For those of you who haven’t been following my Twitter updates we’ve been having some infrastructure issues with the website. Everything from Chinese bots hacking the site to server issues has all hit within a six week period seriously cramping our ability to get news and reviews posted in a timely fashion. We’ve had to make some emergency decisions and for now it looks like many of those decisions are becoming permanent.
First, our site design became obsolete. After 8 years it no longer supported the newer technology required to keep it running safely. Sadly, this was a proprietary design, and when we stopped using it we lost a lot of meta-data including scores for nearly 4,000 reviews. Rather than track down all those scores and manually edit all those reviews we are simply going to stop scoring reviews moving forward. This has always been an issue for us as we believe words are superior to numbers when evaluating a game or product.
Second, our YouTube channel is going to get a lot more attention moving forward. Until now our videos have supported the website, but moving forward we are going to do a lot more video content in regards to First Looks, Reviews, and full LetsPlay videos. We’ll still be doing daily updates for news, trailers, and reviews on the website, but look for the freshest content on our YouTube channel.
And finally, as we approach our official 25th anniversary this November I just want to thank everyone who has ever visited our site, viewed any of our content, used a strategy guide, and especially the dozens of game reviewers who have been a part of the Game Chronicles team. Your hard work is appreciated by me and thousands of readers. We are quickly approaching our 9,000th review, which puts us right up there with IGN and Gamespot when it comes to content – not bad for a bunch of gamers doing this as a hobby. Also, a big thanks to all our publishers, developers, and PR people who have worked with us over the years. We look forward to keeping this going for as long as possible.
Mark Smith, EiC
