Tonight, on a very special episode of “Diff’rent Strokes”…

PC Gamer Just Says No (via TN)

For the record, PC Gamer\’e2\’80\’99s official stance on these types of companies is that they are despicable: not only do they brazenly break many MMOs\’e2\’80\’99 End-User License Agreements, but they all-too-often ruin legitimate players\’e2\’80\’99 fun.

To put it mildly, we here at PCG are furious that these types of ads ever made it into the magazine. We know that their presence has upset you, too, because we\’e2\’80\’99ve received, read, and sympathized with all of your emails saying so.

…

After months of behind-the-scenes talks with our sales department, I\’e2\’80\’99m extremely proud to announce that starting with last month\’e2\’80\’99s issue, PC Gamer will no longer accept ads or ad dollars from Gold Farmers. Screw them. As a company, we have agreed to turn down what literally amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual ad revenue so that you, as a reader, can game easy knowing that we\’e2\’80\’99ve got your back. I challenge my fellow PC gaming mags and websites to follow our path and to help us close down these bastard companies by attrition.

I’ve always been more of a CGW and CGM guy myself… but you go, Vede. You go.

  • Freakazoid

    I like the cut of his jib. Screw them indeed.

  • Wanderer

    Looks like I need to get a PC Gamer subscription.

  • http://www.corpnews.com Andrew Crystall

    Snort.

    Now, if you could convince google to stop spamming adverts for IGE all over any page related to MMO’s…

    (certain very useful Eve sites which use Google adverts could get an official link, since the understandable policy is that if you show RMT adverts, no official link and since google…)

  • scottj

    That’s also one reason why you’ll never see Google ads on this site.

    (Another reason: I’d make about 73 cents.)

  • Wanderer

    Subscription paid for, email sent. Too bad Blizzard doesn’t have half the balls PC Gamer does.

  • Ironwood

    Um, in fairness, it is harder for Blizzard to do…

  • http://blog.psychochild.org/ Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green

    Don’t worry, they’ll still value other ads over content in the magazine. ;)

  • http://blog.psychochild.org/ Psychochild

    That’s my comment there. I think I broked the comment thingie with my full name. :P

  • scottj

    It’s because you used ‘ ‘. I think it thought you were trying to h@x the g1bs0n.

  • Jurrasic

    Welp, at least they listened to their buyers and realized they’d lose more in revenue by cancelled subscription and store returns then they gain from IGN ads, and who can blame em for making hay with that decision?

    I’m about 2 cans of beer away from re-subscribing myself, dispite the fact that the mag is a sad shadow of what it was 5-6 years ago.

  • Xyntar

    Woody is a moron asshat (for a number of reasons). All magazines are about 50% ads, have been for a long time. Pulled out some random old issues of PC Mag, CGW and PCG, they’re all the same it’s about 1:1 ads for content. Yeah, PCG is getting thinner, all magazines are. Been subscribing to both CGW and PCG for years, CGW is a damned pamphlet now, PCG is getting there. It’s not a good time for the magazine business.

  • http://www.gallowglass.ca Metta

    It doesn’t matter to me who they refuse to take ad dollars from: PCG is practially a marketting pipeline for the game publishers – oh yay! another *world exclusive* scored 90%+ – ‘Doom 3 is a ‘Masterpiece of the artform’ – Let’s see if we can pare down all the annoying things in our magazine like, you know, the words – I have it! We’ll rotate columnists so we have half as many each month and we’ll reduce reviews to one page with lots of big pictures! Oh we need a female presence cos I’ve heard that there’s a girl in idaho that sometimes accidentally opens her Minesweeper instead of her Recipes folder (you know how women are with technology!) so let’s try and find a woman here at the office who plays games and get her to give us 25 words on what she’s playing; that’ll take care of that!

    I haven’t seen actual journalism in PCG since Dan Bennet was the editor.

  • Xyntar

    Bitter much?

    Ever notice practically everyone gave Doom 3 a 90%+ or equivalent? Disagreeing with reviews doesn’t make it not ‘actual journalism’.

