End All - Be All Gaming News Sites?

Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2003 11:47 pm

As some of you may have noticed our friends at Voodoo Extreme were also assimilated recently. Right around the time of the change they started posting more than just gaming news. Now we at UO have been doing this since the beginning and I see other sites (our boys at Beyond Unreal) are following suit as well. I know some of you appreciate and use the Tweaking articles we have here. The same goes for Hardware reviews. However I was wondering what you all think of this? Is it a good trend, bad trend or do you not give a shit? Speak up and let me know!
One more thing before I ship you off for the weekend. I want to welcome Squirrel King to the Unreal Ops Staff! We were full after this week but I thought we needed a Canadian reporter to go with our Euros. He will be handling Tuesday news and helping out with other days from time to time. Welcome aboard eh?!

UO Noob Joined: 23 Jun 2003 Posts: 25

IMO, there's only 3 sites out there for news... (keep in mind I really only care about UT2003). I listed why I visit them next to the site.

1. UO - awesome mod/map/developer news... seems to be more technical & "Underground" than the other sites. Great articles & news regarding the latest mods & developments. Love the tweaks. Everything seems geared toward the cutting edge of the Unreal Technology.

2. BeyondUnreal - seems to be more of a fan community. A mix the above contents (albeit watered down a bit? dunno, just IMO) with other community activity. Lots of veterans and cool people there to play with, plus tips & strategy abound. The forums are the main reason I go to BU, not news.

3. PlanetUnreal - news, good POTD's, n00b forums, good place for the beginner. I scope out the Forums here a lot just to see if I can help UT2003 newbies out and help encourage others to play - we need 'em!

With that said, I'm not for the trend of consolidation. If the above 3 sites were to combine, I'd have to shed a tear because I think they address different communities very well, and that's needed IMO. Combining them would make things too ambiguous & hard for people to navigate. Besides, the site forums/news sections would segregate anyways due to the different needs of the communities. I know that each site wants to be THE source for news to stay alive, but I tend to like focused content on a specific range of subjects. Variety is nice, but I like the variety from different sources.

Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2003 11:40 am

You bring of some valid points. I didn't necessarily mean I want UO to be 'THE' Unreal news site. I meant that I want to offer the best content available. If that means tweaking articles sometimes or non-Unreal games sometimes so be. I want you guys to be informed and entertained!

I do agree with you as far as the 'Underground' feel of the website. To this day if it hadn't been for Gwot from Digital Extremes, Mark Rein would never have given UO the time of day. Now that has changed and other developers check out UO now. Yes being open and opinionated will get my foot in my mouth sometimes I still want to give an honest opinion of the industry.

Laughing

Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2003 4:23 pm

This may be little off but, I love Ve3d. The recent changes I don't really care for however. I liked the "underground" flava Ve3d use to have. Since IGN, never cared for them before, has tainted Voodoo it just seems wrong. Too many advertisements, no real comments system, and I am sure they will be censored to some degree. Funny I did not mind when Ve3d looked like an official Eve or Devastation site, but now the ads are out of hand. I will keep reading Ve3d and I am glad they are making some money, but it just feels like a titan of independent game news has fallen. Sorry if i am off topic Smile

Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2003 7:25 pm

VE is/was run by the infamous Apache, who ran PlanetUnreal long long ago, then created UnrealUniverse, which was supercool for a while until he got distracted and it faded. UU was fun for a very geeky "Unreal 2" forum that lived before any info on the game was available.... we chatted about out imagined direct sequel to the original game, but then Legend went in a totally different, less interesting, direction and it all fell apart.

The first Great Unreal website was unreal.org. Lotsa fun, but it fell apart when the game was released, and the group decided they hated it.... mainly because the crap network code. They went on to create PlanetCrap.

Unreality.org, run by Preacher, has been around since the dawn of time. Always worth a look, but being a one person show, it can be fairly quiet at times.

This site seems to be the best about at the moment.
I'd prefer you stuck to UnrealEngined stuff. There's plenty of general hardware and games sites about. Show off clans and mods, models, maps, and weird new games using the Engine. But then again it's your site, showing off stuff that just interests you is fine and dandy.

Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2003 11:06 pm

Guest,

Don't get me wrong UO is still going to be 80% Unreal Engine. The Unreal Engine Community is getting bigger each year and there is plenty to write about. It is just that I feel other games 'affect' the UU because when new things are invented other games usually incorporate them. As far as hardware, I am only review items I feel that are useful to myself and you guys. Hence no reviews of $500 video cards that most of us can't afford. However you will see reviews on middle class cards, efficient PSU's and other worth while things.

I don't want to be the stop you make just because. I want UO to be a place you stop at because you WANT to.

Wink

Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2003 9:57 am

Well said Fearless leader.
Very Happy

Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2003 5:30 pm

Hm, well... personally I don't visit UO that often, but - *ducks to evade incoming clouds of rotten tomatoes* - I like your style. I'm not only interested in Unreal related news, but I don't really have the time or motivation to check out all the other relevant news sites... Be it hardware sites, general gaming sites or whatever else... So it's pretty cool to get a little peek over the rim on Unreal news sites from time to time. IMHO the Un-Unreal coverage is pretty good the way it is, maybe even a little more wouldn't hurt either... but I think the way you handle it is pretty good: If it interests you, you think it may interest us also, and that's pretty damn right in most cases Smile

Cheers,
Lugg

Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2003 8:58 pm

Hmm that sounds like a pretty good idea Lug!

