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Home Brewed: GCA and their Myth of Credibility
The shady tactics used by Advanced Media Network have given a bad name to WiiCafé and the other free Nintendo news sites. Practices like those used by Ken Cauley not only hurt the sites that use them, they also damage the reputation of Nintendo sites as a whole. Sadly, GCA has one of the largest readerships among free Nintendo news sites despite how it is run. The main reason for this is because the fans are simply not informed that there are better, more credible sites out there than GCA. Others have only scratched the surface as to the depth of the unprofessionalism, bad journalism, shady tactics, and incredibility of GameCube Advanced and Advanced Media Network. This article will focus more on the scams that GCA and Ken Cauley have run in the past.
First off, I would like to point out that up until recently Ken and WiiCafé were quite friendly with one another. We had heard many rumors about Ken from our fellow industry friends but took them with a grain of salt and pushed forward to try and become better friends with him. Many of these people (most of which we are still friendly with) continually warned us how Ken Cauley was a user. He will use you for his own greedy needs and then as soon as you are of no use to him anymore he will treat you like garbage.
One of Ken’s main scams we had been warned of was advertising events or articles on other websites and upon completion of the advertisement he would simply not keep his end of the deal. He doesn’t do this to large sites who he knows will not stand for that kind of thing and would more than likely sue him in court. Rather, he heads to smaller sites because he feels he can abuse those organizations. We had talked with Ken for almost a year and he had never asked us for anything. We thought perhaps that our other friends had simply had a bad experience in the past; that kind of thing can happen and people do harbor hatred because of those experiences, but around March of 2004 Ken approached us asking if we wanted to help with GCA’s Re-Launch Sweepstakes. Naturally we were curious so we proceeded to ask him questions as to our involvement in the sweepstakes. Below is part of our conversation:
Capt R Wilco: So explain to me what you want to do. I’m a little confused.
MadSkill Kenny: Donate some prizes to WiiCafé for your viewers to win exclusively.
Capt R Wilco: We plug you guys on our site and vice versa?
Capt R Wilco: How much stuff are you guys actually able to give away. I remember reading what you had a while back and thought to myself that you’d never be able to do that.
MadSkill Kenny: http://www.gcadvanced.com/article.php?artid=328
MadSkill Kenny: Everything listed we already have in our possession.
We asked around and it seemed that Mr. Cauley did not have the prizes in his possession. He either was still in talks to get the prizes or he simply falsified news articles on GCA saying he had the prizes already. In order to participate in this sweepstakes, readers were required to register for the GCA forums. Getting readers to read and participate on forums, for any site, is like trying to pull teeth from a five year old. Many people just don’t like to be involved with forums. With the lure of prizes however, it seemed like an opportunity too good to pass up. In the end, what it boiled down to was that Ken was scamming people by promising a chance to win prizes if they joined the forums and participated in contest events that GCA held. While a few people have received prizes from that sweepstakes, they had to wait an exorbitantly long time and several of them had to pay for shipping.
Like we were saying earlier, Ken tried to get other sites to advertise the contest in exchange for a small mention on GCA and a few prizes to be given as part of their own contests. The catch was that in order for readers of these other sites to enter the contests they would still had to register for GCA’s forums and Ken still had to approve of any contest a site wanted to do. We quickly remembered our friends in the industry warning us; something just didn’t feel right about the contest. We know from personal experience that trying to get developers and publishers to give you free product is not easy. Could it really be possible that Ken somehow managed to get all those free products to give away? Maybe, but it didn’t seem very likely. We do not know if he had some of those products or none of them, but we have managed to talk with someone from one of the sites that participated in his cross-site contest. The following is what they had to say (their name is changed at their request):
JosephRyan: Actually I think we did a mini contest on our site.
Capt R Wilco: How did it go?
Capt R Wilco: Did everyone get their prizes?
JosephRyan: I don't think everyone got their prizes
Capt R Wilco: Thank you for helping me out.
JosephRyan: Or if they did they got them really late and had to pay shipping.
JosephRyan: Their re-launch contest had lots of problems.
This scam was devised to bulk up the registered members on GCA’s forums which now stand at 5,841. The number of active users on their forums is actually much less. Why would it matter how many people are registered on the forums? Well, for one, it gives the impression that they are more popular than they are. That doesn’t sound all too harmful at first, but when they promise prizes and material goods and then don’t make good on their promises, it looks back for all free Nintendo media. We recently had a trivia contest in which we gave away a Nintendo DS. We had a good turnout, but it could have been better. Scams like those which Ken Cauley has pulled make people’s first though, “Oh, they aren’t giving away anything. They just want to get publicity.”
