EPTAlso, in a gaming era that leans increasingly towards consoles, the Shack remained a site with a significant PC gamer base and bent, founded originally around Quake. Although TL and the Shack have had some differences regarding Starcraft ("Shackers want a strategy game that plays itself so all they have to do is thing about tactics"! "TL wants their strategy game to be dominated by busywork!"), I feel there is a great deal of overlap in the feel of the two sites' communities.
I held off joining because there were so many people who had been there for so long I was pretty sure I'd never be heard, but finally the urge to join the conversation overcame my reticence. Just like happened here, occasionally I'd get a reply and get in a conversation about something. And through it all I got to get honest opinions of current games without the immature horrors of a gamefaqs or youtube.
Now today I find they've been sold. To Gamefly, a console game renting outfit. Though they profess not to want to change things around, it will change.
The Shack has a significant population of game developers. Guys like GeorgeB3dr, who usually broke (whatever tiny, insignificant and seriously infrequent bits of) news about Duke Nukem Forever there. You could go there for insights into the game development process, and get glimpses behind the scenes of the business. The thing is, game developers don't really like game rental places. I have no clue how much rentals impact sales, but one dev there claims his company has numbers (that he can't talk about) that show a significant impact. It's likely that many of the devs will leave rather than support a site owned by Gamefly. I've seen one announce his intention to leave, I'm sure I missed a lot more.
People are wondering what will be next to go. The NWS threads? Swearing? Negative reviews of games?
Long experience shows that independent sites getting bought by large corporations usually suffer. I used to be a moderator at the Winamp.com forums. Once they were bought by AOL, you could see the innovation stamped out (though they managed to squeeze Gnutella and Waste out first) and the devs leaving one by one and funding slowly choked off.
There's a lot of doom and gloom over at the Shack now, and plenty of prior examples lead me to pessimism as well.
A lot of Shackers are casting around for a place to which to migrate. Thank $deity I have Teamliquid. The discourse here is refreshing, and troll minus inc free. The game we obsess over is PC based, so my preferred platform isn't dumped on all the time. The place is independent (barring some oversight on my part, but at least in that case it gives a convincing aura of independence
). tl;dr: I have two sites I love to visit. One of them sold out, but I still have the other. Thanks for being here. Now if TL gets sold to IGN I'll have to cut myself.
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*edit* got George Broussard's shacktag right, URLified Shacknews
I'd have been disappointed if my slightly emo ending slid by without a response like that. Of course if TL did sell out, I wouldn't hold it against them, just as I don't hold anything against Steve Gibson. He ran that site for 13 years, he deserves to get something for it. Doesn't mean I can't be worried about how it will affect the community though.
