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This week, Disney Pixar’s Brave hit the cinemas and you can guarantee it is all over the mainstream media. Reviews will appear in tabloids, regional newspapers, lifestyle magazines, TV guides and so on.
You can also guarantee the same won’t necessarily be true for the likes of Nintendo’s New Super Mario Bros 2 and Square Enix’s Sleeping Dogs, both of which arrive on shelves today (Friday, August 17th). Sure, they might get a 50-word review somewhere but by and large they will be forgotten.
Wired.co.uk new editor Duncan Geere hopes this will soon change: Games have been mainstream for some time, but much of the rest of the media hasn’t really noticed. There will likely be more publications reaching for the low-hanging-fruit of gaming coverage in the coming years.”
Like Wired, some broader entertainment sites have already upped the ante on their games coverage and been rewarded for it.
There is an incredible demand for games coverage at Digital Spy,” says gaming editor Matthew Reynolds. Our readers regard it as another form of entertainment alongside movies, music and tech, and so we treat it with the same weight as other sections.
Our readership for the section has doubled in the past year alone, now rivalling other sections on the site.”
That’s not to say either site will start trying to compete with the likes of CVG and IGN. While the latter remain dedicated to the enthusiast gamer, Wired and Digital Spy tailor their content to their broader audience, opening up new avenues for games coverage.
Our audience is knowledgable and open to new ideas and new ways of thinking,” explains Geere. As a result, we’re able to showcase projects that might be too off-beat or left-field for even some specialist mags.”
And just because gaming isn’t their first priority when it comes to content, readers might be surprised at how in-depth these sites’ coverage goes.
Says Geere: Our readers demand more from their games coverage than they might from a broadsheet newspaper or a gadget blog — they want deeper stories about people doing incredible things that they haven’t heard of but will have a significant impact. We cater to that demand by writing as much about the fascinating world of indie games as we do about triple-A titles.”
