Among one of the stranger stories to come out of Jim Sterling of the Jimquisition's YouTube channel is an expose, dealing with a relatively well known video game review website that's eerily similar to our own.
On April 17th, the former Escapist contributor's channel posted a 20-minute video exposing the very shady underpinnings of Brash Games; a gaming news and review outlet that's been host to a lot of video game journalists over the past ten years. What may not come as a surprise to some, is that often the writers of Brash Games weren't being paid for the work they contributed to the website.
This is often the case for many wanting to break into the game review scene and potentially make a living from it. Writers often lend their work to a website in exchange for the exposure to build a portfolio. I started off doing that for years between my full time job, and eventually I gave up and just started my own website.
Getting lured with the promise of 'exposure' in exchange for giving away an article is commonplace in this industry, but when game reviewer and long time contributor Olly Smith decided to quit working for Brash Games, the website systematically erased his name from the reviews he wrote. In fact, when another reviewer by the name Josh Robertson had a very similar situation with Brash Games they went as far as changing the review scores of some of the games he wrote about, to scores that fit more closely with the rating mega-site Metacritic.
Apparently, this was not an isolated incident, either. It appears that anyone who decided to quit working for Brash Games were habitually credited out of their own articles and reviews, which was the only reason anyone would work for them in the first place.
One of the most popular examples of this is a Pac-Man 256 review by Ben Curry, in which he severely roasts Brash Game's editor Paul Ryan.
One of the most popular examples of this is a Pac-Man 256 review by Ben Curry, in which he severely roasts Brash Game's editor Paul Ryan.
The idea of Pac-Man 256 is derived from what happens in the original Pac-Man when you clear 256 levels; on level 257, the game becomes a garbled mess that becomes unplayable. A good example of a garbled mess is Brash Games; this very website that strips authors of their writing credits when they leave the site, later attributing them to the sole owner and editor, Paul Ryan, making your work completely pointless, just as Pac-Man is completely pointless after level 256.Oh, but it gets better:
Namco Bandai haven’t changed too much of the winning formula, and why should they? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Everything that we grew to love in the original iterations is still present; the classic sound effects, the musical stings, and even ghosts. Speaking of ghosts, did you know that Brash Games deliberately ghosted themselves from Metacritic, GameRankings, and OpenCritic (marking themselves as “out of business on Meta and GR, which is an outrageous and egregious lie – it’s here right now) to avoid having any sort of public record of reviews available which would have attributed work to the proper authors? It’s true! In fact, when reviewers leave, work gets automatically attributed to “Brash Games”, which is solely operated by Paul Ryan, thus making it seem like he did all the work. OpenCritic are doing an investigation into the behaviour of the site and everything. But what truly deserves investigation is the new alterations added to the game in order to freshen up the format; this is very much a case of teaching an old dog new tricks.
The entire un-redacted article is available here, for anyone who's interested. It's actually pretty funny, and it's a shame he wasn't paid for such a well played roast. What's even funnier is that Jim Sterling --upon hearing about what happened-- invited Ben Curry to write an article about the Brash Games situation. Only this time, Ben would get paid for it.
Several critics and writers brought this issue to OpenCritic, who conducted their own investigation into Brash Games, as well as it's supposed owner, Paul Ryan. (No, not that one.) OpenCritic --in case you aren't in the know-- is a website that hosts freelance writers, and pools a collection of review scores in order to give a kind of estimated consensus on what people are saying about a particular game. As the investigation was happening, Brash Games seemed to have been actively covering up any and all evidence of wrongdoing -- even going as far as to remove archived posts with dozens of articles that linked to shady online casino websites. Luckily, Opencritic archived the posts themselves, and upon concluding their own investigation, decided to remove Brash Games from their list of websites, as they used data from Brash Games in the past.
