Feature: The Hsu Drops: EGM Editor Dan Hsu on the gaming industry and media Subscribe to this RSS feed
Very few people give the gaming press any credibility whatsoever. A lot of young kids who either are not professional writers or journalists by nature - and in saying this - I am not trying to give off the impression that I know it all and I am the best at this or that everyone should emulate me. I have room to improve. I'm no CNN or Time Magazine. There are a lot of things that we could do better, but I am just saying as a whole, we are not really a respected industry. When you see young kids go up to and try and get their picture taken with or autographs from the head of game companies or famous developers or taking a free trip and then writing a story about a game... well, of course, we are never going to get the respect because we're not acting mature enough! I kind of do those things with the hope that it might not necessarily change the industry, but it might make a few more people think more about what they are doing, and say "You know what, he is right. I am going to pick the covers. I am not going to let my advertising teams pick the covers for me, I am going to handle myself with dignity and integrity despite what I see everywhere else" If a few magazines are doing it right, but the majority are not, then the bad is definitely going to overwhelm the good. People are only going to see the negative-- take one rotten apple and everything is ruined. I try to just hope that the industry could do better --us included. We just want to do the best job possible.
It may not look like Hsu, but this Penny-Arcade image was inspired by him.
So going to your other point about those interviews, I'm surprised. We're mostly getting good comments about those and a lot of people are really happy that we are doing such thing. I don't see what the big deal is honestly, because I am only asking questions that everyone is already. Most gamers don't have access to the President of Sony, so it's our job as the media to ask those questions. But they are out there; I didn't throw in any surprises in there. Peter Moore, like everybody, knows these games are not 100 percent backward compatible with the 360. Sony knows like this machine is really expensive and the PlayStation network isn't everything it was promised to be, so we ask the questions and I just don't see what the big deal is. It is not like I am creating topics of discussion that no one had thought of before. The problem is that with most media, that the people are afraid to ask those questions. They don't want to piss Sony off because we haven't really matured a lot as a media.
DR: Between the official PS magazine closing up and there are always a few rumors around Ziff-Davis [about the magazine] being sold and other magazines going under, what do you see as a future for the magazine game industry?
Hsu: It's important for our magazine to be working closely with our online properties [1UP, GameVideos, and MyCheats.com]. One example is instead of our magazine trying give tips and tricks, why not leave that to the websites that have that space. It's much easier to look up something on a MyCheats or a Gamefaqs to try and find help than to look to a monthly magazine for that. We try and kind of work closely with our online properties to make sure what we do still relevant and make sense in today's Internet age.
