Thanks to your continued support of our hardware and gaming endeavors, the site has continued to boom into 2014 -- far surpassing traffic during my January 'thank you' -- and we've had to adapt staff to meet demands. Many of you likely already know Michael Mann, known as "Mik" around these parts, for his past role in handling sales round-ups and existing role in PC builds and forum support; Mik has been with us for a number of years and has continued to be a critical asset to the site's hardware support, but even between the two of us, we couldn't keep up with traffic.
Our logo was redesigned about 2 years ago by artist Andrew Coleman. Andrew also designed our new shirts (on sale soon!).
The team has grown to accommodate a few new key players alongside the old-guard. The team looks something like this right now:
- Steve Burke, Editor-in-Chief.
- Nick Pinkerton, Senior Editor.
- Patrick Stone, Hardware Editor (CES support).
- Michael Mann, PC Support Specialist.
- Scott Griffin, Staff Writer.
- Adam Davis, Contributor.
- Michael Kerns, Contributor.
- Jim Vincent, Contributing Photographer (our convention enthusiast).
Nick has been responsible for some of our best coverage coming out of conventions for at least a year now. I first recruited Nick upon his departure from Antec, the case & cooling manufacturer, and immediately set him to work on some of our mainstay guides (like cable management). Since then, Nick has continued coverage primarily on the gaming side, writing some of our biggest features out of PAX East this year (Borderlands, Double Fine, Wolfenstein) and GDC (Archeage). I've been running the show here for going-on 6 years now, and I've got to give it to Nick -- he gives me a serious run for my money at the tradeshows; it's his fault that I'm turning more and more into a real "editor" as things go on with the site. Which is a good advancement, to be sure.
But as you all know, GN's lifeblood is in "hardware as it pertains to gaming," as I tell everyone; we've expanded gaming coverage extensively this year and news coverage has also grown, but hardware is still as strong as always. In light of this, we'll be ramping Nick into peripheral reviews in the near future (headsets, mice for starters). Things may expand from there upon the Broadwell rebuild of our test bench.
Nick may also contribute occasional editorial support when the publication queue grows too long. And, yes, we do have a proper queue with a publication schedule now -- with thanks to all those names listed above, we've been able to rotate article assignment and get some truly fantastic hardware & games coverage online each day. It's a far cry from the "maybe I'll post this week" stance of 2008-2010.
And so with all of this, I'm putting Nick into a role of "Senior Editor" (from his previous "Games Editor" position). He's the first to be given an editing role at GN and will hold the title well. Nick will be a critical component to the site's growth going forward.
Oh, and he's also the President (CEO? Evil Mastermind?) of the Bay Area's premiere gaming club, South Bay Button Mashers. Go sign up if you're in the area, they've just expanded to a larger space.
Grats to Nick!
The Site's Present Course
A few of you have emailed me or commented on articles recently to let me know that you're happy with the site's revitalized direction. I'm personally more dedicated than ever to the site (having founded it in 2008), and made it a personal vendetta to publish at least one article per day as of this year. That's big growth for us. We've frequently hit 2 or 3 per day, which gets a lot more overwhelming for a single editor to handle when we're also putting out so many high-quality videos. We're publishing more news (with more research) than ever, often among the first to put out the word, better reviews, and better hardware guides with a very heavy emphasis on quality; high standards got us this far, so those won't be going away any time soon.
I'm presently working with a developer to revamp the site (I've historically handled all of this, but we need something stronger architecturally) for our 3x traffic growth this year. The new site's template won't be too different than this, but it will be far more functional and even more responsive to large screens. I think you'll all like it.
But it's not just the site that's important going forward.
Michael Mann has been moved into a position to write many of the site's PC build guides going forward -- I'm moving away from all but the highest-end -- and has got a couple feature ideas of his own. We've given the sales round-ups to Scott Griffin ("Abibiliboop" on the forums), who has done a phenomenal job of contributing quick sales blasts (this one is particularly good), gaming features, and has followed GameSpy's demise over the past few weeks.
In addition to this, new contributor Michael Kerns ("The Bear") started with some short news posts and showed his ability quickly. I assigned him an article that I'd normally take on, a Z97 motherboard round-up, and we ended up with fairly extensive coverage of all the new boards coming out.
And, finally, contributing game reviewer Adam Davis is bringing his oft sarcasm-littered game reviews back to GN. Adam has written some really fun game reviews in the past, but recently got picked up at Epic Games (grats!) and has been building his career over there. I'm happy to announce that Adam will be able to continue his game reviews going forward in the indie games space; he's currently working on Pixel Piracy and, uh, it's interesting. You'll just have to wait for this one. I can't even begin to do it justice.
That's all for this update! A huge thanks to our return readers, our excellent team, and all those who've helped build the website up until this point -- readers and writers alike.
Steve "Lelldorianx" Burke.
Editor-in-Chief.