[quote name='MarioColbert']Maddox. Penny-Arcade. VGCats. SomethingAwful. YTMND.
Those guys are the opposite of "flashy," and they don't bother to advertise, yet people flock to them like crazy. Penny Arcade generates two million visitors per day (according to Gabe, so give or take a million), and unlike GameSpot and IGN, they spend $0.00 on advertisement. The same can be said for the rest.
Each of the aforementioned has an army of people that can bring down any of the geosites websites, simply by posting a link on their appropriate website. Each of them can generate a substantial revenue through advertisements alone. They did it by posting their honest opinions, unfiltered by, well, anything.
Those guys can do something... Something more than make fun of the new Superman Movie. Something more than write a book about how funny chauvenism is. Something much more than Bill Cosby rapping... You get my drift.[/QUOTE]
They aren't the "print" media, unfortunately. While they can take editorial perspectives on games and gaming current events, they aren't what people go to for hard-hitting news and interviews. They're kinda like the "Free Republic/Daily Kos" of gaming sites. All opinion and no substance.
They also don't interview Peter Moore and give him shit, or Reggie, or whomever. The closest that comes to that is EGM's retrospective interview in each issue, where they interview the lead somepositionorother for a top notch game that's a few months old, asking them about stuff left out, regrets, and things of that nature.
What seems to me to be the problem is that the gaming rags (print, gamespot, ign) see themselves to be in competition with each other, rather than serving as a bipartisan force to bring real news to people. Piss off Ubisoft? Someone else gets the cover story for Assassin's Creed. Piss off EA? You lose credibility when all the other rags but yours have review copies of their titles. Ask Peter Moore a tough question? Well, that'll be the last interview you do with him. I can't prove this, of course, but that's because we have the problem we exist in currently. The media act as cheerleaders for the industry, uncritically pushing title x or system y, and failing to ask tough questions of the PR bullshit artists for each system (though post-release mockery of Peter Molyneux is common, it's pervasive enough to be exempt from this point). Because, it seems, nobody is willing to talk shit about the industry, we haven't seen the ramifications of a gaming media that's willing to call a piece of shit a piece of shit. Shame, really.