Evil Avatar Analysts ...

So, the fine folks over at Evil Avatar have had enough, and they've launched a new "Evil Avatar Analysts" Website:

"So, here we are. The people who play the games, read about the games, study the corporations creating the games, and obsess over every detail of our hobby. We are providing the analysis now. You want to know what to really expect from this industry? Don’t ask a suit or a pocketbook. Ask an intelligent, informed, articulate gamer."

The site's got some interesting initial topics, including "Math is Hard: Assassin’s Creed for the DS? Highly likely"; "Guitar Hero II = Love, GHII Downloadable Songs = Not So Lovable"; "Shifting Trends: Microsoft and a series of Errors" ; and "Big Brother is watching you play games".

I think it's a good addition to the gaming blogosphere, and (along with Kotaku and Joystiq), I've been long glad for Evil Avatar's game coverage.

I am, however, going to give the site some more time before deciding it's useful to me. And it's not an analyst site, per se. Reading the first run of posts, I would say it's certainly more of an gamers' Op-Ed site (which is fine; and analysts are lying if they say they're not opinionated).

A few things at least are keeping this from really being in the "analyst" arena.

First, there's this gamer-centric, almost anti-corporate vibe. Though at least one contributer explicitly acknowledges, "Don’t ever forget for even one second that game corporations are in this business to make money", that acknowledgement of reality seems to be lacking in his and co-posters' writings. Corporations make the world go 'round, and while I like and support and participate in the indie game scene, that scene doesn't bring me Gears of War, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, Mass Effect, BioShock, or the like (it does, however, bring me Dungeon Master). Want a triple-A title? You need a triple-A budget (and yeah, despite Epic Games's assertion of the "small" $10-15M Gears of War development budget, I would like to see the Microsoft Marketing budget for the title; and I would like people to stop using Gears as an example of a triple-A now-gen title built on a last-gen budget).

Secondly (and tied to the first), I'm not sure where the corporate experience is for these contributing writers. Granted, the bios are a bit thin, so there's obviously more to each of them, but it doesn't appear that anyone there has any enterprise financial, development, product, program, service, or project management experience (and yeah, I have all of those). Don't get me wrong -- having years of gaming experience and relationships with companies like these guys have is huge. But I do take issue with commentary lobbed from folks who haven't lived in the trenches with tough product, financial, and development / customer balancing acts. I think that insight would balance their gamer's perspective.

Finally (if only because people remember things best in threes), the professionalism tone may inhibit them in their analyst goal.

"Ask an intelligent, informed, articulate gamer."

That's a good, important goal. However, the tone needs to be watched (or at least evaluated; their tagline is, after all, "Providing in-depth game industry analystatistics…with attitude!").

To illustrate what could be perceived as a possible lack of professional writing, I had pulled a bunch of sound bites out of the posts, then realized all but one were from a single contributer. So, that's either easily fixable, or that becomes his particular "voice".

Gamers opinions are unfortunately often discounted by mainstream press, because there's a stereotype of immaturity and lack of professionalsim (which, incidentally, is borne out in spades through a majority of video game forums). And things like Take Two Interactive's lack of responsibility doesn't help at all. So, to be taken seriously, I think gamers almost need to err too far on the "professionalism" side of literary voice, just to be taken seriously. But that's my opinion.

Overall, I don't mean to come down on the whole "Evil Avatar Analysts" Website. I think it's a cool idea. Besides, "legitimate" video games analysts (as I've mentioned repeatedly) are usually only right 30-60% of the time, and a lot of the big financial firms are getting involved late in the game with green analysts only because they see the dollar signs, but they aren't immersed in the relationships or culture that create a better understanding and (importantly to them) bigger financial opportunity.

Let's see how it goes moving forward. They need to be different. They need to be deep. They need to be useful. These guys need to compete with solid, vetted gamer analysts (who are themselves gamers) like Chris Morris and Jeff Keighley (who seems to be falling out of favor with gamers), and differentiate themselves from other gamer analyst sites, and differentiate themselves from their own Evil Avatar main site brethren (otherwise, why exist as a separate site?).

That's a lot to juggle, but some useful stuff could come out of it for the gamer community, if they pull it off. Best of luck to them.