Topic: How much is too much?

So I am kind of a lurker on Push Square. I don't post much and rarely on the forums BUT I do visit the site multiple times daily. I have always like the way the team have covered news and events and I am a self-confessed Sony Pony, I love all things PS.

I wanted to post today however, to give some gentle feedback about the amount of posts on say one topic. The topic of Death Stranding. LOL.

I am going to preface this by saying, I have kept mostly spoiler free - I'm waiting on my game coming. I am quietly ambivelent about DS as it sounds like that kind of game I would like, but if I am honest I have never really been a fan of HK storytelling. He designs a mean game, yes, but I find his writing extremely heavy handed. But I am quietly intruged.

So the posts on Push Square about Death Stranding have been reaching a crescendo with it's release which I fully expected. However, in the last 48hrs alone, there have been over 20, read it, 20 articles with Death Stranding in the title and even more than that that are related, however tenuously, to Death Stranding and Hideo Kojima.

Do the staff on the site not feel this is overkill to an exceptional degree? I know you have to drive traffic to the site but all this clickbait is insane. And I do feel it is clickbait. Super spoilery clickbait.

I'm all for a good hype train but I do feel you've lost control a little here. It's actually doing the opposite and making me not want to come to the site until the Death Stranding Fever has subsided.

I'm probably in the minority but I felt I had to just give some friendly feedback about it. Are you gonna do the same with Cyberpunk and FFVII Remake?? I actually hope not because I am really excited about those games and I don't want that to be spoiled by the same oversaturation that has occured with Death Stranding.

Thanks for the feedback. We haven’t published any spoilers to my knowledge, and nor will we.

I understand we’ve posted about the game a lot, but this is the big PS4 exclusive of the holiday period. We’d be insane not to cover it thoroughly.

There is other stuff on the homepage and it’s not like we’re skipping major news just to focus on trivial Death Stranding stories.

@kiki3400 I'm the same, and be saying this for a few months. I understand this is a site where PlayStation is at its core but can go a bit OTT with articles for an exclusive. It has meant in the past I've missed news on other stuff because the site is top heavy of articles for one game. A few of them could be merged together, some of them seem a bit pointless just on their own. I just go elsewhere for news when I feel this is happening.

@get2sammyb i think the issue is that all the posts drown out the others, when you load up the home page all you see are Death Stranding posts (in this case) and sometime it means that's ALL there is on the home page

could you not have one post stuck at the top the has links to all the articles in it without flooding the home page with them?

Click bait - an Internet gaming news website?

You do have to pay the bills and unfortunately it's an essential strategy. Luckily Pushsquare staff are ace so once you look around the bits of clickbaity stuff it's a great website.

Interesting take.

I don't mind really. It's the biggest release of the year so naturally there's a lot to talk about

@get2sammyb - spoilery was probably a bit too harsh. But not everyone wants to know how all the mechanics work before you actually load up the game and not everyone can play the game on day of release so I do think there were things in there that were spoilery. Perhaps not story spoilery but game spoilery defintely. And for a game we have been told time and again we have to 'experience for ourselves', I feel it was a little premature for some of those posts.

I absolutely agree that its a big title and it deserves to be covered but when you post in excess of 20 articles, most of which were a few paragraphs long, and completely spam the latest news section of the website or rss feeds of people (does anyone use them anymore?) then that excessive. I would also point out that if a member did that in the forums they'd be flayed alive. I do think there was room for a little tightening and editing to be done in the creation of your posts. I have no beef with the content just the sheer avalanche of it. Some of them defintely could have been merged in to one post. I agree with @JohnnyShoulder on that point.

@themcnoisy - lol, I know, I should know better, the whole internet is basically a clickbait machine.

@roe - I agree, but does it have to be done in so many different posts? It fractures the conversation, makes everything messy. I believe you could have the same conversations and still have less posts.

Anyhoo, thanks everyone for reading me wee rant. I'll go back into hiding now.

I can understand both sides of the argument here.

I am in the camp where yes I do believe when a big game like this comes out they go overboard. The did it with Red Dead 2, Marvel's Spider-Man, Dragon Quest XI and even The Outer Worlds to name a few.

But yes they are looking for views and traffic. That is the meat and potatoes of news site weather it be sports, video game or your everyday news.

Take for example Antonio Brown's blow up. If you follow sports when that happened every sport news site was saturated with stuff about him. A celebrity dies every article on a news site is about them. Take Michael Jackson for example. Or even like the Royale Wedding.

Video game jounarlism is the same way. It would be crazy if they didn't cover it. While yes I do understand it can be overwhelming especially with articles that seem overboard like the making of the game or guides for every little thing there are people out there who can't get enough of that stuff.

Bottom line if you are feeling overwhelmed the best thing to do is just take a break from the site when a big game comes out. Interact with the forums there's a billion other topics that don't revolve around a particular game there, that what I usually do in fact I am doing that now since I have no interest in Death Stranding or whatever it's called whatsoever.

Doesn’t bother me. I just read the articles I’m interested in. That said sometimes it can get a bit over the top, but i figure there is a reason for it so no dramas..

It is a bit much but it could be worse. I remember when Destiny first arrived and Eurogamer and probably a few other sites posted dozens upon dozens upon dozens of articles. They just wouldn't stop, it was painful.

Personally, I would love to see the occasional Vita article which isn't just, 'The PS Vita is Dead!'
Not much love at all for the magnificent handheld on this site.