When I first began writing, I was roughly 15 or 16 years old. I had originally began writing a journal, something my English teacher suggested would bolster my skills, and flirted with short stories, some absolutely dreadful fan-fiction, poetry and novellas. It was around this time that video game journalism had begun to graduate from print to the web, scattered across a number of European and American "networks" - namely UGO and Gamespy. While those sites generally focused on producing paid content from ex-print professionals, many others were more than willing to capitalise on the free labor of, well, anyone.
I started off writing for two sites; the first was a European network called MGON.com, run by a few swedish guys with a taste for the eccentric. I honestly don't remember a lot about my time there, it was about 12-13 years ago now and the site has been defunct for much of that. It was, however, my first experience dealing with an online team, and back in those days, this was something very exotic and exciting. Most of my writing was for one of their Half Life subsites, covering mods, updates and the like. Of course, I wasn't paid a cent, back then noone was, the team is what kept you going.
The relationship lasted about a year or two. Internal relationships between many of the sub-site owners became hostile and unmanageable, and the network slowly began unravelling. About a year after I left, most of the writers had migrated over to Gamespy's network and MGON became just another forgotten example of the tumultuous personal relationships that govern community games sites. Like most, MGON was run almost entirely from the top down, and as a result, many writers and sub-editors were rarely given much autonomy over their content, design and layout.
The team were incredibly talented, intelligent and had a spectacular work ethic. Most of us were teenagers, and had all self taught overselves the skills to create and serve content. Back then, there was no Web 2.0, no wordpress. If you wanted a site, you built it from the ground up, and if you wanted traffic, it spread entirely on word of mouth. It was a simpler time, with Gamespot and IGN still in its baby stages, Gamespy was also new but growing to be the king. Other magazines had slowly become to come online, but the keys were temporarily in the hands of the fans. It was truly a golden age. I'll get to the problems it faced and why it fell over a bit later on.
The second site was called Gamers Pulse, a community run site based out of Texas. Probably one of the most professionally run sites that existed at the time, it was technically part of the UGO network but had almost complete autonomy. I had no issues with management or other staff when I wrote for GP, and my leaving was based on really nothing else but a sense of disillusionment with the investment of time and effort being put into sites I was pretty sure was making money and gaining influence for many people other than myself.
After this I took a break from writing for roughly 6 years. I finished high school, flirted with Uni and sailed through some jobs before landing, ultimately, into IT. My life began to stabilise somewhat so I decided to stop being a reader and start writing again. I was impressed to see a burgeoning Australian media industry growing, particularly around sites like PALGN (then run by Peter James), Ausgamers, Games On Net and Australian Gamer. Emails to all of them went unanswered (funnily enough, two of them are two of my biggest clients now) so I decided to start small and applied to a very tiny but interesting site called Gamer Limit.
Gamer Limit was run by two guys, one was a Tasmanian and the other was a Floridian. I liked both of them straight away - they were friendly, fiercely passionate and intelligent and had thousands of ideas. I took to the site quickly and before long I had graduated to 2IC. It was at this point I found myself sitting inside the echelon of an established community games site, with a significant amount of support and power to make changes and shape the site to something I thought could be amazing.
Alongside the EIC, I quickly decided we needed to change 3 things about the site - the focus, the staff and the layout. All three were dated and ineffective; our traffic was atrocious and the quality of prose was average at best. The current staff were roughly split into great/terrible, and it was obvious we needed to whip things into shape. I put together a stack of policies - ranging from staff performance/expections to what is expected in a particular style of article. We went on a huge hiring spree and chose, what I still consider to this day, to be a team of some of the best writers I've had the privilege of working with - many of whom have gone on to become paid writers at magazines and larger sites.
Once everyone knew their places, we instituted weekly staff meetings over Skype, discussed plans to increase patronage and upgrade the site. Our insanely talented coder ripped the site apart to institute changes to templates, graphics, adding an entire internal blogging system and more. We put together a schedule of regular content and before long we had regular news, reviews, editorials and previews. Our traffic went up 1000%, we started getting offered review copies and press invites left and right. I spent 8 months working on successfully getting the site listed on Metacritic and Game Rankings.
We couldn't believe our success. I started to slowly increase my profile and make a name for myself during my various networking while sprucking the site. We went to E3 two years in a row. We held a successful charity game marathon across two continents with help from Insomniac Games. But by this point I had been working on the site almost 8-10hrs a day, everyday, for about 2 years. I was starting to burnout hardcore, along with the rest of the editorial staff. Then came the monetisation problem.
One of the biggest myths of community game sites is the expectation that you will, one day, make it big and monetize. This will almost *never* happen. Some sites, namely the Gawker blogs and Destructoid, are exceptions to this rule, but almost every other one will never turn a profit, let alone grow a revenue base. One of our biggest issues was getting consistent ad campaigns - we were in a bracket that invited us into more lucrative ads (at our peak we were coming up to around 800,000 unique hits per month) but all of the providers were next to fucking useless.
This situation tore the site apart. As we became more popular, and we expected more from our writers, many of them started to burn out and lose motivation to write consistently and regularly. To keep them going we would reward them the only way we knew how - creating arbitrary positions and promising them press and priority on review copies. This worked for a little while. But you can't fight fate.
The site peaked once we lost the ability to keep ontop of our social networking commitments. It takes at least 2-3hrs a day of pushing traffic to the site to keep growing readership, but we were losing 1 in 4 readers (only one would come back, 3 would read and run, its a pretty common statistic). We couldn't offer exclusives, we couldn't offer video content, and our podcasts were too random and inconsistent. Our sense of community was very small and our forums were always blown away by spammers.
But we just didn't want to give up. We all knew the truth but it didn't matter, we had spent far too much time to get here. We scoured YouTube for up and coming video talent to poach the site. We hired more writers. We eased the restrictions on content. But then we had the split.
During one of the press trips a massive rift opened up between two of the editors. It was almost completely irreparable. Both sides refused to talk, and it eventually became a case of he-said/he-said. Half the staff quit on the spot. It was the death spiral for Gamer Limit. I left, very sadly I might add, a few months after the split. While I try to keep in touch with these guys, most of us have lost our shared connection and barely talk anymore.
The recent very public breakup of PALGN reminded me of how volatile and unstable community run sites are. Most of them are backed by very strong, top heavy leadership followed by a dedicated team. This tenuous relationship is made even more difficult by the fact that noone is being paid, meaning that the only element of motivation is for the games and the team. If the team have no confidence or respect for each other, or is neglected by the leadership, the house of cards will fall like dominos.
Yug, the original founder of Australian Gamer, recently wrote an article on his blog about the DO's and DONTs of running a community based site. All of it's true, sadly.
