Asmongold declares the leading European gaming site dead for years in dispute over Steam failure

Twitch streamer Asmongold is on a crusade against gaming magazines. After trouble with Kotaku and IGN, he has now set his sights on PC Gamer, for many the most important gaming site in Europe. It has been dead “for years,” says the Twitch streamer and shows a terrifying graph. But is that true?

What is the dispute about?

• Asmongold has been on a crusade against games journalism in recent months. Most recently, he was upset by an article about Black Myth: Wukong on IGN and a review of the Chinese action-adventure on Screen Rant.
• In fact, his main enemy is Kotaku and one author in particular that he has been chasing for a long time. That is Sweet Baby Inc., enemy number one.
• Asmongold has set his sights on British online gaming site PC Gamer as the latest target of his righteous wrath. They dare to defend a match.

Dispute breaks out over Sony’s failed shooter Concord

What does Asmongold hate about PC gamers? We have already reported on Concord, Sony’s new shooter, which failed miserably on Steam at MeinMMO. Asmongold harshly criticized the game. According to his narrative, the politically correct and therefore ugly characters are to blame for Concord’s failure.

In addition, one developer blatantly defended himself against the critics on Twitter, calling them “talentless fanatics.”

BeiPC Gamer Editor-in-chief Tyler Wide posted an article two days ago criticizing the malice that unpopular games receive. The article reads:

But player counts do have a moral quality in some situations: if you release an unpopular game, suddenly everyone has the moral right to shame and embarrass you, either because all big-budget games are bad, or because all live-service games are bad, or because you were too woke, take your pick.

PC Gamer complains that game failures receive only malice and no analysis

The article also says: People would rejoice at Concord’s failure, but would not analyze the failure, instead only “uttering quotable sayings, exaggerations, and superficial observations,” such as that Concord used the “ugliest character designs of all time.”

This is what Asmongold says: Streamer Asmongold apparently feels affected by this and is upset with PC players (via YouTube).

He then wants to prove that PC Gamer is completely irrelevant and to do so he pulls up Google Trends, a tool that shows global search interest in individual terms and topics and thus provides insight into how relevant a topic is at a given time in a given area, country, and how this relevance develops.

On Google Trends, Asmongold shows that global search interest in PC gamers has dropped significantly. According to his chart:

• PC Gamer still had a relatively high relevance in the week of November 1-7, 2020 (71% compared to the peak value)
• 2 weeks later, from November 15th to 21st 2020, relevance plummeted: here PC Gamer only had 17% of its peak relevance and the site remained at this low level for 4 years)

This is the graph that Asmongold shows his viewers:

He concludes:

“Uh oh, basically: nobody cares about PC gamers anymore. If someone had something like that in a hospital, they would be declared dead.”

Asmongold is searched on Google

Is he right about that? No, this is classic Asmongold. Sometimes his editor corrects him at the last minute, but this time he does it live on video.

Asmongold searches for PC Gamer, but gets the print magazine search result, “PC Gamer” magazine. In fact, search interest has plummeted, for whatever reason.

If you had searched for the term “PC Gamer,” you could see that interest in the general keyword hadn’t dropped that much.

The idea that a website’s relevance would drop completely from one week to the next, as Asmongold’s chart suggests, is absurd.

The graph just doesn’t seem right as of late November 2020. Because the graph actually suggests that page views dropped 80% in 2 weeks and never recovered.

While you can see from the red, “overall” chart, that although there was a drop in search interest after November 2020, this stabilization was not so drastic and there have been peaks and valleys over the past few years.

It would also be an option to look up approximately how many visitors PC Gamer has on the “Similarweb” site: they estimate that PC Gamer has around 30.7 million page views per month. Asmongold has 882,000 subscribers on his “Asmongold Clips” channel on YouTube.

However, Concord is performing poorly on Steam and has received a lot of criticism. We already reported this in an article on August 26: Sony’s new shooter Concord fails brutally on Steam at launch.