Crispy Gamer – New Games Review Site Raises $8.25M

Earlier this week, Crispy Gamer announced they had secured their first round funding of $8.25M. Normally, I don’t make a big deal about a new game review sites as it’s not usually worth writing about. I mean any kids next door can literally start a blog and become a games review competitor. Also having been a PC and console gamer for over two decades now, I’ve seen all of the game review sites… so a new games review site must be doing some really interesting — or defies all logic — to get my attention. Crispy Gamer, at least initially, seems to get my attention by doing the latter.

At first glance, Crispy Gamer appears to be a valuable site — reviews are professionally written, good community as supported by user submitted reviews, simple and effective site UI and design, and quality images and artwork. I like the site.

Crispy Gamer will be the first major games review site to not accept advertising from game company advertisers reason being they do not want their editors to be influenced and write biased game reviews. Not sure if I agree with this decision because consumers want to see ads that are relevant to their online experience. I poked around on their site today and saw a bunch of random ad network including ads for Virgin America. The elegance of advertising online is the ability to serve ads relevant to the user or the site. It’s basic web advertising 101. (Turning on Denis Leary voice now) I like games. I play games. I read about games. I visit game review sites. I read about games before I buy games. Why not serve me ads about games? Don’t give me a ad about Virgin Airlines. (Turning off Dennis Leary voice now). Anyways, it remains to be seen if the benefit of “unbiased” game reviews can offset the loss of ad dollars from game companies and irrelevant ads to users (affecting user experience).