Rev3Games

» see rev3games.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

American games television is one of those things that stayed inside America. G4 and X-Play never showed up on any package I could buy in Turkey, so the whole apparatus of the on-camera games critic with a studio set and a catchphrase was something I only encountered secondhand, years late, through clips. Games coverage here came off paper and out of forums. In the years I was posting on donanimhaber with my hardware list in the signature, the idea that a reviewer might be a television personality sounded like a category error.

Rev3Games launched on 13 March 2012, inside Revision3, which by then belonged to Discovery. The bet was that the audience for that kind of criticism had not disappeared when cable stopped funding it, it had simply moved to YouTube and would follow the faces rather than the channel. On 12 November 2012, Revision3 hired Adam Sessler, who had come up through TechTV and then spent years as the face of X-Play on G4, and made him editor-in-chief and executive producer.

It worked for a while. Sessler did long reviews that argued with games instead of scoring them, and a rotating bench of hosts around him did the daily volume. The channel had the one thing a video brand cannot manufacture, which is a person the audience had already decided to trust.

~ the dossier ~

~ the sessler year ~

He left Discovery Digital Networks in April 2014. Within the same month, roughly half the Rev3Games staff quit as well, which tells you how much of the operation was held together by one person's judgment about what the channel was for.

What remained was a real team, Tara Long and Nick Robinson among them, doing competent work into a hole where the audience used to be. The math of a personality-led channel is unforgiving in both directions. Subscriber counts do not fall when a host leaves, because nobody unsubscribes, they just stop clicking, and the view numbers erode quietly for months while the dashboard still shows a healthy figure.

~ the last upload ~

Discovery Digital Networks ended the channel on 6 November 2014, two years and eight months after it started, and gave no public reason. There was no wind-down schedule and no word about what would happen to the back catalog. A corporate parent that owns a dozen web video brands does not owe anyone an explanation for retiring one of them, and it did not offer any.

rev3games.com now forwards to a discount game key shop, which is the ordinary fate of a media domain once the legal department stops renewing it for sentimental reasons.

~ the g4 inheritance ~

The interesting part is where the people went. The hosts scattered into IGN and Polygon while Sessler kept working in games on his own terms. The format they had all been carrying since cable, one person on camera with an opinion and a deadline, turned out to be perfectly portable. It did not need Revision3 and it did not need Discovery. Within a few years the same job was being done by individuals with their own channels and no employer at all, which is either the happy ending or the reason nobody could fund a studio version of it.

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