GamersNexus Bringing Back Written Reviews: Old Is New Again

Randall Stephens said:
I highly recommend adjusting the YouTube playback speed to 103% and listening to Bob Seger’s against the wind. Then go back and listen to it at 100% and tell me that Bob didn’t get the tempo wrong. If anybody does this let me know. When you’ve heard it at 103, 100 sounds wrong forever.
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Same for the tech "content creators", except I usually recommend 2.5x with regards to "tempo".
 
I am enjoying that "Bob Seger" and "written reviews" have something in common.
 
I dig it. While I don't always agree with some of GN's focus ("Thermals!!!!"), I like that their videos nearly always have clearly labeled chapters. I also appreciate their integrity and the fact that they do their due diligence. This will make digging around for reference reviews and info way easier.
 
This is good news for me. I much prefer written reviews and think that it's a much better format for conveying information as well as making it easier to go back and find a specific detail.

I get that some people prefer the video format and even learn more from it but I still think the main reason for the shift away from written reviews has to do with it being easier to monetize videos so it's nice to see GN add these back to supplement the videos.
 
Watched the vid. Did not subscribe, but I'll snoop their website in the future... mostly because I am arms length interested in headless drupal.
 
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Randall Stephens said:
I highly recommend adjusting the YouTube playback speed to 103% and listening to Bob Seger’s against the wind. Then go back and listen to it at 100% and tell me that Bob didn’t get the tempo wrong. If anybody does this let me know. When you’ve heard it at 103, 100 sounds wrong forever.
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Same thing happens in the opposite direction if you take a 45 of Dolly Parton's Jolene and slow it down to 33rpm. The original sounds weird after.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMrfM711vXI
 
Ebernanut said:
This is good news for me. I much prefer written reviews and think that it's a much better format for conveying information as well as making it easier to go back and find a specific detail.

I get that some people prefer the video format and even learn more from it but I still think the main reason for the shift away from written reviews has to do with it being easier to monetize videos so it's nice to see GN add these back to supplement the videos.
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As someone who's been writing written reviews for 16 years or so, I'll weigh in here. I think written articles are vastly superior for most hardware reviews. It's just a better way of conveying much more technical detail and depth than a video is. That being said, there are cases where a video is a far better option. Case reviews are a fantastic example of this. It allows you to see the object and get a better sense of scale, heft, quality and the like in a way that static photos don't allow. A reviewer giving impressions on build quality and even some of those initial reactions in unboxing videos are potentially valuable.

But if your goal is to learn about the VRM's and look at benchmark data, I don't think video is really a good format for that. In some cases, I think video makes a good supplement to the written review. An unboxing video linked in the article for example could be of interest and use to some people.
 
The only time I've enjoyed Video Reviews is the often mentioned case review (just how the hell does that panel come off?!?), and the other is video card full coverage waterblock reviews. In the waterblock case the value is in the assembly process.

In basically all other cases, give me a written review. I don't get much value from blowing 30 minutes to find out the performance of a Samsung 990pro or whatever.
 
DPI said:
One-page, long form written hardware reviews with no ads or popups: time will tell if this is momentary novelty, or will join TheFPSReview.com and few others in trying to continue if not recapture the magic that made sites like [H]ardOCP such a fixture of the golden age of PC hardware reviews. If nothing else, being able to quickly CTRL-F to the word "overclock" without a descent into multi-page, notification and cookie prompt hell.


View: https://youtu.be/Mrdw1fiqPmI
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Someone needs to work on using AI to insert Tech Jesus into this video :p


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gOHvDP_vCs
 
Dan_D said:
As someone who's been writing written reviews for 16 years or so, I'll weigh in here. I think written articles are vastly superior for most hardware reviews. It's just a better way of conveying much more technical detail and depth than a video is. That being said, there are cases where a video is a far better option. Case reviews are a fantastic example of this. It allows you to see the object and get a better sense of scale, heft, quality and the like in a way that static photos don't allow. A reviewer giving impressions on build quality and even some of those initial reactions in unboxing videos are potentially valuable.

