Nov. 19, 2014 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
03:16
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| Time | Text |
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| I'd like to announce that I'll be having a conversation with Jenny Barrage about Based Gamer on Sunday the 23rd of November 2014 at 10pm British Standard Time. | |
| If you have any questions you'd like me to ask Jenny, please leave them in the comments. | |
| I'm neither condemning nor endorsing anything about this project. | |
| I'm going to take a quick look at the information that I have available to me to give everyone a quick overview of what I know. | |
| Basedgamer.com is currently a holding site where anyone can sign up and reserve their username in advance. | |
| It has a link to an Indiegogo campaign to raise the funds to create the website. | |
| The stated goal is $50,000 and has just over $11,000 pledged now from 182 backers. | |
| I've been informed multiple times in conversation that Jenny put up $2,000 of this money herself. | |
| In the introduction bit, Jenny states that Based Gamer will be devoted to a community driven by gamers, similar to the popular website rottentomatoes.com. | |
| Based Gamer will feature a genuine aggregation of game reviews and other great features. | |
| Jenny has apparently already assembled a team who at this time are undisclosed and she's expecting 650 hours work to build the website with them. | |
| This includes design, programming and testing, and a percentage breakdown of the cost is as follows. | |
| 35% cost to designers, this will include 45 iterations of design work for web and mobile screens, 45% to the cost of development, this will include front-end and back-end programming, and 20% cost of performance testing slash tuning. | |
| This will include unit testing, beta testing and bug fixing. | |
| We are expecting to work with a team of five two-end front designers, one back-end programmer, and one front-end programmer and one testing lead. | |
| She states the current risks as being a low number of sign-ups as well as a lot of recent instance of malicious attacks targeting individuals and websites in the game industry, and she is concerned about similar attacks towards Based Gamer. | |
| To remind you who Jenny Barrage is, she's been a relatively prominent voice in Gamergate, having appeared on both the Huffington Post and the David Pacman show in defense of Gamergate. | |
| And she has a genuinely solid body of work behind her on her YouTube channel that she's been doing for the last five months predating Gamergate. | |
| Jenny's project has recently received criticism from a website called Reaxion that honestly I don't feel has done itself any favours at all with its clickbait headline and rather extreme statements. | |
| For example, Jenny Barrage does not want $50,000 of any individual's money, so saying why does she want $50,000 of your money is wrong. | |
| I don't know who these people are but I wouldn't be surprised if they were owned by Gorka. | |
| But they do raise some valid points that I will go through here. | |
| They think $50,000 is an excessive amount of money to ask for. | |
| They question what's the need for a video game review aggregation site. | |
| They want a more clear breakdown of how the money's going to be spent. | |
| And they want to know more about the team that she's working with. | |
| I think all of these are valid questions, but I don't think they're beyond answering. | |
| And I think Jenny has definitely paid her dues with Gamergate so far, so she's certainly entitled to the benefit of the doubt. | |
| So to wrap up, I'm quite ambivalent about the subject, but I'm quite willing to listen. | |
| There's nothing about the project that immediately strikes me as untenable, and I don't see why it couldn't be a success, especially if it has solid community backing. |
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