean I would argue it's related, the reason behind it is $$$. Corporate interests have homogenized content and de-normalized diversity and community.
People who use to just post their excel sheets and research on some bb forum for free somewhere starting getting paid by icy veins or maxroll. Overtime they establish a monopoly on the content and can do whatever the hell they want.
Why make a platform that depends on the community and you get the ad views when you can adopt a business strategy that also gets you youtube and social media views while eliminating your competition.
And the youtube trend is just people trying to emulate the handful of people who managed to make it big off the twitch/youtube bag.
Social media has now existed for an entire generation and those users are very averse to creating accounts on new websites. They also aren't willing to put up with growing pains and lack of content. Alternatives are almost impossible to get off the ground now.
Maybe your expectation that people should do all that work to free is unrealistic and just a sign of your own entitlement issues?
Rofl, it's a hobby, you do it for fun, you shouldn't need to get paid. I also play tennis as a hobby and I love to talk to people about it without charging them money believe it or not. The fetishization with internet fame, views, and money is making gaming weird.
I mean back when I was more into gaming I would contribute. I didn't expect money, I just did it because I was fun. I feel like there's a big disconnect between the current generation and my generation that wrote 300 page guides on gamefaqs for the hell of it rofl.
Not when rent is as high as it is, unfortunately everything that takes a significant amount of time needs to be monetized these days. If it takes a significant amount of your time it had better be earning you money, otherwise the factories need their cogs.
There are multiple factors. Some people are trying to get something for nothing, ofc. Like you also said elsewhere here,
As someone who has tried to do this for a couple of games, I can say that people don't like to read. Charts, text, spreadsheets, data explorations, MediaWiki Template encoding conjoined with Cargo database querying providing a back-end support, even simplistic graphics... these are all huge no-nos when you try to say something to a bunch of teenagers that would prefer to simply make fun of you for being a nerd, who can actually write much less read - even for games whose central premise is math. No matter how much you dumb it down for them, it's too much to bother with - they just want tier lists and nothing else, and will complain LOUDLY if you dare to offer something deeper. Then again, that was Reddit, and maybe the Fediverse will be different somehow in that regard?
Also then there's ego to contend with. If you say something without the explicit blessing of The One True God (apparently meaning the kid who played this game before you ever heard of it), then it doesn't matter if what you say is right or wrong (like even if you agree with them word for word), the spin doctors will have their way with it and through selective screenshots of your exact words can somehow twist it into you you having said the exact opposite of what you explicitly said (it's easy if you try, just cut out the word "not" before the rest of the partial sentence and you get the idea! remember: nobody can/will read, so they'll all swallow it, hook, line, & sinker!:-). The art of Politics doesn't just apply IRL apparently - you can use the same basic principles for anything you want.
I've written guides for a couple games when I was unemployed during the pandemic, since I was looking to have something to do that was a bit deeper than just casually playing, and I'm not so eager to try to do so again. Especially since I have a job now and no time for that anymore. Not individually, but by and large as a whole, people suck (at least on Reddit, and especially Discord gaming communities) and I'm tired of pretending that this is not the case. So I'm not doing this again - fool me once, fool me twice, but I'm not dumb enough to do this for a 3rd game.
Context: I've played D1-3 but not 4 so that would not have been an option anyway, I just thought you might be interested in the perspective of someone who has done this for other, more strategy-type games than RP build theory-crafting.
On a positive note: if you find there to be a lack of good theory-crafting out there, maybe that's a great way for you to contribute and become known in the communities that you would enjoy talking in, if you would enjoy making such content? But if YOU won't make it, and OTHERS won't make it, indeed, there's likely a reason why... as the various comments to this post are going into various reasons why. People don't have as much time & energy these days as they once did due to rising inflation costs, and moreover the presence of disinformation does a fantastic job of masking the sources of true information, especially when compounded by bots and weird & alternative styles of up-voting campaigns where people flock to particular personalities more than paying attention to the content that is actually said. What you want may even be out there somewhere... but good luck getting the engagement algorithms to cough it up for you, b/c that's not what they are designed to do (anymore) - the world has changed, and we have already been eaten alive by the corporate giants.
It's a video game, it's meant to be fun. If you don't enjoy writing guides then don't write them but don't cry that no one wants to pay you for it.
Only crying I'm seeing is people upset that the quality of their free content isn't up to their personal standards.
People have been doing exactly that for decades, ever since video games (or learning in general) have been a thing. Nintendo's tipline in the 80s was free. Here is an in-depth guide to every version of tetris, complete with ascii diagrams and user-submitted cheats, released less than a year and a half after the gameboy version came out, when the internet was still a mess of rabbit holes. It's far from new.
Both of those attracted helpers primarily or entirely for the love of the thing itself. 99.9% of communities for any topic are the same way, and one would be horrified to find out the kinds of things that people get up to in knitting circles. Insinuating it's wrong to expect help to be both useful and accessible runs counter to human nature.
Frankly, when we're talking about YouTube, it's also weird. The watcher doesn't pay either platform. An uploader running two ads on a video with a million views makes $180, and that's if none of them is running an ad blocker (they are). Scrolling through the top Hades videos, the only ones with views that really broke more than the low thousands were the official trailers. No one is so much as buying chicken nuggets off that game unless they are the company that made the game.
From someone who jumped from Hades all the way back to trying to beat Suikoden Tactics, god fucking bless passionate text forums in general and gamefaqs specifically. I would not have have bothered with an obvious clickbait ""boss exploit"" video, but the information that there was one spread like wildfire among fans in paragraphs of nuanced Q&As. For free. Because people needed to talk about the game with each other, which they are still doing on Lemmy for free too.
Nor do I have the will to sit through what would be actual irl hours of letsplays to figure out the ancient coin is on the third floor of Obel, buried in the right-hand rubble next to the exit. Sometimes, often even, you just want the damn answer.
Conversely, not every aspect of society needs to be monetized and capitalized.
There existed a time when players made guides because they were passionate about the game, not because they were trying to hit engagement metrics or ad revenue breakpoints. The website GameFAQs, for example, holds thousands of user created guides, and many of them are extremely high quality.
Obviously this is not to say that we should expect all creators to work for free, especially if they're trying to make a career of it, but there's decades of precedent for passion-driven user created content and I don't think it's right to label it as entitlement when talking about the loss of those elements in a shift towards icy veins/maxroll paid guides.