But if your goal is to learn about the VRM's and look at benchmark data, I don't think video is really a good format for that. In some cases, I think video makes a good supplement to the written review. An unboxing video linked in the article for example could be of interest and use to some people.
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I basically agree with all of this. The other thing too is understanding your audience. I don't necessarily think that video reviews are the best at displaying all kinds of information, but the other half of it is knowing that a good chunk of the enthusiast audience isn't necessarily interested in a deep dive for every review anyway. It's good that reviewers do that, as the due diligence makes for accurate reviews, but most people including myself are satisfied with knowing generally where things fall comparatively vs something else. And also I'm watching whomever I'm watching for their editorial stance on a given product. Which is precisely why I never watched Linus and why I do watch DF, GN, HU, etc.

So video's fit a lot of the viewership because they don't want the deep dive, they do want easily digestible information, and good enough is good enough.
 
UnknownSouljer said:
So video's fit a lot of the viewership because they don't want the deep dive, they do want easily digestible information, and good enough is good enough.
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Essentially the people who used to be on consoles before their friends convinced them "PC is better" :p

I know people hate gatekeepers, but I kind of liked things the way they used to be. If you wanted to partake in top tier gaming, you needed to take the time and learn all the nitty gritty details, or stay away. No pre-builts, no gaming laptops, no portable PC gaming handhelds. If you didn't have a n engineering mindset, you didn't game on the PC.

It kept a lot of the nitwits out.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Essentially the people who used to be on consoles before their friends convinced them "PC is better" :p

I know people hate gatekeepers, but I kind of liked things the way they used to be. If you wanted to partake in top tier gaming, you needed to take the time and learn all the nitty gritty details, or stay away. No pre-builts, no gaming laptops, no portable PC gaming handhelds. If you didn't have a n engineering mindset, you didn't game on the PC.

It kept a lot of the nitwits out.
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Hate to tell you but it's always been this way. Kyle left his sarcastic remark earlier in this very thread essentially saying that only the first and 10th pages were populated with content and pages 2-9 were blank just to see if anyone would check.
FrgMstr said:
We used to make reviews 10 pages all the time and just leave 2 through 9 blank and no one ever noticed.
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My point here being that people would simply read the summary and trust what the reviewer said. And that was true whether talking about [H], Anandtech, or Tom's or whatever. The difference now is that people can passively listen to a review instead of skimming 'an executive summary'. So people's behavior here hasn't changed at all. The audience may have increased but it's not due to people being more or less technically savvy. So while Gatekeeping might make you feel "elite", turns out your perception of it was an illusion.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Essentially the people who used to be on consoles before their friends convinced them "PC is better" :p

I know people hate gatekeepers, but I kind of liked things the way they used to be. If you wanted to partake in top tier gaming, you needed to take the time and learn all the nitty gritty details, or stay away. No pre-builts, no gaming laptops, no portable PC gaming handhelds. If you didn't have a n engineering mindset, you didn't game on the PC.

It kept a lot of the nitwits out.
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I don't think you're gatekeeping as much as lamenting the dearth of more in-depth, technical reviews that take time to digest. Making accessible, superficial videos and putting them on YouTube isn't itself problematic - there's a huge audience for that and I appreciate PC gamers who don't have the inclination to spend hours and hours of time and thousands and thousands of dollars building beast machines. What I hate is that it seems like ALL of the money and effort moved to at best 'enthusiast-lite' video reviews, and at worse, bullshit clickbait nonsense garbage videos.

I happily plunked down $50 on Patreon for a year-long subscription to their new site and am looking forward to not triple-timing through 5 minutes of fluff to hit pause on the one figure that shows me what I need to know.
 
UnknownSouljer said:
Hate to tell you but it's always been this way. Kyle left his sarcastic remark earlier in this very thread essentially saying that only the first and 10th pages were populated with content and pages 2-9 were blank just to see if anyone would check.