  • Freakazoid

    “Oh we need a female presence cos I\’e2\’80\’99ve heard that there\’e2\’80\’99s a girl in idaho that sometimes accidentally opens her Minesweeper instead of her Recipes folder (you know how women are with technology!) so let\’e2\’80\’99s try and find a woman here at the office who plays games and get her to give us 25 words on what she\’e2\’80\’99s playing; that\’e2\’80\’99ll take care of that!”

    Reminds me of what GamePro did a few years ago. They finally added a female writer to the staff after someone wrote in about it, then tried to pass it off like they’ve always had her on the team.

    Perhaps gaming mags were pathetic to begin with, not just after the internet snuffed any reason to pay for game reviews.

  • Balasarius

    PCG is pretty good. They’re not solving world hunger, they’re not delving into MMOG philosophy. For me, personally, they’re entertaining me for the 10-15 minutes a day I spend on the toilet. And they do a pretty good job of it.

    Like everyone else, I gain all my gaming news and reviews from the Internet. I don’t really care what PCG thinks of game X, but reading it in PCG I find sufficiently entertaining to keep subscribing.

    I support The Vede’s decision. I don’t understand why people are giving him shit for it.

  • invitroman

    Xyntar: except that doom3 is generally considered inferior to Hl2, is rated the ‘equivalent’ of 82% by users (on sites that allow user ratings), and that the gaming press has a more or less known history of giving nice handjobs to game publishers… sure. Exactly as you say.

    more on topic.

    Is it possible that companies like IGE aren’t the real enemy here? Does anyone else besides find the devil to be in the greedy, consuming gameplay style inherent in every MMO after Everquest’s blazing success? The games whose design is intended, from the very beginning, to suck players in, and keep them subscibed and playing till their remaining social life, employment, marriage, parenthood, even their VITAL SIGNS, all go to hell?

    Those exact same games that will gladly reap all the benefits of getting legions of obsessive, mindless drones addicted to ‘catassing’ while moments later decrying all the negative side effects, all the player suicides, law suits, obnoxious parasites, LIVES RUINED, and of couse, virtual property sales in a sadly amusing double standard? What the hell.It’s a concept that’s only been expressed a couple o’ dozen times by other ranters. Fuck IGE. What do they need of gold farming. They probably enslave entire cities of childeren for /farming/ black market organs, then supplement that income with illegal sales of fission weapons from the former USSR, just for laughs.

    /BESIDES/, there’s no such thing as game publishers enabling these creeps to begin with, right guys? I mean it’s the player’s own damn fault for wanting to avoid hours of tedium, hemorrhoids, carpal tunnel, varicose veins, temptation to sacrifice silly nonessential daily routines (like sleep, sustenance, bowel movements, academics, sustainable income, time with loved ones, etc.), rapidly diminishing mental health in some cases, and elitist attitudes from other players… by replacing a wallet with time invested . In pixels, at that. Yep, without virtual propert sales, online games will become the idealistic paradigms of legit playing and players will once again be able to access content that was constantly being sucked up by farming that the decrials and histrionic remarks about IGE and others seems to suggest. Sure.

    Something to the effect of “You can’t be a sewer worker and then complain about the god awful smell” comes to mind all of the sudden.

  • Xyntar

    “except that doom3 is generally considered inferior to Hl2, is rated the \’e2\’80\’98equivalent\’e2\’80\’99 of 82% by users (on sites that allow user ratings), and that the gaming press has a more or less known history of giving nice handjobs to game publishers\’e2\’80\’a6 sure.”

    That’s more of an indictment of the gaming press in general, which I would be inclined to agree with, I just don’t think PCG is any more or less guilty than the rest of them. But over the past 6 years I’ve found that their tastes more closely reflect mine than any other gaming magazine or website, and I’ve never been one to trust any sort of review, even by a player/consumer because there’s no context there and personal bias will always enter into it. And any kind of user review will end up being a snapshot of the average gamer’s opinion, and I rarely agree with the average gamer. Even so, reviews rarely make me decide to buy a game. I refuse to buy a game without playing a demo or test driving someone else’s copy first.

