Another golden age gaming news site is closing down. Looks like IGN stopped paying their newsies and the few posters who remain are doing it on a freemium model…
What a shame. I always liked VE.
Looks like bluesnews is my final gaming news site.
So apparently teamxbox and gamespy have suffered cuts as well. Egad!
I’m sure Gaming Trend would appreciate your patronage.
Team Xbox had the same fate, and I believe there were some cuts at GameSpy.
That’s too bad, I used to go to VE all the time a while back. At some point I switched to checking Bluesnews but honestly I don’t remember why.
I stopped hitting VE when Billy was cut loose from the site.
That sounds vaguely like when I stopped visiting it as well. I think I was into the site around the time I owned a 3dfx voodoo graphics card, but times have changed a bit.
Yeah, VE hasn’t been VE for years, even before Billy passed away. No great loss. It’s not like blue’s news, hardocp, or anandtech, legit sites still run by the same guys from the halcyon dotcom days.
RSS really killed the ctrl-C/ctrl-V news sites anyway.
wow - out of those three sites you mentioned, Anadtech was the only one I expected to be still active. So they’re still out there, huh?
evilavatar is still around.
Shacknews is very alive as well. You know, I wonder what happened to slash dot’s popularity. There was a time when the termed slashdotted was ubiquitous to making the headlines. I guess it’s being replaced by Reddit.
Fark and Digg has slightly faded off as well. Ah well…
Digg died when 4.0 came out. Fark had some epic Photoshop contests back in the day.
I went to reddit for the first time yesterday, and then again this morning. The posters seemed to be really into reddit. Like really into it. I only looked at the top um… things, and three of them were about reddit fans meeting up to talk about reddit, with lots of comments about reddit based marriages.
Anyway, off topic, just wanted to share what I learned today. (ilt)
Which is just sad. I used to frequent that site somewhat regularly, though mainly to mock the guy who runs it for being such a consistent dumbass all the time (where’s my CTF mode in Neverwinter Nights 1?!!!). I hit the site for the first time in years during the Avenger flap and there was EA arguing that the controller just had to be a fake (and thus the drama all made up).
CTF for NWN? Hahha… That is phunny
I still hit Blues at the beginning of the day – I really only need one game news aggregate site, and get the rest of my gaming info from forums. I like Blues the most because of its complete lack of pretentiousness and complete lack of Jimquisition-type content.
But back in the day – man, cruising through Blues, VE3D, Games Domain, the Shack, hitting up Tom’s Hardware to see if I could push my Pentium Pro a little more or if the Riva really was better than the 3DFX V3 etc. etc.
VE3D used to be my main news site. Then they went overboard with the ads and slower on the news. Massively has better MMOG news. RPS caters to my particular PC gaming interests. Blues News is easier to scan quickly for interesting bits. It just doesn’t leave room for the slower ad ridden site that VE3D turned into.
I think my team did a great job on news considering how tight our budget got over the last couple of years. We also did our share of original content like reviews, previews, and interviews. Content was ever factored into our pay. Believe it or not we were outputting several times the news stories expected of us.
We did our best to stay on top of news leads whenever it was our block of time to post. There were so many times that we were among the first if not the first to break a news story, but we rarely received credit for doing so.
I think our coverage of MOBA games (League of Legends, Heroes of Newerth, and Dota 2) was seriously ahead of its time, only in the past six months or so have I seen other sites start to catch up a little bit. Same goes with a lot of the simulation products, Rise of Flight, Digital Combat Simulator, iRacing, etc.
Oops sorry, I forgot to clarify that this is Ohmwrecker, co-Editor-in-Chief.
My issues were never the quantity or the quality of the news. You guys have always done a great job of that. I particularly miss Jube’s short lived MMO podcast. :) Good times!