My point here being that people would simply read the summary and trust what the reviewer said. And that was true whether talking about [H], Anandtech, or Tom's or whatever. The difference now is that people can passively listen to a review instead of skimming 'an executive summary'. So people's behavior here hasn't changed at all. The audience may have increased but it's not due to people being more or less technically savvy. So while Gatekeeping might make you feel "elite", turns out your perception of it was an illusion.
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The detailed stuff I wrote about integrated NIC's, BIOS information and a lot of the subsystem stuff was largely ignored. What sucks about that is that it was the vast majority of the actual work writing the review and even doing the testing. People read the intro and the overclocking and conclusion page. That was generally it as far as I could tell. We've cut out a lot of that at FPSReview to make more succinct articles and again no one has noticed or cared.
 
Dan_D said:
The detailed stuff I wrote about integrated NIC's, BIOS information and a lot of the subsystem stuff was largely ignored. What sucks about that is that it was the vast majority of the actual work writing the review and even doing the testing. People read the intro and the overclocking and conclusion page. That was generally it as far as I could tell. We've cut out a lot of that at FPSReview to make more succinct articles and again no one has noticed or cared.
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I hadn't noticed, but that's largely because I haven't been reading a lot of reviews lately.

I think its a shame that's the way it has gone. I - for one - really appreciated that stuff. (But usually only once every 3-4 years when I go to upgrade :p )
 
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UnknownSouljer said:
Hate to tell you but it's always been this way. Kyle left his sarcastic remark earlier in this very thread essentially saying that only the first and 10th pages were populated with content and pages 2-9 were blank just to see if anyone would check.


My point here being that people would simply read the summary and trust what the reviewer said. And that was true whether talking about [H], Anandtech, or Tom's or whatever. The difference now is that people can passively listen to a review instead of skimming 'an executive summary'. So people's behavior here hasn't changed at all. The audience may have increased but it's not due to people being more or less technically savvy. So while Gatekeeping might make you feel "elite", turns out your perception of it was an illusion.
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I respectfully disagree - most of us still frequenting and posting on this board were the fraction of the fraction that were, in fact, reading pages 2-9. And if the audience has increased, the fraction of a fraction is absolutely larger today than it was 20 years ago, even if it is not relatively. Edit: re-reading what you said, I don't actually disagree with you.

When I began work on my PhD, I was concerned I wasn't smart enough to earn it. I said to my mentor, 'I feel like all I really do is read the articles, write down a few sentences about how the articles relate to other articles I've read, and try to come up with a few questions following from the articles I think might be interesting and feasible to pursue.' My mentor laughed his ass off at me and said 'You'll be fine.' The point of this anecdote is that [h]ardcore enthusiasts often don't realize how much more they're putting into their passions than nearly everyone else.
 
Motherboard reviews were ones I always read the whole way through, as looking over the build quality was important, along with overclocking functions and such. Motherboards used to be a lot more hit and miss then they are now. CPU reviews I mostly looked at benchmarks and the summary, for a video card I looked a bit more closely at build quality and thermals. I do still enjoy a written review they are just harder to come by these days.
 
Gideon said:
Motherboard reviews were ones I always read the whole way through, as looking over the build quality was important, along with overclocking functions and such. Motherboards used to be a lot more hit and miss then they are now. CPU reviews I mostly looked at benchmarks and the summary, for a video card I looked a bit more closely at build quality and thermals. I do still enjoy a written review they are just harder to come by these days.
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I mentioned earlier that the only time I would deep dive on a topic is if I was about to buy. I imagine it's true for other people as well. The thing is other than that, reviews are a form of "entertainment" in the sense that we're hobbiests that are keeping up on general information inside of our hobby. And that's where video reviews come in and/or reading executive summaries come in.

