The Twitch streamer Asmongold is on a crusade against gaming magazines. After issues with Kotaku and IGN, he has now taken on PC Gamer, which is considered by many to be the most important gaming site in Europe. According to him, it has been “dead for years,” and he shows a shocking graphic. But is that true?
What is the dispute about?
- Asmongold has been on a crusade against gaming journalism in recent months. Recently, he was upset about an article on Black Myth: Wukong on IGN and a review of the action-adventure game from China on Screen Rant.
- His main enemy is actually Kotaku and a specific writer there, whom he has had in his sights for a long time. This concerns Sweet Baby Inc. – the number one enemy.
- As the latest target of his righteous anger, Asmongold has set his sights on the British online gaming site PC Gamer. They dare to defend a game.
Dispute ignites over Sony’s shooter flop Concord
What bothers Asmongold about PC Gamer? We have already reported on MeinMMO about Concord, the new shooter from Sony, which has failed catastrophically on Steam. Asmongold harshly criticized the game. According to his narrative, it is the politically correct and thus ugly characters that are responsible for Concord being such a flop.
Additionally, a developer cheekily defended himself on Twitter against criticism, calling critics “talentless freaks.”
On PC Gamer, editor-in-chief Tyler Wide published an article two days ago criticizing the ridicule directed at unpopular games. The article states:
But player numbers carry a moral weight in certain situations: When a game is unpopular, suddenly everyone has the moral right to shame and embarrass you, whether because all big-budget games are bad, all live-service games are bad, or because you were too woke – pick your poison.
PC Gamer criticizes that game flops receive only mockery, not analysis
The article further states: People are happy about the failure of Concord, but do not analyze the failure, instead only expressing “quotable phrases, exaggerations, and superficial observations” – for instance, that Concord uses the “ugliest character design of all time.”
This is what Asmongold says: The streamer Asmongold apparently feels addressed by this and is upset about PC Gamer (via YouTube).
He then wants to prove that PC Gamer is totally irrelevant and opens Google Trends for this purpose, a tool that shows global search interest in individual terms and topics and thus provides insights into how relevant a topic is at a certain time in a specific country, and how this relevance develops.
On Google Trends, Asmongold shows that the global search interest in PC Gamer has supposedly dropped significantly. According to his graphic:
- In the week of November 1 to 7, 2020, PC Gamer still had relatively high relevance (71% compared to the peak).
- Two weeks later, from November 15 to 21, 2020, the relevance fell into the ground – here PC Gamer only had 17% of the maximum relevance, and it has remained at this low level for 4 years).
This is the graphic that Asmongold shows his viewers:
He concludes:
“Oh oh, so basically: No one cares about PC Gamer anymore. If someone had something like that in a hospital, they would declare him dead.”
Asmongold googles himself
Is he right about that? No, that’s a classic Asmongold. In some cases, his editor corrects him at the last moment, but this time it goes live in the video.
Asmongold searches for PC Gamer and ends up with the search result for “PC Gamer” (the magazine). There, the search interest has indeed dropped – for whatever reasons.
If he had just searched for the search term “PC Gamer,” he would see that the interest in the general keyword has not dropped nearly as dramatically.
The idea that the relevance of a website could fall completely from one week to the next, as Asmongold’s graphic suggests, is absurd.
The graph seems to be incorrect from the end of November 2020 onwards. The graph suggests that the page views fell by 80% within 2 weeks – and never bounced back again.
Meanwhile, one can see from the red, the “general” graph, that there was indeed a drop in search interest after November 2020, but this leveling off was far from being as drastic and there have been peaks and valleys in recent years. This is much more plausible.
Google Trends does not correctly reflect the relevance of the website
But both search results seem suspect, as a closer analysis shows that the search interest for the keyword “PC Gamer,” whether magazine or general search term, is extraordinarily high in Montenegro, while it is relatively low in the UK.
Apparently, Google Trends simply does not accurately reflect the relevance of the website here.
It would also be a possibility to look up on the page “Similarweb” how many visitors PC Gamer approximately has: There, it is estimated that PC Gamer has about 30.7 million page visits per month, making it the largest gaming site in Europe.
Asmongold has 882,000 subscribers on his channel “Asmongold Clips” on YouTube.
Nevertheless, Concord is indeed performing poorly on Steam and has to take a lot of criticism. We reported on this in an article on August 26: Sony’s new shooter Concord fails brutally at launch on Steam