    It did amuse me, though, that in PCG and CGW the side by side comparisons of EQ2 and WoW were grossly prejudicial. In WoW reviews Blizzard was ‘incorporating popular and successful elements from other games’, in EQ2 SOE was ripping off ideas from other games. For Blizzard it was a positive, for SOE it was a negative. Blizzard fanboyism FTW.

  • http://www.eqclerics.org Boanerges

    On the one hand I’m glad someone at least is standing up. For something. Meanwhile most other mags, sites, etc, will gladly take their hard farmed dollars. In other words Vede has just cast magic missle to attack the darkness…

    Ultimately it has 0 effect. It’s a publicity stunt. Wanderer seems to have fallen for it and I’m sure there’s people going “You know, I think I’ll subscribe to PCG now. DETH TO FARMERZ!!!!11″. Subscriptions are much better than advertising. It’s sort of like saying “I’m giving up one bag of M&Ms a day to set an example to those who want to lose 100lbs”. This isn’t moral high ground. It’s barely even a moral hill. Sort of like a moral bump. If gold farmers were, say, 30% of revenues (there’s not THAT many gold farmers taking out full page ads yet) then maybe Vede would have a point. But losing maybe a handful of full page ads per mag (which will be filled easily by other gaming vendors) isn’t going to kill the magazine. It’s barely a scratch. Because if it really was 30% you’d see a new chief editor the next month with just as many gold farmer ads and nobody discussing why Vede suddenly “decided to pursue other career opportunities”.

  • Wanderer

    Wanderer needed a game mag to read in the bathroom anyway. :-)

    Those exact same games that will gladly reap all the benefits of getting legions of obsessive, mindless drones addicted to \’e2\’80\’98catassing\’e2\’80\’99 while moments later decrying all the negative side effects, all the player suicides, law suits, obnoxious parasites, LIVES RUINED, and of couse, virtual property sales in a sadly amusing double standard?

    Jack Thompson, is that you in there? Hellooooo?

    “All the player suicides”? Point to one healthy, well-adjusted person who committed suicide because of any game. Yeah, there are people who are screwed up in the head who are gonna off themselves. Having been there myself, I can tell you it’s got everything to do with what’s inside your head and nothing to do with what’s on your screen. (well, in my case before there were such things as MMORPGs, but the point remains) Those screwed-up people are gonna do it if they play MMORPGs or if they don’t. I’ve never had personal experience with someone killing themself because of a game; I have known two people who were planning to (for other reasons) whose in-game friends realized what they were doing and contacted people IRL to help them — parents in one case, the cops in another. I think I’m preaching to the choir here when I say that if anything, having even the tenuous connections to other people that come from online friends, guildies, etc., is better for someone than just sitting in their room talking themself into ending it all.

    LIVES RUINED? Anyone whose life could be “ruined” by a MMORPG didn’t have much of one in the first place. The same life could be equally well ruined by an obsessive devotion to golf, partying, or watching the Pats lose the playoffs, and if they hadn’t been playing their game of choice, they would have picked something different to obsess over. Before there were “EQ widows” there were “golf widows” and “football widows” and all. People devoting every waking hour, every penny, to their hobby are nothing new. That’s like saying lives are ruined by shopping.

    I remember a couple of years ago when someone left their kid in the car to cook to death while they were playing EQ, and there was this huge public outcry. I started counting. Within a couple of months, I read reports of the same thing happening to assorted kids when their parents were at work, getting their hair done, in a bar, at a party, and asleep on the couch. There were no calls to ban work, hairstylists, bars, parties, or couches. Only EQ. Becuase, of course, when fucked-up people play a game, anything that happens is the fault of the game. Yeah, right.

    Anyway, publicity stunt or not, it’s a step in the right direction. Scroll up for my take on game companies and the problems with the endless treadmill.

  • http://www.corpnews.com 3 Stacked Midgets

    I think this is dumb. They’re not giving up “hundreds of thousands” of dollars in ad revenue. They’ll just replace those ads with different ones. Taking out an ad in a publication is not supposed to be a tacit endorsement of the advertiser by the publication.

