Topic: Nintendo Life's Costs Article Questions???

So I saw the recently reposted article on here to support your websites before they die, but the comments were turned off, so I figured I would just make a new topic to discuss further.

Why does it take much money to run a video game website?

The core of any video game website are reviews and you could easily get a bunch of high school students to write well-written detailed reviews for free just because they would be so excited to receive the games so far in advance of their friends.

The second major part of a video game website are walkthroughs and the standard for these is very low.

When I used to buy Player's Guides, I always read every single page of them and one thing that totally FLOORED me was how little work each person contributed!!!

For example, the Super Mario 64 guide paid a person to just cover one world, whereas any halfway serious gamer should have been able to write the entire guide themselves in a timely fashion.

Does anyone know how much money NintendoLife's costs are per year?

I feel like it should not be any higher than $250,000 at the most.

This is the wrong subforum to start a thread on the subject of the Nintendo Life site itself. You should post your message here:

https://www.nintendolife.com/forums/feedback

As far as I'm aware, the core of most video game websites isn’t reviews. It’s general news, and increasingly guides, because that’s what attracts backlinks and performs well for SEO. Better search visibility leads to more traffic, which in turn sustains the site and allows it to publish more content over time.

This isn’t work you can realistically rely on school-aged contributors for. They’re in education, unavailable during the working day and can’t meet the consistency or turnaround times required. The work needs to be done by people operating full-time, who expect to be paid because this is employment like any other.

Traditional ad revenue has declined in part because widespread ad-blocking reduces returns. As a result many outlets turn to direct monthly support and alternative revenue streams, often including sponsored content or product coverage (though I don’t know the specifics of NL’s financial model).

On top of that, producing video content carries real costs. Software, equipment, and crucially skilled writers, editors and narrators. That level of quality and professionalism isn’t something a typical 15-year-old can reasonably be expected to deliver, nor do they bring the same maturity or editorial judgement.

Finally, sites staffed primarily by amateurs aren’t bound by professional obligations. Without contractual responsibility to hit deadlines or complete work, output becomes inconsistent and those sites rarely survive long term.

Where I agree with you is that some websites do become too big to sustain themselves. Covering so much information is good but it has obvious drawbacks and I do think websites should sometimes limit their output to balance the cost of hiring staff better. I don't think it applies to a specific site like NL but I do think it's kind of an issue with the editorial-heavy ones where there's no obvious niche/demographic they're catering towards.

On reviews, I believe Eurogamer talked about reviews a couple of years back and how they are one of the least impactful areas of their site now for clicks. It's no surprise to see that YouTube has become a bigger area for this as games naturally lend themselves to video content over written text. Revenue is made through ads in turn. There's nothing stopping people from creating channels that do it and ignoring the written side of course. SwitchUp are one of many who do it, but that's also not a website because it wouldn't be financially viable for the two guys who run it to take on more work. As such, they don't create news content.

Thanks for your reply!

Here are my comments:

1) The reason I think general news is not a big draw is because the Switch systems have so many games released for them that you never find yourself with a shortage of games to play.

In the Nintendo 64 era, Gamecube era, and even the Wii U era, there were months between quality releases, so the need for general news was more important.

2) Why do school-aged contributors need to be available during a standard working day?

They could write their reviews/guides and write them after school.

You could even have grade school kids write reviews because they get so little homework that they have tons of free time.

I have no idea if this quote is accurate, but my 8th grade social studies teacher claimed that the average newspaper journalist is not allowed to write over a 5th grade level because "they have to appeal to everyone."

If true, why couldn't middle school students write video game reviews? Their vocabulary would stll be fine.

3) Is video content necessary?

I can say I have read this site for around 3 years or so and I have never watched a single video.

Especially since most videos are just "Contributor X's Top 10 games in Y genre" that feels like filler between real news.

4) Personally, I find this site's actual review output pretty inconsistent.

I saw an article here claiming the "Arcade Archives" line just reached 500 games and checked this site for "Arcade Archives" reviews and found less than 50 reviews.

Why have 450 games gone unreviewed?

5) Do you know how much money it costs Nintendo Life to run in a given year?

You've been reading this website for three years and you honestly think it would be just as good if the reviews were written by unpaid children?

@sportymariosonicmixx, obviously, we're not going to discuss the details of our costs here on the forum, but ultimately, the two highest costs are people/staff and infrastructure/servers, along with the usual admin on top.

What you are suggesting would be a very different organisation from what Hookshot is; we've never been a company to simply drive down costs to make what we do as cheaply as possible — we wouldn't be interested in doing that.

We stand by our product, and we believe it's what our loyal readers want from us. There is a reason this website has been around for 20 years now. We're supported both through the standard advertising, our supporter scheme and a few other streams like affiliate ads. This is all outlined in our How We Work section.

