Editor-in-Chief of the Month: Paul Franzen
Ever stop to think about where GameCola stands in relation to other online gaming publications? Automatically assume it’s at the bottom of the barrel, or do you consider it mid-to-upper-tier? Well, I’ve recently had the opportunity to get a new perspective on GameCola and, specifically, our Editor-in-Chief Paul Franzen.
I was recently looking into doing some freelance writing for an unnamed videogame Web site that offers 100-200 dollars per submission. Upon inquiring about said job, I found out that the site, even though it supposedly has hundreds of thousands of readers, has absolutely no access to review copies of any games. Let me take a brief sub-paragraph here before I get to my point:
The compensation at this site actually ranges from 50-200 dollars per article, depending on how long the game is and how much of a “major” title it is, and the compensation is for walkthroughs/guides, not reviews/previews. Writing a walkthrough of a 20-hour game would get you 50 dollars. Since you have to purchase the game yourself, which would be about 60 dollars these days, you make a grand total of -10 dollars for your 20+ hours of work. At most, you’d make about 2 dollars an hour writing walkthroughs for this site. This is problematic since you must pick a game from a list instead of writing about whatever you want, but I suppose it’s good if you can get a game you’re already going to buy/write a walkthrough for. There, now don’t complain about no background info (feel free to complain about too much background info).
Back to the point I was about to make: GameCola, thanks to Paul, has received a very respectable amount of free games/review copies from developers/publishers/whatever. The freeness of games, combined with the freedom to write basically whatever type of article you want about whatever game you want, clearly sets GameCola above those “we have hundreds of thousands of readers” sites out there, in my opinion. So why doesn’t GameCola have more readers? My suggestion is that we need more FAQs, walkthroughs, guides, and stuff like that. People seem to eat those things up, and I’m sure we could whip something up somehow. More on that later, though. This month is about a person, not an idea. Or is it?
In addition to putting the legwork into getting us free games to play, Paul also does about 90% of the work that goes into keeping GameCola going. Without him, we’d all be unemployed bums sitting on the street corner playing a harmonica and begging strangers to spit on us so that we might moisten our lips. So, this month, instead of posting answers to inane questions I ask, post your thanks to Paul for making it possible for you to read all of the entertaining/hilarious/poignant articles in GameCola every month. After that, double thank him for being more than the half-assed wannabe game-mag editors out there and actually getting us free stuff for our troubles!
