Yesterday, FANDOM laid off 11% of their workforce, including employees at its GameSpot and Giant Bomb subsidiaries, companies they purchased in 2022. This is the third round of layoffs, preceding the first round in January 2023 and second round in January 2024. At least 100 employees have been fired since the layoffs began last year. Based on what I've seen from those who lost their jobs yesterday, many seemed to be pretty passionate about their work at GameSpot and Giant Bomb.
So, if FANDOM keeps firing employees that care about GameSpot & Giant Bomb, who will be left to preserve these decaying site's digital history? Hopefully it's anybody but FANDOM, because they have a very poor track record of making legacy content accessible.
An Invisible Legacy
I personally don't consume any of GameSpot's new content, but I do visit their site to view their legacy content. I'm mostly talking about stuff from the 1990s and 2000s here. If you were to spend 5 minutes on GameSpot's site, starting on the homepage, you'd never guess there was old content buried somewhere on the site. Not a single dropdown menu on the main page will take you near this stuff. But it's all still there, waiting to be found manually using the search feature on the site – which has no sort-by-date option and the results aren't ordered chronologically. So really, it's anybody's guess if and when the reader will find what they're looking for.
The other option is to locate the main page for game that's being researched via the same search bar, and then reading this page to find any related legacy articles. To this end, the site also has a search feature for games that isn't really linked anywhere. Yeah, this website is patchworked as fuck. As an example for what kind of legacy content can be found on this site, I discovered that GameSpot had a bunch of trailers for Metal Gear Solid 3, uploaded over 20 years ago, that I'd never seen anywhere else. The video player didn't even work properly on the site, and I had to do a lot of digging in the webpage's files before I discovered where the files were hosted so I could download them. There's a bunch of articles from 1998 and 1999 about the upcoming Final Fantasy VIII. That's just the tip of the iceberg, and I'm sure there's countless other oddities on this site that have accumulated over its nearly-30-year history.
On the web, old gaming news outlets like this kick the bucket all the time. And every single time this happens, it's a major blow to video game historians. All these sites are precious for documenting a hobby that came to life in a digital era, whose history exists largely in out-of-print magazines, decommissioned bulletin boards, private newsgroups and long-dead websites. So yeah, I'm seriously starting to get worried that GameSpot's legacy content is on the verge of being wiped out. I'm sure a lot of the site is archived, but since archived pages aren't really indexed by search engines, they're still basically inaccessible to all but the most dedicated archivist powerusers. This really hurts me as a hobbyist researcher. I wonder what kind of interesting things I could discover if every news article dating back 30 years was still on the clearnet. Ah, but that's just a pipe dream.
The Absolute State of GameSpot
I will be using SimilarWeb analytics for this next section, in order to establish how much reader traffic GameSpot receives.
Analysis reveals that GameSpot's viewership has started to tank over the past few years, going from roughly 150 million views monthly in 2018, down to 72 million views in 2020, and finally down to 47 million last month. Further analysis reveals that the vast majority (42.5 million) of GameSpot's current views actually come from its subsidiaries GameFAQs (40 million) and ComicVine (2.5 million). Which means that GameSpot itself only gets about 4.5 million page views per month, merely matching the view counts of some major wikis.
For example, Hollow Knight gets ~2.5 million views; Wowpedia & Elden Ring get ~4 million views each; and Minecraft gets ~14 million views. All of these wikis are actively locked in competition with non-FANDOM equivalents and are still pulling in massive numbers. Compared to curated news sites with several employees, (most) wikis come with the benefit of not really having any paid employees that need to write articles, make videos, or post on social media. So, not only are many big wikis dedicated to single topics matching or outranking GameSpot in view count, but these wikis have no employees, and overall, their reader retention is much longer. Also, they weren't part of a $55 million acquisition deal... From a purely financial standpoint, a general gaming news site like GameSpot just isn't a money printer like specialized wikis are. Keep in mind that the entire FANDOM wiki network accumulates nearly a billion views per month during its peak activity periods.
Last year, FANDOM attempted to remedy this incredible decline in GameSpot's views by plastering affiliate links (some so old they were from 2010) inside of wiki pages in order to keep the site afloat.
But this strategy didn't work at all, resulting in a less than 1% increase in referral rates over the past 4 years; Accordingly, it looks like FANDOM partially abandoned this strategy by early 2024. However, it's still around on multiple wikis, and you can see an example of it right now, on the Dying Light Wiki, which links to GameSpot reviews from 2015 and 2016. I wish I had data from the height of this massive cross-linking program, but I don't; I only have data from 2020 and 2024. So, it's a bit of an unfair conclusion to make, but I don't really have anything else to work with.
(By the way, I got my referral rate data from comparing the November 2020 and September 2024 versions of GameSpot's SimilarWeb data).
How FANDOM Treats Dead-Weight Sites
Returning to the subject of whether GameSpot might lose its legacy content, FANDOM has purchased many websites before, only to leave them out to dry when hard times come knocking.
Most recently, in 2018 FANDOM acquired Curse Media, which led them to shutter several sites. They outright deleted StrawPoll.ME, which was part of this purchase, in 2022 due to "low usage". The website received ~11 million views monthly in 2019, but it's unknown what the number was in 2022 when the site was closed. As a side tangent, the closure of StrawPoll isn't actually the first time FANDOM has destroyed poll data (obviously it's all trite information, but still unfortunate). The first was the loss of SocialProfile polls when that extension was deprecated, the second was the cancelled experimental feature of Top 10 Lists, the third was the deprecation of wiki polls, and finally, StrawPoll.ME's closure was the fourth.
Back on track, when FANDOM was integrating with Gamepedia (also part of the Curse Media acquisition), they forcefully merged the communities of supposedly inferior wikis with their supposedly superior counterparts, and the inferior wikis were then locked and left to stagnate (1, 2, 3).
These aren't the only sites that the company has treated this way. In 2006 FANDOM (known as Wikia back then) purchased Uncyclopedia, at the time an independent wiki. Over a decade later, they stripped the site's features and ultimately deleted the wiki. Also in 2006, Wikia purchased ArmchairGM, a social media site that was built upon MediaWiki software. They took ArmchairGM's social features and incorporated them into their own software, then disabled the original custom features, permanently breaking the site. For over a decade, it's been an absolute graveyard of a site, where the pages' original formatting have been lost to time with how many times FANDOM has stripped features over the years.
For example, take this original page with its comment section intact, and compare it to its current version, which lost its comment section at some point due to the associated feature being deprecated. In order to view these comments, the reader must look them up on an obscure maintenance page. And even then, they have to be viewed one at a time, which is especially bad for comments that were part of a thread, as that continuity was not preserved. That's the short version, anyway. It sounds simple because I'm familiar with FANDOM's software, but it would be much more difficult, if not flat-out impossible for those unfamiliar with FANDOM to discover these broken pages, or even assume that such pages exist in the first place.
Arcane rituals like this need to be performed to view legacy content on thousands of FANDOM's older wikis. I fear that one day, this same future may befall GameSpot & Giant Bomb. Actually, what am I talking about? It's already happening.
- Coda -
Arcane Rituals
That was the main article, I'm done talking about GameSpot now. But I figured that since I mentioned Arcane Rituals, I might as well tell the story of The Greatest Arcane Ritual of All Time...