Smile

UO Staff Joined: 19 May 2003 Posts: 190 Location: BoooooM

Alot of good opinions !

-dp-

Guest

Hmm.... not sure what you mean by "follow suit". As a general rule, we don't follow anyone, but like yourself, do what we are interested in. To understand BeyondUnreal, you have to understand a few things about it that some people may or may not know:

BeyondUnreal was created in part to stay away from the hostile take-over that Gamespy was implementing on the "Planets". When I say that, I mean that we (as site administrators of PlanetUnreal) disliked the corporate direction that was being taken by our "Mother" site, Gamespy.

You see, Gamespy is about their corporation and not the games that make up their individual sites. If the people running each site happen to like the game they are writing about... great! But, it's not a priority (witness PlanetUnreal). They want to cover the basics on the front page and use hosted sites to suck in traffic. With their huge server capacity, it's quite easy for them to do. All this, of course, is about generating ad hits, and pushing GSI product.

The Planets are all in turn a little blip in their respective Gamespy Planet (PlanetUnreal -> ActionPlanet, for instance), which in turn is a blip on the great Gamespy portal page.

What this means is that the people running these sites may or may not even be interested in what they are writing about. The passion and personality is missing.

Hey, Gamespy is a great hosting resource. I'm not knocking that, I just think it's important for people to understand that about the "big" Unreal news site.

Apache left PU because he didn't like where it was headed. We managed to steer it away from that destination for a while. But when we left, we were replaced with Gamespy-paid writers who also do news for PlanetHalf-Life as well as staff-writing for the Gamespy.com portal.

We left all that crap behind to start BeyondUnreal. A site about Unreal and the games around that great Engine (hence the "Beyond" part of the name). We've done Unreal Engine news, Linux news, some Hardware news, some Competition news, and whatever else looks interesting, but we also post a lot of mod and map news. Moreso than any other Unreal site out there. That's a definite carryover from PU. It's something that supports Unreal and the mod/map authors, and I can't see us leaving that behind.

The way I see the Unreal news scene right now is this:

1) PlanetUnreal - biggest hosted site resource, nice POTD's, official news, mainstream mod news that is emailed to news@planetunreal.com
2) Unreality - Preacher's one-man-show (rightly said, guest-poster).
3) UnrealOps - lots of opinion and editorial mixed with key news pieces and a select mix of Hardware
4) BeyondUnreal - big forum, fairly thorough Unreal-scene coverage, major Unreal Engine news

So, I've rambled on as I tend to do, but I say again: I don't know what you mean about "followed suit". We're not in that business. We've been at it long enough (five or so years now) that we've learned to just do our own thing.

7 day a week coverage is a big undertaking. It's not for the faint of heart. Best of luck with that one. Having a good staff of people is the best way to start, and you seem to have some fine staffers. It keeps everyone with one foot in RealLife.

I think the Unreal scene is at a cross-roads, personally. A solid, but partially completed, follow-up to UT and an underachieving follow-up to Unreal have left the fans in disarray. There isn't any one site that achieves its potential. So there's definitely room for more than one. In fact, they sort of complement each other.

Just thought I'd add that.

Thanks,

-hal

Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2003 12:30 pm

Your reading too much into it Hal. I meant lately that you guys have been doing more 'Tech' news, and have classified your posts. I have doing what I think is relevant Tech news since the beginning. I am not here to say that UO did this first or BU did that first. I don't look at it that way.

For example, Beyond Unreal first did the comments to the forums thing waaay before I did it with UO. It is a great idea and I followed suit. With Tech news and explaining that in the post header, UO did that first and BU followed. It isn't about direct competition. BU will ALWAYS be bigger and UO will ALWAYS try and be the best for origial articles. We shouldn't be compared because we are different in a lot of ways. You just took what I said wrong. No problem, all is well.

As far a Gamespy is concerned I didn't know Apache came from PU. I was a reader of VE from almost the first day (back when Billy didn't drink his profits and EVERYONE knew who McBlink was) and I was bummed when it went corporate. I can see why they did and part of me is jealous and part of me is bummed. I mean it would be cool not to have to ever worry about hosting bills and such but it isn't worth losing control over my site.

Lug is right, the right blending is the key.

Smile

EDIT: I forget to add one thing. Hal we definitely won't go to 7 days a week. News is too sporadic too make people do it 24/7. Also I want my staffers to take the weekend off to do RL stuff so they won't get burned out. I still think BU is crazy for doing it 7 but hey QAPete isn't exactly a sane person. Wink

Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2003 3:00 pm

i personally like the fact that this site is run by the fans. and sponsored by them, supported by them...... you get the idea. the fans make or break a game, just like they make or break a website. (besides the thickness of the owners wallet Wink

)

Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2003 4:36 pm

True that is one good thing about both UO and BU is that fact. As far as I know the Ads on BU are bought by clans and such.

Guest

Actually, the categorizations (including the Tech category) go back to PlanetUnreal. We did that there too. So naturally we set up BU the way we were most comfortable.

We don't do (nor did we ever) nearly as much as you do here.

Our ads are targeted ads (Crucial, Tux Games, etc) but most of them are from our super-cheap ads that we offer to Unreal sites and such. There's really no money in them, it just helps ever so-slightly.