A NeoGAF user calling himself shandy706 pointed out that the owner of the site doesn't seem to exist, and many of the articles that link to shady gambling websites might be posted by a sock puppet account by the name David James. (No, Not that famous soccer player either.) A YouTuber by the name KiriothTV has a few videos exposing the potential casino scam in great detail.
FULL DISCLOSURE:
RageFor was also solicited by a few of the shady gambling websites mentioned. (These sites will remain unnamed, out of fear that someone might be gullible enough to gamble with one.) We would be asked to write a thinly veiled advertisement that looked like a legitimate think piece, --much the same way Brash Games's articles turned out-- and we were even asked to 'name our price', if not offered a flat fee upfront. We refused every time, but the level of persistence their parent company seems to have is something to behold. Our contact email (admin@ragefor.com) has at least one solicitation per-day from some shady gambling sites, sometimes offering a rate up front in the email. To give some perspective, our email is generally reserved for people with questions, or ad placement requests, but we get a lot of press kits from startup game developers in the hopes we will cover their games. This isn't done for money at all, this is done for exposure. The aggressive approach taken by gambling sites is bordering obsessive compulsive.
one time, a Legit advertisement agency contacted me, under the pretext of running a banner. (Media Top.) Fair enough, but as it turns out, upon further digging, what they really wanted was an entire article written (by me) for one of their shady casino gambling site clients. It isn't hard to see why ad agencies are paying websites for backlinks within unique articles though. Google's algorithm seems to move a website's ranking up one whole space per-backlink to the website in question, so, one could theoretically pay their way to the top of the internet if enough websites took the bait. Honestly, though, that's a lot of trouble to go through for a tiny website like ours. To try and sneak in a casino spam request through an email --sent by a human being this time-- under false pretenses is some true desperation.
one time, a Legit advertisement agency contacted me, under the pretext of running a banner. (Media Top.) Fair enough, but as it turns out, upon further digging, what they really wanted was an entire article written (by me) for one of their shady casino gambling site clients. It isn't hard to see why ad agencies are paying websites for backlinks within unique articles though. Google's algorithm seems to move a website's ranking up one whole space per-backlink to the website in question, so, one could theoretically pay their way to the top of the internet if enough websites took the bait. Honestly, though, that's a lot of trouble to go through for a tiny website like ours. To try and sneak in a casino spam request through an email --sent by a human being this time-- under false pretenses is some true desperation.
Brash Games' Business Model makes No Sense
First of all, let me start of by questioning the reasoning behind actually hiring someone if you're not going to pay them actual money for their work. I don't know about the UK --where Brash Games is based in-- but here in the states, that's called wage theft, and we have laws against that with the obvious exception of academic internships. The fact that someone would have to resign from volunteer work is absolutely ridiculous.
Nearly all work done by writers for a lot of mid-range sites similar to Brash's are done in a freelance capacity, and it isn't hard to see why. Hiring a blogger to "contribute" to your site for a flat fee would be far more affordable, and avoids a lot of potential financial pitfalls, like having to pay an employee tax, or a mandatory hourly minimum wage. (Depending on what country or province you live in.) To be honest, it would never have made sense --with Brash's business model-- for Brash Games to be able to pay writers in the first place. Even if brash games ran Adsense ads to pay for itself, the owner of the site wouldn't even break even with its hosting expenses, making it impossible to even consider paying a writer -- let alone hiring one full time. A Pew Research Center study suggest nearly 62% get their news-related material from Facebook, making sites like this one a thing of the past that hardly justifies the expense of hosting a website for ads. Factor in the $150 a year in average hosting, domain, and maintenance costs, You end up with a website that hardly qualified as a business, let alone an entity that can afford the caliber of writing talent it 'hired' in the first place. A website with two Adsense ads per-page --even landing 10,000 unique impressions per month-- could only hope to average around $200 a year in returns. That's barely enough to pay for itself, let alone a writing staff. It's a wonder this site is even getting by with the online casino affiliate links it is quite obviously being paid to produce.
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