IGN does have a review of GCN's NBA Street before GameSpot. Not that I can read it. It's not even posted in the Review section so I can't see the score.

Now that was a website that had everything from sports to videogames and entertainment news they even had a forum like this one that talked about all sorts of topics but before they could make their website even better they pulled the plug 'sigh' and now IGN will follow suit by charging people for their opinions sheesh talk about pathetic they deserve to go under the IGN boards were pretty popular despite the trolls and one-year old spellers and system fanboys that populated their site I'm sure going to miss them but not by much anyway.

http://insider.ign.com/articles/354257p1.html

They aren't going under. Board members are a very small part of their readership base.

What trolls, one-year old spellers, and system fanboys? Now they can't use the free boards, they have all disappeared. The quality has gone up tremendously.

It jsut seems strange to me that by locking everything they expect to up their profits.

Locking the threads means less traffic to the boards, meaning less hits, meaning less ad revenue.

Locking the reviews means new users would have no reason to run accross their site, and people already familiar with their site would have no reason to go back.

It's like trying to sell a really great product in a plain brown box, and not telling people whats inside. Your only selling point woudl be the brown box.

I just got through reading their response and all I have to say is that they should get into politics they could become great spin doctors from what I have read and it still doesn't take away from the fact that making the boards subscriber only alienates any potential customers they could have had it's moot to me since I removed the bookmark from my web brouser.

I think this whole subscriber thing is getting ridiculous. Informational sites can't get greedy! You don't put up sites like this to become rich. You try to cover the costs with advertisements. Charging for something that a million others are offering for free is not going to work. I may have to hunt a couple different sites to find the stuff I pay for on IGN but I can get it for free. If they want to become rich off a picture and informational site, they're in the worng business...try porn or maybe the black market! Portals should be free to the the user! We'll see how long the software companies pay for banner ads when their hits go down cause everything has to be paid for. Just going to help the small guy like me launch a successful game site.

Amazing!

If you read their response, they basically said...

Go ahead, leave us and read other sites, everytime you visit us, it costs money, so bye!

and...

We are going to have our biggest subscription sign up in history tomorrow!

I would never pay them a dime. They had a good chance of winning me over when they offered the "free for three day" trial.
Come to find out, all they gave you was 4 crappy articles, everything was still locked out.
I sent them a very un-profanity laden email about it and they just ignored me.

Heck, even ESPN opened up their premium service for everyone to try.

But the last straw was taking over two weeks off during the busiest video game time in my mind, Christmas. If I had paid $20+ for a subscription, I would be furious. It would be like all the major magazines skipping their December issue so that they can "relax with their families".

For what the site is, a video game review site, the ad revenue should be adequete enough to run the site. If not, they either have to hire better salesmen to get better rates or cut some of their costs.

Now every Dreamcast review is insider (at least they are starting to put a little lock icon on them now).

Too bad, I used to really like IGN, but they are a few days away from me removing them from my bookmark forever.

According to them, good riddance.

Doug

Whoa, I got an email from ign with a "Teaser Review" of State of Emergency. When I clicked on the link it took me to the full review. Of course I had already rented the game (and planned to) before they sent this review so it didn't really help, but I don't know how they got my email address.

That article is a long read, I feel sorta sorry for them...., but it sounded really impersonal for some reason, in particular he said " it doesn't matter if fewer people visit our site, since it's the very visitors themselves who cost us money by taking up bandwidth." It almost sounds like they're blaming us, in a way they are probably right, but that statement also makes it sound like they dont' care about the users anymore. Not sure why they got off bashing Napster all of a sudden either as its not related to gaming info.

its the very visitors themselves that bring in the advertising dollars. Also, bandwidth is much cheaper now a days so maybe they need to look at their isp.