  • http://hgamer.blogspot.com Heartless_

    That\’e2\’80\’99s also one reason why you\’e2\’80\’99ll never see Google ads on this site.

    -You could use eMiniMalls Scott and just display Dark Ages of Camelot ads… though you may umm get better links from your ummm employer?

    (Another reason: I\’e2\’80\’99d make about 73 cents.)

    -Actually I’ve come to understand that there is so many ads for gold selling and such that the companies are paying BIG BUCKS to get to the top of the keyword list. So if you display the ads it equals better returns.

    On that note I’ve been trying to weed out all the gold selling sites that appear on my Google ads. My filter limit is 200 sites and it has filled up… and my ad units still are filled with gold selling sites.

    Good news my ad experiment is almost over and I can dump em soon enough.

  • slog

    A worthless magazine dumps worthless ads.

  • ajeba

    Well, I guess Scott is on his “Chinese gold farmers are bad” schtick, again.

  • hawken

    The MMOs companies were threatining to sure the Magazines for the ads.

    Thats the only reason.

  • Aufero

    “Perhaps gaming mags were pathetic to begin with, not just after the internet snuffed any reason to pay for game reviews.”

    Oh, they were. However, they were more amusing back when all the potential advertisers had PR budgets in the three-figure range.

  • invitroman

    Wanderer: scrolled up, didn’t see anything definitive about your thoughts on grinding, mmogs, or games in general. Just a few comments about a magazine. (snickers) Glad you feel Vede is such a “white knight” for (giggle) legitimate catassers out there. For such an initially highly publicized gesture, it seems this vederman guy will be lucky to still be talked about (or thought of) after the current decade is over.

    You’d like to add to this?

    “Jack Thompson, anyone” (followed by anecdotes about imbalanced people playing online games)
    Insert typical ‘ just icing on the cake’ response here. ‘OMGZ! He made teh imflammatory, hyperbolic attacks on MMoG publishers’. Thanks for pointing that out. I am now no fucking different from nearly every other ranter or opinion maker on the internet, including yourself. Play again sometime.

    \’e2\’80\’9cAll the player suicides\’e2\’80\’9d? Point to one healthy, well-adjusted person who committed suicide because of any game.”

    well-adjusted people play games? that’s fucking news to me. (notice the suggestion of faulty logic in that retort?)

    “Those screwed-up people are gonna do it if they play MMORPGs or if they don\’e2\’80\’99t.”
    (bbcode 4tw, anyone?! :p)

    Interesting conundrum here. I’m not sure whether to point out obvious non-sequitur or the subjective, iffy substance of such an arguement. I had a stepgrandfather who offed himself over panic with debt. ‘Don’t see the connection with mmogs in that instance either. Nevertheless, I’d like YOU* to point out an example or two where a person has killed a loved one or fucked up their own lives over something as superfluous as epic weapons accidently deleted or wanting to dedicate more time to an obsession that has already spun out of control… Obvious examples not withstanding. (or we can play citation wars nonstop until one of us gets tired and quits)

    For a preempt, the first examples that come to my mind are narcotics, gambling, legal pharmaceuticals, sex addiction (yes, being psychologically addicted to fucking isn’t necessarily a good thing).

    and…. I’m fucking tired of writing. (not kidding either) ….

  • Wanderer

    Am I just really tired, or didn’t that make any sense to y’all either?

  • http://www.slydesblog.com Slyde

    Well, i for one am a loyal PC Gamer reader who is glad the ads have stopped.

    Have any of you actually SEEN those ads? Never mind what they are selling… the ads were atrocious. Not one gramatically correct sentence, and horrible typos. It was like they just took the korean version of the add and just ran it thru an english translater and printed it without a look.

  • http://www.majcher.com/ Majcher

    Gold farmers are like those little red tablets they used to make you use when you were a kid, to show you where you missed brushing your teeth. They just highlight where your game is broken. And… uh… they’re red. Or something.