@sportymariosonicmixx Thanks for the reply, too. I don't have much authority to answer your questions as I'm not a staff writer (Ant's your man for that), but the point you mention about newspaper journalism is largely true from my experience. I did some journalism work experience about 15 years ago and we had a wall to remind us who the readership was, which was very much a reminder that we shouldn't go above a certain level of writing depth. I remember laughing about it because it had a big picture of a happy shopper at a budget supermarket (Iceland for UK people). Simple writing is a skill in itself; one I'm not always great at.

@antdickens: How do you expect people to support you if they have no idea what the overall cost number is?

That is the first place I start when devising a funding strategy.

If you are not looking for help from the readers, then what was the point of your "Support the sites you love" article in the first place?

@Dogorilla: The reviews would absolutely be better.

Kids are motivated by non-monetary factors like being the first in their friend group to get a game by receiving an advance review copy and getting their name posted on an official website.

Kids have little use for money these days, now that most technology is gifted to them by their parents.

And kids have tons of free time. Most gamers tend to suck at sports and most academic workloads do not become demanding until 15 years old.

A mature 12 year old could absolutely produce a better review in a faster time than "professionals." Not to mention if you have a pool of 10,000 12 year olds, each of them would only have to produce 1 review and every game's review could go live on launch day.

If you watch sports at all, you could easily have kids be unpaid broadcasters and just promise them that they could hang out with the players on Sundays as payment and they would give 110% effort every single broadcast.

A "professional broadcaster" mostly just goes through the motions because he is locked in a multi year contract where he makes $10 million per year if he just shows up.

I don't know what kind of fantasy world you live in, but this absolutely not true. When I was 12 years old I was fairly mature and liked writing, but no way could I have written something half as good as I was able to do 10 or 20 years later. Writing good reviews (or any other professional non-fiction content) is just like writing good fiction: it's a skill which takes time to hone. No 12-year old has had enough practice and experience to be able to do it better an adult professional writer.

@sportymariosonicmixx if you firmly believe that using "kids" would be a better business model and also be ethical, then I would encourage you to go for it and build that website because as far as I know, it doesn't currently exist.

I on the other hand would have to disagree with your points — and it's okay that we disagree on that.

@sportymariosonicmixx Giving you the benefit of the doubt that you're serious about this - how does non-monetary motivation inherently lead to higher quality reviews? And kids may have plenty of free time but they still have to go to school, so how would they be able to play through a game and write a thorough review faster than professional writers who can dedicate their working hours to it? No disrespect intended to 12 year olds but I for one would rather read the work of a dozen experienced writers than 10,000 random children any day, even if it means far fewer reviews.

@Dogorilla: If professional reviewers only had to review one game per month, you would be correct.

However, professional reviewers often just blow through games as fast as they can, so they can throw together a mediocre review and move onto the next game.

I remember reading several reviews on another site where the reviewer did not even bother reviewing all the game modes, but then gave the game a low score due to "lack of content."

The reason non montetary motivation leads to higher quality reviews is the website is the kids derive strong motivation for getting the game before their friends, but the websites normally get advance review copies, so they are not expending any additional resources to motivate the kids.

Even though they have to go to school, if you had a pool of 10,000 12 year old reviewers, each kid would only review 1-2 games a year, so they would still easily be able to fit it into their schedules.

If you think that sounds foreign to you, imagine if you could get the next 3D Mario game or Super Smash Brothers game 6 months early? You think that kid would not be motivated to review some other game to earn the right to review that Mario/Smash game early?

@Polvasti: If you read my exchanges with another poster, we both agreed that journalism expects you to write on a 5th grade level to "appeal to everyone."

If so, what skills does a professional writer have that a 12 year old does not, given the 12 year old already has all the relevant vocabulary?

If there were some special review format the site wants to use, that could easily be taught to the kid.

I'm still not following the logic here. Some kids may be keen to review games for the sake of getting them early but that doesn't mean their review will be better written than a professional games journalist's. And I don't know how far in advance review copies are generally sent out but it's absolutely not 6 months (I think it might be a couple of weeks usually?).

Regardless of that, I think you and I want different things from websites like this one. I read Nintendo Life every day not just for news and reviews but because I'm interested in the opinions and experiences of the staff. I like the fact the regular writers are often mentioned by name within articles; there's a feeling of community and I can often recognise their different writing styles without looking at the author. I have no interest in the FIFA / EA FC games, for example, but I could tell you off the top of my head who reviews them for this site and I enjoy reading them every year because they're entertainingly written. 12 year olds might be able to list a game's features and give an honest opinion on them but they couldn't bring the wit and deeper insight that an experienced writer can, especially if they're not even getting a chance to develop their skills by reviewing more than two games a year.