BasedGamer Hits Goal, Next Goal Up

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After a slow crowdfunding campaign on INDIEGOGO the community project known as BasedGamer reached it’s funding goal thanks to a last minute push by it’s team. BasedGamer wants to be a review aggregation site for video games much like Rotten Tomatoes is for movies.

As quoted from their campaign “BasedGamer will be devoted to a community driven by gamers. Similar to the popular website, “RottenTomatoes.com,” BasedGamer will feature a genuine aggregation of game reviews and other great features”.

In response to GamerGate which includes ethical questions concerning relationships between professional reviewers, indie developers and AAA Publishers with a Dose of Feminism mixed in Jenni Bharaj has launched her project. Vying for attention in the modern Media Echochamber and the Twitterverse’s own Tower of Babel I did not think that this project would meet it’s funding. But then again I remember that I am a gamer and I have seen what The Gamer has accomplished in the past and I am not surprised at all. You see, anyone who self identifies as a Gamer and especially the eternally proactive and rabid PC Gamer  has seen what we geeks have done in the past. We are eternal beta testers. We are 250,000 strong petition signers (ask Activision). We are problem solving techno-geeks who develop applications to make our games more useful when developers release unfinished products. We are custom content creators when developers open their minds and allow modding and mapping to happen. We are the crafts-persons of the game on the consumer end of the equation. If you cannot relate to this then you are sorely lacking in your understanding of what the hardcore gamer is and we are many. Excuse my slight divergence here since I am a bit sensitive to memes such as The Gamer Is Dead. I just hold my own internal Gamer meme in a much higher regard than those artificially created through the gaming medias own echochamber.

Do We Need BasedGamer?

That is the question to ask. I personally am not a great fan of Rotten Tomatoes if that is the nearest comparison to what we will get. Yet I am consciously oblivious to Metacritic, the spammable aggregator of the masses that is a podium for the professional media. Both platforms are driven by professional critics and leave the average moviegoer and or gamers voice buried in the background when the front page is king.  I ask myself how these sites could better promote the gamer or moviegoers voice any better and I have no solution since I don’t believe the average person wants to hear from the average person first. So in the end it is a competition to be front and center to gain more traffic to the professional critics home site and or to generate back-links for those struggling for views. In the end both of these platforms fail at that average man or gamer input total. Why bother when the establishment is doing all the thinking for you. BasedGamer also promises to use a rating system more thorough than others

“BasedGamer’s reviews will include written and YouTube reviews. Unlike other game-review aggregators, BasedGamer will compile and score game reviews based on four categories: Visuals, Storyline, Gameplay, and Entertainment. The categories will be rated via a simple, four-point scale: Excellent, Good, Okay, and Very Bad. This simple grading system will define scores with much more clarity”.

Does this make any difference in separating BasedGamer from Metacritic or even Steam Curation ? I will say that if critics and reviewers can take their bulky archives and copy and paste them into BasedGamer then the average gamer who would like some input will never be heard or read. My concern is that in desperation for instant content BasedGamer will allow copy and paste reviewers, who pay others to do their work, to fill the site with Pew Die Pie, Total Bisquit, IGN, Gameinformer etc etc. There would be nothing different in that model. Steam Curation allowed that and also based first view on the number of followers that a Curator had. This resulted in the same cut and paste link whoring as Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes. I confess my bias though since I can’t help but see it as a competition as we are humble content creators here also trying to be better and better at what we do. Yet outside of that bias the competition is a fact. Steam Curation collapses under that fact and is nothing but a further link to the Curators home. Hopefully BasedGamer with it’s more thorough rating system will actually force the critic or reviewer to spend some time crafting some quality work. Work centered around a rating system that fleshes out the meaning and merit of the game and is written primarily for BasedGamer first. Yet this is dangerous territory ! To actually write for BasedGamer first could push many away as too much work for that backlinkage. All hail the backlink yet please no read more and back to the author’s page

I truly want BasedGamer to add something new and workable to the world of gaming but I just can’t envision what that will be from the mission statement that has been put forth. Knock our socks off BasedGamer! Yet if the end of the journey is another front page like all the other front pages of aggregation sites shoving the same familiar voices and pens at me then I already have that just to my left…My bookmarks! If the voice of the gamer cannot be represented in a better way, as you seem to have promised, then you will have failed IMO. You will have built a site on the backs of other people’s work for your profit in the future….and all through Crowdfunding.

C’mon….. Be better ….. Be outside the box ….. Take a risk.

Your Crowdfunded so be Crowdcentric.

Good Luck!

Sincerely.

 

 

 

About Senior Editor

I am a life long gamer and a Podcaster. I love writing and talking about gaming and game developement. I work in tech in a obscenely large corporation.
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  • Eddie Laidler

    Your more optimistic than I am. While I am pulling for an application such as this it will have to be of some considerable difference to make a difference. I say Good Luck and Best Wishes to them also.