The Wire is Output Lag’s streamlined news desk. The fast-moving river of announcements, release dates, patches, trailers, feature drops, and more. It works differently from the rest of Output Lag, and we’d rather you hear exactly how it works from us.
The problem it solves
Studios, publishers, and PR teams send out enormous volumes of news email. At most outlets — including this one, before the Wire — the overwhelming majority of it is never covered at all. Small teams triage ruthlessly, and announcements from smaller studios are usually what gets cut. The result: coverage concentrates on the games that already have attention, and most time is spent playing games and covering them for reviews, previews, and features.
The Wire is an attempt to change that. Announcements sent to wire@outputlag.com are processed automatically, and developers, publishers, and PR folks that have been whitelisted by Output Lag will immediately have their news go live on our wire. This means news from a two-person studio can be up as fast as news from a major publisher, and rather than not having the capacity to post the news, it will go live.
Our Thoughts on AI
Full disclosure: The Output Lag Wire utilized a custom AI system we have built internally. We understand that AI, or at least what the mainstream term of “AI” has become recently is very contraversial. We believe it has no place in its current format near anything that involves any part of a creative process until the companies behind these models can find a way to properly compensate those who the results are based off of.
That being said, this industry is moving fast and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for a small outlet like ours to have any chance to survive and get eyeballs on our website, especially as search engines continue to roll out no-click systems that absorb traffic before it ever reaches out website.
As such, we’ve built this system to utilize AI for the repetetive task of posting gaming news in realtime. Our website currently operates at a loss (it’s a passion project!) so we can’t realistically hire someone just to take news blasts we get and turn them to post, and yet we feel like so many good ones slip through the cracks or don’t get the publicity they deserve.
Of course, we totally understand if you’d rather not associate with anything AI-related. Developers, publishers, and PR teams can opt out of being included in the Wire simply by not sending e-mails to wire@outputlag.com. Emails and blasts sent to our traditional tips line are still managed by Humans, and has no association with the Wire.
For readers wishing to opt out of the Wire, simply scroll down to the bottom of this page for more information on how to disable it easily.
How a story gets on the Wire
- Trusted senders publish fast. Studios and PR contacts earn a place on our trusted list through a track record of accurate, relevant news. Their news goes up automatically. We’ll continue to grow this list once we know a contact is reputable and can be vetted.
- Non-whitelisted addresses end up in a queue. Announcements from senders we don’t yet know are drafted but held until someone on the team reviews them. Nothing from an unknown source publishes on its own. Once approved a “track record” begins for that sender towards being whitelisted.
- Eveything goes through a filter. Even from whitelisted addresses, our system will go through a pretty thorough vetting process to determine the news is relevant to gaming, something readers at Output Lag would be interested in, and not spammy in nature.
- Embargoes are honored automatically. If an announcement states an embargo, the story schedules itself for the embargo time, but still goes into a queue for human approval before it ever goes live.
- Everything is auditable and reversible. Every Wire post records exactly which announcement it came from, and we pull anything that shouldn’t have run. This is a very fluid system. This means that attempts to abuse the Wire can lead to addresses being blacklisted from it completely.
Where automation fits, and where it stops
Wire posts are drafted by an automated system working from the source announcement, under strict rules: it reports what the announcement says, attributes claims to the studio or publisher rather than presenting them as our judgment, and is not permitted to invent facts, dates, platforms, or quotes. Every Wire post is labeled as an automated wire post, right under its headline.
The Wire is the only part of Output Lag where a post can go live without a person approving it first.
All of our reviews, previews, features, and guides are written by Humans all go through our editorial process (also Humans), and no review verdict or score has ever been, or will ever be, produced by the Wire system. When we tell you a game is worth your money, that’s us saying it, and we own it.
Rather not see it?
Fair enough. The Wire isn’t for everyone, and we certainly understand. The button below hides the Wire section from your homepage on this browser. You can flip it back any time, here or right where the section used to be.
For studios and PR
Send announcements to wire@outputlag.com. This can be plain email, assets attached or linked. State your embargo in the email and it will be honored to the minute. What gets through: game announcements, release dates, updates and patches, trailers, studio news. What doesn’t: anything that isn’t gaming news. A history of solid announcements earns automatic publication.
Any questions reach out directly to steven@outputlag.com.