PC game reviews....
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[QUOTE="Aspyred"][QUOTE="mikemil828"]The biggest problem I see that gamespot reviews 'are aimed at anyone who would consider spending fifty bucks on Supreme Commander' rather than the people that actually read game review sites on a regular basis, Gamespot knew back in the good ol' days that everyone who bothered to look them up to read what they thought of a particular game generally had better machines than John Q. Public, this is obviously why Gamespot's review of Total Annihilation never brought up it's at the time steep hardware requirements despite it being a "absolute disservice" not to mention it. The true question is how did Gamespot go from being quite alright with a beastly game to docking it because the developers had the gall to stress the computers they used?
mikemil828
It's hard for me to personally buy that argument seeing as a lot of time has passed since the days of Total Annihilation.
GameSpot has changed hands in terms of its staff many times since then, and methodologies may change with such shifts. Secondly, back then, you're right. Only enthusiasts (essentially) would visit the website on a regular basis, but that doesn't neccesarily imply they're packing the hardware. Period.
Today, GameSpot is online the WWW, where millions of people are online at any given moment. Web surfing is an accepted social practice nowadays, and GameSpot is linked from many websites on the 'net (refer to the bottom of this page for a few, GameFAQs, MetaCritic, GameFly...) and is getting fed a fudgeload of advertising dollars. You have a wider audience, so it won't neccesarily be those enthusiasts looking at the reviews. Such a audience may necessitate a few changes here and there.
Sure Gamespot has "changed hands in terms of its staff many times since then" but wouldn't you think that something that is an "absolute disservice" today, would also be an "absolute disservice" then? After all it's not like there were no games the that pushed the limits of PCs back then. As for ethusiasts not packing the hardware, how could you consider yourself one if you do have a decent machine? My dad is a model train ethusiast and he spends a lot of money on model trains and has one of the bigger collections I've ever seen, a friend of mine is a car ethusiast, he spends a lot on parts and devotes a lot of time and energy to making his car run faster. Generally if you are a true enthusiast in something then you are very likely to want the best you can afford, and because of that you'd probably have a better machine than the guy who buys his run of the mill HP computer from Best Buy. Period.
As for your comment that Gamespot is the WWW itself, you are giving Gamespot a little to much credit, although it looks like gamespot is a huge site, it's still just a microcosm of the internet itself, ask yourself how many people on the internet actually visit Gamespot, 10% 5% 1%? Not even that, Alexa estimates that Gamespot has about .378% of every person on the internet visiting it, compare this to say....myspace.com which has 4.05% and google.com with 26%, clearly gamespot still remains a website largely frequented by enthusiasts in the subject. There may be more enthusiasts, but they are still enthusiasts nonetheless. Millions may be online, but chances are 99.622% of those millions are not going to gamespot. Should gamespot tailor it's reviews to the 99.622% who don't read their reviews (seeing that probably all of them have have computer and might benefit from the reviews) or the .378% who do?
I don't know what you're reading, but all I said was that the internet is far more popular now than it used to be. Simply that. I did not say, "Gamespot is the WWW itself". What kind of statement would that be anyway? Two words, Strawman Fallacy.
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