Crispy Gamer

» see crispygamer.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The whole thing started with a condition. Chris Heldman, who ran media entertainment at Google, pitched the idea at E3 in 2007 to John Keefer, then editorial director of GameSpy. Keefer said yes on one term: separation of church and state, meaning the site would not take advertising money from the companies whose games it covered. They took an office in New York in October 2007, spent six months in beta, and launched on 26 October 2008 with twenty people and $8.25 million from Constellation Ventures, the venture arm of J.P. Morgan.

As journalism it worked. The staff came out of Entertainment Weekly and Wired and Joystiq, the reviews ran long, and the comics went up on a schedule. Inside a year the site was drawing about a million unique visitors a month, which for an independent games publication in 2009 was a real audience. What it could not do was sell against that audience, because the only advertisers who wanted games readers were the ones it had ruled out. Heldman later described the timing as a perfect storm, which was his way of saying the recession had cleared out everybody else too.

In December 2009 the company bought gamerDNA, a games social network, mostly for its metrics business. One month later, on 21 January 2010, the board cut the entire editorial department, eight people including Kyle Orland and John Teti. Heldman resigned as CEO the same day over a decision his own board had made. Jon Radoff, who had been running gamerDNA until six weeks earlier, said he found out about it when journalists rang to ask.

I was not a Crispy Gamer reader. In 2009 my games reading was whatever surfaced in English search results plus the Turkish forums, and a fifteen-month-old New York site that had sworn off publisher advertising never came up in either. What I recognize is the business problem rather than the writing. Refusing the money that wants your audience is a position you hold for exactly as long as somebody else is funding you.

~ the case file ~

~ the condition keefer set ~

Keefer's stipulation reads like ordinary media ethics now and in the games press of 2007 it was closer to a structural bet. Print gaming magazines had run on publisher advertising for twenty years, and the web outlets that replaced them inherited the arrangement without much of an argument about it. Opting out meant Crispy Gamer had to find general consumer advertisers who wanted a games audience for some other reason, starting eighteen months after Lehman Brothers went down.

The traffic was never the failure. A million uniques a month in 2009 put the site in the same band as outlets that were paying their writers comfortably. The difference was who was allowed to buy the inventory.

~ the meeting the day before ~

Harold Goldberg reconstructed the sequence for Slate's The Big Money two weeks after it happened. On 20 January, Tom Wasserman of Constellation Ventures sat down with John Teti, the site's videographer, and told him he was unhappy with the traffic and the ad revenue. The next day the writers were gone and what was left of the company was pointed at a games-focused advertising network. Fifteen months is not long enough to learn whether an independent games magazine can pay for itself, and the board did not wait to find out.

~ the eighteen months of afterlife ~

The domain kept answering. Archive captures show crispygamer.com returning a page every month for years after the writers left, because nobody switched off a working server. In July 2011 gamerDNA was sold on to Live Gamer, with Crispy Gamer still nominally in the portfolio. Kyle Orland, introducing himself to Ars Technica readers in January 2012, wrote about the site in the past tense, which is as close to a death notice as it got.

There was no farewell post and no announcement. A publication that had launched with a press release about $8.25 million and a promise of editorial independence closed with neither.

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