So I agree with you in the sense that having the detail there is important, it's just not important enough for most audiences, most of the time, until a purchasing decision is happening. I used to get detailed enough in my reading to know what kind of audio DAC's a board had, how many lanes were coming of the CPU vs the northbridge, and electrically how that affected the PCI-E slots and NVME slots, etc. So believe when I say I'm right there with you - but it comes down to how much time I have to spend on this hobby. And it turns out if I'm not buying in the immediate future the time is very short. And I would say I'm probably not alone in this mentality when it comes to how we digest this information.

If I'm not buying, it doesn't really help me to know all the differences between every board in even one product stack. Gigabyte as an example makes something like 13 different boards for any given chipset. If I'm not about to buy, why bother knowing what all of the differences are in just their product stack, let alone their competition? As much as anyone wants to say they're elite, outside of a Gigabyte hardware engineer, I doubt anyone on this board can tell me the exact VRM configuration of every Gigabyte board from a single generation, let alone multiple generations and let alone them + Asus, Asrock, and MSI, etc. So I would say it's the same thing when looking at reviews. Keeping on general knowledge is enough. I don't need to know specific knowledge until I do.
 
Gideon said:
Motherboard reviews were ones I always read the whole way through, as looking over the build quality was important, along with overclocking functions and such. Motherboards used to be a lot more hit and miss then they are now. CPU reviews I mostly looked at benchmarks and the summary, for a video card I looked a bit more closely at build quality and thermals. I do still enjoy a written review they are just harder to come by these days.
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Ditto. Don't get me wrong. I'd also do a lot of skimming of reviews.

Usually I'd read reviews all the way through once. Then come back several times, refresh my memory, or compare the same sections of multiple reviews for comparison purposes or to support a forum post, stuff like that.

A review was not a "one and done" thing for me, but rather a "read it once" then reference it countless times over the next couple of years, often using Ctrl-F to find the part of the page I remember reading. Not sure how that would have shown up in the page stats :p
 
Endgame said:
This is the kind of information that is best served as text, and is completely devoid from any video review I've ever seen:

The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ​

https://www.anandtech.com/show/2738

that is the kind of stuff where you come away actually having learned something and knowing what kind of drive you wanted to be shopping for.
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The downside is it is completely absent from Anandtech these days as well.

Ever since Anand sold out and went to Apple, it has been a slow slide into just posting press releases and company announcements. Very little in the way of real content/ testing.

Which is a real shame. Anandtech used to have the best SSD testing. That was the one thing I used to go over there for.
 
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Dan_D said:
As someone who's been writing written reviews for 16 years or so, I'll weigh in here. I think written articles are vastly superior for most hardware reviews. It's just a better way of conveying much more technical detail and depth than a video is. That being said, there are cases where a video is a far better option. Case reviews are a fantastic example of this. It allows you to see the object and get a better sense of scale, heft, quality and the like in a way that static photos don't allow. A reviewer giving impressions on build quality and even some of those initial reactions in unboxing videos are potentially valuable.

But if your goal is to learn about the VRM's and look at benchmark data, I don't think video is really a good format for that. In some cases, I think video makes a good supplement to the written review. An unboxing video linked in the article for example could be of interest and use to some people.
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Include reference for size and I think photos are fine for case reviews but, video works too. One of the few subjects where it doesn't need to turn into a narrated slideshow to make it of any use.
 
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Prince Valiant said:
Include reference for size and I think photos are fine for case reviews but, video works too. One of the few subjects where it doesn't need to turn into a narrated slideshow to make it of any use.
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My favorite are the reviews that are written , but include embedded media (picture, audio, or video) where it adds value to illustrate some point that can't easily be illustrated in written form.

I really like what Gamers Nexus is doing here. The only downside is that there is like a week or two delay, which means - at least for me - the effort likely won't get much use. A lot of the information is of the very timely sort.

I understand why they do it that way though. YouTube still pays most of the bills. it's tough to get away from that.

Maybe they could do a subscription model where donors get instant access to the written content, and everyone else gets it a week or two later?
 
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