http://www.gamersclick.com/error_docs/forbidden.html
Ain’t that some shit. Squatters?
Tom Ohle used to run it, right?
Yeah, I think Tom started it. I didn’t know it was dead.
Didn’t Turner “Bulldog” Hopkinson have something to do with this site after the fiasco that was the VE3D/Billy Wilson meltdown?
Yeah, Turner was the main guy there after Tom got the job at Bioware I think.
–Dave
As a former GC writer…
At my last writing, Turner Hopkinson was the main guy in charge. That was almost a year ago.
Since then, with next to no warning, the site kind of imploded. No hinted. No clue. No idea.
Mike Murphy, to be frank, was the last guy that gave me any hint that things were working fine. For more than one person, his editing skills kept the site somewhat sane. His resignation was the canary in the mine for a lot of people there. For a couple of weeks, GC tried to reframe itself as an interview site, but, franky, to little effect.
I have since found a couple of sites willing to host my vapid musings on the games that are out there - nothing for profit, but I’m doing this for skill maintenance more than anything else.
Turner was a nice guy who treated me with nothing but respect, so I can’t speak to his management of the site. All I can say is that things were OK AFAIK. Then they weren’t.
Not high internet drama, but this what I know. I’d happily work with many of these same people.
Troy
So, what happened? The people running the site got tired of running it?
I wish I knew.
When Tom Ohle had a say in things, I had some clue what was going on at the top.
Turner seemed to generate more traffic, and was certainly better at barking out instructions.
But in the span of two months, the whole thing imploded. Murph was closer to the center of the implosion than I was, so if anyone has a clue besides Turner, he may.
Turner’s earnestness had a tendency to run far ahead of where any particular writer or editor may have been at any particular time. With a volunteer staff, this is not a good thing.
Turner was, at the outset, under some grand delusion that GC could compete with Gamespot, I think. This was obviously silly and I don’t think any writer harbored such fevered thoughts. At the very end, GC had some sort of UGO affiliation as he tried to make GC more of an interview site. The long and the short of it is that, from my perspective, Turner had too many grand ideas in his pretty little head and the whole thing collapsed. Our best editors found better things to do, which meant that the writing took a nose dive, and Turner went AWOL, at least from my inbox.
Writing at Stratosgroup and DiY Games is certainly less graft, but, more importantly, it is less drama.
Troy
It’s difficult to keep these things going when they’re running on fumes. Evryone’s enthusiastic at first, but that fades quickly.
Only Gamespy and IGN can compete with Gamespot now – maybe 1UP will compete too.
Turner jumped shipped and hopped into bed with Kyle at www.gamegossip.com
I could tell you more but will leave it at that…
Gamegossip, the site where there’s actually no game gossip.
I think that’s the real problem. Small start-ups have no business trying to compete with GameSpot. There are way too many small sites trying to do the same things.
Yeah, I jumped off the GamersClick ship quite some time ago, roughly 6 months after I started at BioWare… and even in those 6 months, I was more involved in an organizational role than anything else.
The site was doing fairly well under Turner’s control, I think, though I can’t really attest to it. I had way more fun with the site when we were just trying to be a solid mid-level site. The only time I saw profit from the site was about three years ago (back when there was still money in the internet).
I’d love to get something started up again like GC, but I don’t know if there’s really any viability in something like that anymore.
That and the conflict of interest. Right?
dunno why you guys don’t just combine your sites into a ring/complete site like they did in the old days (and still do to a lesser extent). qt3 will be the boards, bub can have stuff for the gamers who are parents, another site can do the front page stuff…
[quote=“Bub_Andrew”]
That and the conflict of interest. Right?[/quote]
That’s a big part of it, too, yeah…
yeah, that is a great idea… who’s in?
Indie games in the house! hehe
Anyway, the last update I saw on GC was a black page with text describing how the computer they got from Alienware (or was it FalconNW?) was intercepted by some scum bags at their co-location. The brief story described their new uber computer being replaced by some hunk of junk in their space while the good system went to the hosting company for their own uses.
Troy pretty much nailed it all. I will, however, mention (since Tom didn’t) that Josh Aldritch was working, to varying levels throughout its life, for the site, too. He is, in some way, affiliated (works with, or founded, or something) iDreamDigital, and he/they originally did all the artwork for our layout. For a long time, he was the one who officially “owned” the domain, but I think he sold it to Turner (it was in the works, but it got hard to follow.)
Basically, the degradation of the site went like this:
About four months after Ohle left, there was some inner turmoil with regard to domain ownership. The site was up and down for about a week.
Shortly after that, I took a job that prevented me from having the time to be editor, which left Turner with more work than any one guy can do. He tried to do some reorganization and the like, but he just had too much on his plate.
Then, server problems. The site was up and down for about a month…more down than up.
Then, finally, the UGO deal came through, but we’d lost most of our readership, Turner was burned out, and most of the writers had left, for one reason or another.
I don’t think there’s much bad blood between the staff – it wasn’t a huge ordeal. The demands on the site were more than we could keep up with, and then we all had real life intervene. A familiar story, I’m sure.
But seeing that iDreamDigital page up isn’t so bad – Josh still has some rights to the site, I’m sure, so I don’t think it’s a hijacking case.
Who knows – maybe he’ll try and resurrect it.
EDIT - Hey, look at that. Somebody already linked to IDD site. How’d I miss that?