The Escapist and the trouble with content publishers.

The most recent drama that has exploded across the interwebs regarding the dispute between Extra Creditz and The Escapist would be pretty unsurprising to those who have been monitoring the health of the industry at large. The gradual conversion of TE from a pioneer in mature perspectives on the impact of gaming to a media portal, was largely based on the success of Zero Punctuation, which catapulted the traffic into the weekly millions.

Provided with the possibility of a new business plan to move "beyond the text" and indulge in more of those video based monies, The Escapist scoured the 'net to expand its video portfolio. Before long, the monthly "issues" that originally made the front page focus of the site were marginalized to a few articles and various video series' became the bread and butter of lucrative advertising revenue.

The sheer number of various channels should have raised a few suspicions to the viability of the whole enterprise. The numbers that are coming out of the tens of thousands of dollars in dispute means that TE were promising more then they were reasonably able to provide. Other video based portals like Gametrailers, Screwattack and Channel Awesome compete with TE for those cult-based dollars, and the market, to be frank, just isn't large enough to sustain them all.

Advertising has never been a spectacular earner on its own for content publishers, and I heavily doubt TE are making much on top of the commissions promised to their media creators. The specifics of the dispute aside, what has been agreed on both sides and by other producers is that the Escapist is operating largely on credit. Many people have piped up claiming they haven't been paid for months, if at all, and that the issue that has plagued freelance writers for so long has now spread to video creators.

The fact of the matter is, if you can't afford to pay your staff, don't promise to pay them in the first place. I understand that it must be difficult to keep the hundreds of thousands of liquid capital on hand to pay your bills, but just because the power company and the bank are bigger and angrier then your employees, the money owed to them is equally, if not more, important.

I understand that avenues like The Escapist give unknowns the opportunity for a larger audience, but that excuse does not play when it comes to relying on IOUs. Banking up your debts is a great way to go bankrupt, taking out all of the people who have spent weeks and months generating goodwill and traffic for your website.

There are millions of game related sites on the net, making it one of the most contested markets for consolidated internet advertising revenue. Poking your head above the rest is not simply based on content saturation but content quality. If you're a publisher and are finding it difficult to pay the bills, it might be worth looking at your stable and re-evaluating your position.

It's not fair to expect people to work for free. Sort out your shit, Escapist.

Why DC Universe isn't working out.

It's a statement, not a question. Or, maybe it is a question. I'm not sure, but at the moment I'll work with the former and open up the latter to you, the reader.

DC Universe isn't really something many people currently care much about, nor essentially do they need to anyway. It's just another disappointing mistake from SOE; a company that seems intent on taking great ideas, making muchos mistakes then ignoring the small community of fans who desperately spam ideas on forums, begging for attention and recognition.

But it wasn't always this way. Two of the best examples of originality in the genre came out of the publisher - Everquest was the original timesink, and introduced almost all of the staples of the genre that we love and loathe today. Love it or hate it, EQ was the balls until WoW came along and beat the bastards at their own game with polish and grace.

SOE's heyday included yet another brilliant attempt at genre mashing with Planetside, one of the best team games I've ever played, yet probably underplayed by almost everyone else who just didn't know it existed. It did away with almost every one of the conventional traps and just let you gradually take over the world, point by heavily contested point.

You know the rest of the story. SOE fucked up almost everything after that (Star Wars, EQ2, Vanguard, Legends of Norrath) by dictating to their customers what they needed and ignoring the (originally) positive feedback that was provided to them. But that's just their post-game. Sony have never really been "one" with their audience. They still haven't understood why EQ2 failed so miserably, or why noone appreciated SWG's revamp.

Blizzard know why EQ2 failed. They know why SWG's revamp wasn't received well. They know because they understand what people are trying to get out of these games. They want clean interfaces, interesting quests and evolving structure. They want to feel like they are part of the world and things they do make a difference somewhere. While most people know the game is repetitive, they also understand that there are other things to do within when they get bored.

This, finally, brings us back to DCUO. DCUO fails because it's EQ2. It's an MMO from 1999 with a relatively decent combat system with boring quests and a "snap on" endgame system that doesn't matter. People who care about DCUO right now will not care about it in 6 months. Just like the people who cared about WAR, Age of Conan, Aion, and the countless other forgettable MMOs that launched and failed in the past 5 years don't care about them now.

Yet, I continue to fall into the same traps that I always have. I expect that the new "hook" of the next sexy slut in the red dress will entice me with such terrific gameplay and intutive controls that I will be yet again lost for months inside an online world.

Instead, I'm out $50 and annoyed that yet another random company has my credit card number on file.