Our main priority and that of many other credible Nintendo news sites is to work FOR the readers. When it boils down to it, the readers are MY boss as well as the boss for my counter-parts from other sites. Ken Cauley does not think like this. He uses his readers just like he uses others in the industry to stuff money into his pockets. He is not in this for the love of gaming and Nintendo; he is in this to make a pretty penny. When you are only in business to make money and don’t care about what your business is doing the quality of work is greatly depreciated.
Ken’s advertising and publicity scams don’t stop there though. He contacted us again late last month to try and get us to advertise the “huge amounts of DS” coverage that their new sister site would have. Even though he knew our views on advertising he still insisted we help him out. We want Nintendo news sites to be a friendly community so we started to ask questions just for the humor factor. We want to see the communication and relations between Nintendo news sites grow, so we thought maybe it wouldn’t be too much of a problem to advertise if it helped out inter-site relations. He wanted to run the ad for about a month and was willing to pay us one hundred dollars. While one hundred dollars might not be that much, that wasn’t the problem.
The problem arose because the way WiiCafé is set up didn’t allow for us to put up the banner he wanted. We told him we were willing to help out and advertise for him but he refused to change the banner. His attitude was quite negative and he came off that instead of him taking ten minutes to fix the banner to fit our needs that we should redesign our site for his benefit. Finally he agreed to get someone to do this for our cause; but since the banner would be smaller he wanted to pay us less. The revised banner would have been the same size and in the same place as our current trivia banner. That is prime real estate, yet he wanted to cut his payment to half of the original offer. In the interest of inter-site relations we continued to be cooperative, but when it came time to give him our info to send us a check the following conversation took place:
Capt R Wilco: WiiCafé
47 Timber Dr
Waterford, NY 12188
MadSkill Kenny: Heh, I’m not saving that information right now.
MadSkill Kenny: Payment is also upon completion.
MadSkill Kenny: As it will be stated in the invoice.
Capt R Wilco: That’s fine. If I don’t receive payment 1 week after completion I will not hesitate to sue you in court. Don’t f*ck me.
After that conversation was over he told us he needed to do a few things and get back to us. Less than two hours later he was messaging us back telling us he no longer wished to advertise with WiiCafé. He saw that we would not have any problems filing suit against him if he screwed us over. Since he knew he could not use and abuse us he decided that his time was too precious to waste talking with us or even being friendly with us anymore. This is the conversation that in turn sparked the end of our relationship. We were shocked and appalled. Everything our friends had told us was indeed true. Knowing what he had planned to do, we made a point to go around and make new friends at some of the smaller sites and warn them of Ken and GCA.
These are only a few scams and as shocking as they may be there are some that are far worse. GCA reported that they would be creating an E3 DVD for 2004. They accepted pre-orders and took their readers money willingly. Did the people who purchased one of these DVDs ever receive what they paid for? Nope. The months leading up to E3 we talked with Ken plenty of times about his DVD and you might even say we mentored him. We gave him lots of advice and there was one thing we noticed when talking to him. He had absolutely no business sense at all. He did not know what he was doing business wise and he definitely didn’t know what he was doing as far as a filming and production goes.
E3 came and went and months passed, but there was still no DVD. Did Ken Cauley immediately refund people’s money? Of course he didn’t. He has told us that he plans to finish the DVD and refund people’s money, but when? It has been seven months since E3 2004 and there has yet to be a DVD made. The material on the DVD (if it even exists) is of no use this late after the event. Most games at E3 have already been released. No one wants his DVD now, what they want is their money back.
Capt R Wilco: I don’t know how much money you had for the DVD but your inability to market it goes to prove what I have said. Not only are your business intentions not what they seem but you don’t know what you're doing to begin with.
MadSkill Kenny: Every business comes across snags. The fact that the DVD was a failure means nothing of my intentions. I'm not the best and still learning. I did nothing wrong [with the DVD and apparently scamming people].
These people have been scammed and abused. Have any of them taken action against Ken Cauley and GCA? What for? Over fifteen dollars? There is no point in spending hundreds of dollars in attorney fees to get back only fifteen dollars. What these abused people need to do is join together and file a mass civil lawsuit against Ken Cauley and GCA. Only then will Ken maybe realize that it is against the law to do what he has been doing. Yet among all the illegal and shady practices that GCA and Advanced Media Network take part in they are still one of the leaders in the Nintendo news industry. There are other, better Nintendo news sites to go visit. Try one of them out, just stay away from GCA. You are all welcome at the Café and should you decide to become part of my community you will see how Nintendo news sites should act: with honor, integrity, professionalism, credibility, and good journalistic methods.
Matthew Silver
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