What happened with Shoryuken.com?
If your daily reading consisted of looking at fighting-game-related content, you’ve probably seen that Shoryuken.com has not been doing so hot this year, to put it mildly. No one has spoken much about the situation, so I thought I would maybe share some light since site owners have been quiet. I feel the audience is owed at least that much.
I’ve been a writer for Shoryuken for 2 years, from 2016–2018. Graduated with a journalism degree, finding a paid gig about games is like stumbling upon a rare nugget. Though it wasn’t enough to warrant a (good) living, it was quite a step up from free. I won’t go into my background too much, but I wrote for free for a few websites after graduation for about 3 years or so, with occasional bigger, freelanced pieces.
So with SRK paying an amount per article, no matter how small (with bigger pay for longer pieces), the 2016 “Call For Writers” ushered in about 8–10 contributors, some quite dedicated, some occasional. I did side or temp office jobs in addition to writing.
With each article receiving pretty much the same payout, as long as it met a minimal word count, there wasn’t always an incentive to write long pieces. I will be the first to admit that I also took advantage of that, but I definitely became conscious of churning out overly simplistic posts. As many readers definitely took note, our posting became a little formulaic, mostly posting up the latest YouTube videos from various creators. I don’t think this is a terrible practice, because I think it’s great to highlight community-created content that’s often valuable tech or interesting discussion. Sometimes, it’s the video posts of breaking trailers that did best — like when Akuma was announced for SFV. Obviously, that’s prime SRK news.
(EDIT — I think I forgot to stress this, and Tom Cannon’s post highlighted it: ADBLOCK had a rather significant contribution to the worsening state of SRK, as well as overall decreases from ad revenue. We were aware that some of the ads were pretty annoying, but it’s what helped keep the site alive. Not trying to guilt anyone either, as it’s not like this was the sole factor; I’m aware that this is reality on the internet nowadays.)
But when a lot of our video posts, or even tech-roundups, don’t do well — have barely any Facebook shares — even I don’t need to be privy about the SRK finance books to tell you that the site loses money on stuff like this (full disclosure: I am not versed at all in financial details of the site. As a “blogger,” I’m only knowledgable about how much I get paid and little else). Throughout 2018, it seemed inevitable that this model wouldn’t last long. Again, it wasn’t a lot of reward per post, but compared to how most sites treat their writers (aka as volunteers), this wasn’t bad compensation.
Without insurance and a good wage, I couldn’t only do SRK. If you think about it, there’s only a certain amount of posts that can go up per day, and unless I try to monopolize that (screwing other team members over) it would be tough to make a fully livable wage. One of my temp jobs slowly fruitioned into a full-time job (not to mention that getting paid per hour seemed like a blessing, especially with PTO, and occasionally slow days — I was making “crazy” amounts compared to SRK). SRK increasingly looked like a sinking ship, at least from the cabins.
The writers and I learned in late 2018 that come 2019, we will no longer be paid.
The effects have been obvious. Most left, and I, already traumatized from working for free for a few years after college, had no plans to do that again. Our Editor-in-Chief stepped down (I can’t even go into the details of what a grueling job it was to keep the site afloat, edit all the posts, do much of the behind-the-scenes work, etc.). Currently, mostly two writers keep the site alive, as if it’s hooked up to an IV (and lots of credit to Waveflame and Lazybones2020 for doing that!).
So I suppose the truth isn’t terribly shocking, but if this helps any readers understand the situation better, then I don’t mind sharing this, because personally, I did feel there should have been a statement. It wouldn’t be an easy statement to make.
Once again, I will underline that I am not privy to exact business details or numbers, but it doesn’t take a genius to understand that SRK wasn’t exactly profitable.
While I have a full-time job now, I miss providing content to the community at large, particularly about Arc System Works games. I loved doing the Tension Pulse interviews, which highlighted various members of the community, and I even got to have a conversation with Daisuke Ishiwatari himself.
I’m not exactly looking, but I am keeping my eyes open to still doing something FGC-related. The precarious state of digital journalism is not promising, but it’s not finished yet.
EDIT: Tom Cannon has chimed in with more of a business-perspective Twitter thread:
