Just Google It!

About this time of the month, I'd usually put up a post covering the free games coming to Prime Gaming over the next few weeks. It used to be a fairly simple post to write. I'd wait until the games appeared on the Prime Gaming app, read the descriptions, check out the developers' websites and the games' Steam pages, then write a few capsule previews, sprinkle in a few snarky comments and give some kind of judgment on whether each game interested me or not.

It was fun but always a bit more complicated than I felt it needed to be. The games listed on the app were never exactly the same as those listed on the Prime Gaming website. The new games didn't get added on the same day each month. Some games arrived as codes for other services, like GOG, to which your Amazon account needed to be linked before you could claim them.

On the whole, though, it was manageble enough. I enjoyed putting the posts together. I quite looked forward to it. Best of all, there was the odd comment or two suggesting the posts were helpful in some way, just in reminding people the games were out there, waiting to be claimed.

Earlier this year, though, Amazon changed the way the service operates. Instead of releasing all the games at the start of the month, now Prime subscribers receive one or more new free games every Thursday. That left me with a choice: I could either write a short post every week on the new game or games or I could do some research at the start of the month to find out what was coming, then write about it all at once.

I opted for the latter. A Google search brought up plenty of gaming and entertainment sites that had apparently received press releases ahead of time and turned them into news articles or reviews. It was easy enough for me to use those to create an annotated list of games of my own but even as I was doing it, I started to question both the process and the purpose.

When I was drawing the source material directly from Amazon Prime Gaming, it felt like legitimate research. Taking it from other secondary sources, who'd already parsed and reformatted the raw data seemed a lot more like... well, not plagiarism but definitely lazy journalism. Why not just link to those sites and have done with it?

Still, I didn't not enjoy writing that post and I felt I could put my own spin on things sufficiently to legitimize the effort. A lot of what many of us do as bloggers is reframe information and opinion we've sourced elsewhere. This wasn't materially different.

So, yesterday, it having occurred to me that we were a few days into April already, I thought I'd google "Free games with Amazon Prime Gaming in April 2023" to see what came up. As you can see from the link, plenty of sources have already had their say, including big players like GameSpot and there's even a promo video from Prime on YouTube.

The video surprised me a little, although I suppose it shouldn't have. It's obvious, when you think about it, that Amazon would run video promotions for Prime Gaming. Perhaps what is surprising, something I'm only realizing as I write this, is that I'm clearly in the habit of mentally screening out the thumbnail video links Google embeds close to the top of all searches these days.

I don't even remember when those started appearing. Was it recently? Have they always been there? I see them but I ignore them becuase they don't fit my decades-in-training image of what a page of google search results looks like. I'm expecting a list of text links so anything that isn't that gets screened out.

Checking the YouTube channel, I see the video archive goes back a couple of years. It looks like it started when Amazon rebranded Twitch Gaming, which they already owned, to Prime Gaming. I was already a Twitch Gaming player and I carried on using the Twitch app for a while before moving over to Prime. There was a period when both ran concurrently. I imagine that's why I missed the inception of the channel and later on I just never had cause to look for it.

I've added it my YouTube subscriptions now, along with the Prime Video channel, which I also didn't realize existed. That's going to help a lot with compiling these monthly posts in future as well as possibly giving me ideas for others.

As I said, I didn't find it so surprising that I'd missed the YouTube channels. What I found completely astonishing was that I'd also somehow managed to miss the fact that Prime Gaming has a blog! If you scan down that first page of results from the google search I linked, three places up from the bottom you'll find a link to something called, quite simply, Prime Gaming Blog.

I was a little suspicious at first. I clicked through, naturally, and what I found looked mostly official but I wasn't entirely sure whether it was a genuine Amazon production or a high-quality fan site. The blog runs on the Medium.com platform, which Wikipedia describes as "an American online publishing platform developed by Evan Williams and launched in August 2012."

Williams is apparently a co-founder of both Blogger and Twitter and Medium.com incorporates elements of both, supposedly providing "a means to publish writings and documents longer than Twitter's 140-character (now 280-character) maximum" in a more news-cycle-friendly format than Blogger's full, long-form footprint encourages.

The Prime Gaming Blog employs a newszine format not unlike that favored by several hobby bloggers with advanced HTML skills that already feature in my blog roll. You know who you are😉 The archive, again, goes back to the moment when Amazon canned Twitch Gaming and handed the division over to Prime. 

The thing that puzzles me here isn't that I missed it when it happened. We've already covered that with the video channel. No, what gets me is why the Prime Gaming Blog has never made itself known to me in the many google searches I've done on the subject before. Or, for that matter, why no-one has ever mentioned it in any comment, post or conversation I've read over the last couple of years.

I guess the answer lies partly in that lowly position, down at the foot of the search results. I mean, congrats for getting on the first page, guys, but shouldn't the official blog of the company be at the top? Especially when the company in question is a global behemoth like Amazon? 

For all I know, the unimaginitively, if pragmatically, named Prime Gaming Blog may only just have made it onto the first page. Maybe when I scanned the list last month it didn't even feature. Or, more likely, I found everything I needed on the first screen of results and didn't scroll down. It's really that first screen you want to hit, not somewhere down the page.

Anyway, I've found it now so I've added it both to my Feedly and also the blog roll. That should make compiling these monthly posts more timely and also remove that faint whiff of inauthenticity that was drifting in.  

That's always assuming I decide to carry on with them. With the official press release right there, in blog format, on the sidebar, maybe I don't need to get in my own way. I know the blog roll is the main reason half my readers come here in the first place. I probably should leave the damn thing to do the job it was put there to do.

I'm certainly not going to run through the full slate of free games for this month in this post. There are too many, for a start, allegedly fifteen of them, although some of those seem to be the SNK titles that have been included every time for months. I never even bother mentioning those.

The highlight for readers of this blog, I'm guessing, will be the inclusion of Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition, which drops on April 13. Unlike last month's Baldur's Gate, which I finished twice, I never got very far with Icewind Dale. I'll be glad to add that to the roster.

I'll take a raincheck on posting my thoughts on the rest of the April offer. It depends how short of ideas I get. Meanwhile, if you want to check out the games for yourself, you can either follow the links above or go directly to the official post here, which also includes lots of detail on the in-game offers, as well as information on the new Luna titles.

I'm going to be claiming two Prime games for certain this month, with an option on two more. A shiny No Prize for anyone who can guess which they are.