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You must be doing something right.
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Neogaf has a habit of ‘censoring’ websites that are more influential and popular than they are. GoNintendo is ‘censored’. Even Kotaku was ‘censored’ at a time.
The question is, Why censor any website? Why the fear?
And note the anger, the ‘foaming-at-the-mouth’ anger. My little website is just out here, doesn’t try to get money through ad revenue or anything. Why be so upset over a little website?
You have to feel sorry for places like Neogaf. The forum has been in steady decline for the last several years, and they recently lost the NPD numbers which was a main draw to the forum. In the past few years, Neogaf has revealed they do not have their finger on the pulse of gaming. They missed the DS explosion, they completely missed the Wii eruption, and they continue to be extremely excited over games which no one buys.
The business model for Neogaf is not ‘community’ but to be an advertising vendor. The idea is to attract as many eyeballs as possible to see the advertisements that appear on each page. Normally, this is fine, good, and the standard of how most sites operate on the Internet. However, Neogaf does not generate its own content. It leverages users to do it for them and often steals news and content from other websites (i.e. instead of the eyeballs going to that website, they would just read the content on Neogaf). I’ve seen message posters there spend a huge amount of time and energy making great ‘original posts’ or spend a big amount of time of making posts and updates on a thread. My question to these ‘heavy’ Neogaf posters is: Why are you spending all that time making someone else money? Why not make your own website or even your own forum and make yourself money by doing something you love to do? Posting your own content on message forums not only is giving away your stuff, it often can be giving away your legal rights to it as well.
Let’s look at the quote you provided: “a fucking conspiracy theory Nintard who believes that everyone in the industry is intentionally giving Nintendo bad advice like “make hardcore games” because secretly they want to see their competitors succeed and they know that’s the one way to do it.”
I’m not sure where they got the ‘conspiracy’ part from for I never said that. I’ve always said there are ‘hardcore’ gamers out there who know much about gaming that isn’t so. Lately, I’ve been focusing more on how Nintendo’s own software developers have egos the size of Mars and tend to make games to satisfy their ego (Metroid: Other M is a good example of this).
It is not a ‘conspiracy’ that a business tries to influence a competitor to make the wrong product. It happens all the time. Take an analogy to politics for example where this phenomenon is rampant. The opposition party will attempt to prop up and support the weaker candidate on the other party (even if this weak candidate couldn’t get elected to dogcatcher). This propping up never happens directly. It is almost always done via people posing as the party’s biggest supporters or through journalists (who are easily co-opted). Party A will try to get Party B to nominate losers and vice versa.
In a same way, a business is not going to give ‘great advice’ to their competitors. That would be madness. And since it is risky for one business to badmouth another business openly (because the public frowns on that), it is done through other means.
We know viral marketers infest the Internet especially in the gaming community. In fact, forums like NeoGaf are heavily targeted by viral marketers because developers often (or at least used to) read NeoGaf. Are viral marketers going to praise their competitor’s products? No. However, they will praise the disastrous products of their competitor and attempt to encourage their competitor to keep going that direction.
It is no coincidence that the products Nintendo puts out that are extremely well received by customers are reacted to with great hostility in some parts of the Industry (such as Wii Sports, Mario 5). And, likewise, it is no coincidence that the products Nintendo puts out that are flops or not well received by the public are reacted to with great enthusiasm by some parts of the Industry. Prior to Mario 5 and even during its launch, the hostility to the game on message forums (such as NeoGaf, check the archives) was quite remarkable.
The hardcore are easily manipulated. This is evident by how easily swayed the hardcore are to ‘hype’ marketing campaigns where they keep buying games they do not play (or play a few times and place it on the shelf forever). Of course, there are hardcore out there who act like fools. But there are also marketers out there who are manipulating the hardcore like a violin player does a Stradivarius. A good example of this is the ‘Wii HD’ that certain marketers are trying to gin up game communities to be for in order to influence Nintendo to make a disastrous move (of releasing another Wii console to split their userbase).
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