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| Wednesday, February 3, 2010 |
  Policy on newsletter ads | 
Posted - 2/3/2010 1:39:35 PM | I'm reposting the editorial note I wrote for the Dec 7th GDNet Direct newsletter issue addressing the use of the email list for sending out full-issue advertisements. Another one is going out today (the same one actually as the one sent last December) and I want to be sure that everyone knows the deal behind these.
So this email landed in my Inbox last week:
"I didn't like that you started sending ads over the regular gamedev list."
It was from someone who unsubscribed after receiving the special issue containing the Full Sail advertisement. I realized then that I had never announced any sort of policy regarding these ad-only special issues, so I'm going to rectify that right now.
This list currently goes out to 22,729 confirmed members. We work on a double opt-in basis so after signing up you are sent a confirmation email that you must reply to in order to complete your subscription, so we're relatively certain that most of these members are real people (as opposed to the 300,167 members who have *not* confirmed their subscription). As the list has grown to this massive size, so has our overhead for sending out so many emails on a weekly basis.
To help offset this cost we're allowing companies to place full-issue ads, which will be dispatched NO MORE THAN TWICE PER MONTH. Even as the list continues to grow larger, this will be more than sufficient as we can always increase our advertising rates to match growing membership. Therefore this will not change in the future. This also does not mean that *every* month will see two ad-only issues being released, and these issues will never replace the *real* GDNet Direct newsletter weekly issues.
If anyone has any more concerns, never hesitate to drop me an email.
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| Wednesday, January 27, 2010 |
| January Wrap-up | |
Posted - 1/27/2010 10:55:53 PM | As promised, I'm here at the last Wednesday of the month to share some highlights and changes and general goings-on here at GDNet. Where to begin? Oh, duh.
More Tantalizing V5 Info
So didja know that we're planning to have a V5 demo in two months? TWO MONTHS!! Yea, things are a little bit crazy around here, made moreso by the fact that we're trying to coincide with the biggest industry event in the world (GDC). So not only are we swamped with our usual GDC prep work, we have to make sure there's something worth showing to people at the show! Heck, I completely forgot about the IGF interviews I've been doing for the past 8 years until about a week ago. As in they did not cross my mind once until then. I'm obviously at some sort of capacity load!
Anyways, we've been trying to poke Superpig into blogging some more, but dangit all he's just too busy! However he should be popping out from his cave in a bit, for a bit, to talk more about the slick new UI you'll be presented with for navigating through your V5 content.
Note that I said "your content" - this is a very important distinction to make going into V5. The site will become much more of a repository for you to use to collect knowledge that is relevant to you in order to make learning things and tracking new techniques a lot easier - whether they be articles, blog posts, forum threads, off-site links...
And that's another thing. "Articles" will become a much more fluid concept. We won't be publishing other people's work anymore the way that we do now. That concept worked really well back when the site was first founded, and a lot of people didn't know how to post content online, or those that did didn't have the time to take the effort to do so. It was much easier for them to send us a Word document to format and post for them.
However nowadays everyone's used to blogging, whether they own their own webspace with a blog or have created an account at Wordpress or Blogger. With V5, you'll be able to publish your own content to the site, whether it's from your own blog or from a Journal here on the site. This will bring in a ton of content from all over the interwebs, and our job then instead of posting it will be to bring to your attention the stuff that is worthy of your reading time.
We will still publish articles, but they will mainly be editorial peices or event coverage - stuff directly from us on the staff.
For our dedicated Mod team we plan to have stuff uploaded to play around with early next month, but it's not too much longer after that for the rest of you!
Speaking of GDC...
We're going to have a booth on the Expo floor again this year, so please do swing by and say hello! You'll also want to come by not only to see V5 in action but to pick up a limited-quantity GDNet coffee mug. Hopefully we'll be better placed than the corner we were shifted to at the last minute in 2009. We may also have some extra mini frisbees to throw around at our neighbors. Either way it'll be good times as always.
New site partner: Events For Gamers
We're beginning to trade traffic with industry event website Events for Gamers, a relationship that will continue to grow once V5 has arrived and we are able to more fully integrate the two websites. One of the things we're doing with V5 is allowing effort for certain parts of GDNet to be focused off-site at locations built specifically for such purposes, and E4G will cover our current Events Calendar. This will bring together a network of development-related websites (hence bringing back more meaning to our .net domain) all right at your fingertips with GDNet at the hub.
Currently with E4G we have created a new forum where you can go to discuss various local/worldwide events. Right now there's only Triangle Games Conference and GDC (two that I plan to attend), but you can request a thread to be started for any conference you plan on attending. We have it set up this way so that all conversation is located in one place per event. Use this forum to find out who else is attending, organize car pools, book room shares, etc.
With V5 you'll be able to see a list of GDNet members attending an event, as well as other integrated feautures - we're just trying to get the ball rolling a bit early. If you're interested in helping out, E4G could use some Drupal developers - contact Mathew Anderson at mathew@eventsforgamers.com.
My travels for the first half of 2010
I'm going to be hopping around to several conferences between Feb and May, here's the full list:
Feb 16-17: Engage! Expo (NYC)
Mar 9-13: GDC (SF, CA)
Mar 26-28: PAX East (Boston, MA)
Apr 7-8: Triangle Games Conference (Raleigh, NC)
May 6-7: GDC Canada (Vancouver, BC)
May 10-13: LOGIN (Seattle, WA)
I'm especially excited for TGC and GDC Canada. For TGC I get to drive down, and there are some beautiful roadways (they call them skyways) I can take through the mountains of West Virginia. I also get to meet Radioactive Dan in person and race the Z against his Boxster  . Then for GDC Canada, I've always wanted to visit Vancouver and it's also the city that hosts the TV series Stargate (in all incarnations) - I'm a big fan so paying homage will be great. Also, Vancouver is only a ~2-hour bus ride from Seattle, and I might even take the intervening weekend between GDC Canada and LOGIN to bicycle down or just rent a car and take a scenic route. Either way should be great!
If any of you will be at any of the events above, let me know!
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| Wednesday, January 6, 2010 |
| Notes on "Adverarticles" and Featured Articles | |
Posted - 1/6/2010 5:07:50 PM | What is an "Adverarticle"?
There's been a bit of backlash from our recently-published article Using Game Engine Art Tools to Improve Run-Time Streaming in Online Worlds. It's also brought back, for some, memories of the Intel debacle from 2007. Some might call this an "adverarticle", but it's really not (and that's a horrible name anyways, I'm sorry I came up with it).
Let me just make one thing perfectly clear - we will never feed you an advertisement without labeling it as such. If someone pays us to push their product, we will slap "Advertisement" in as many places as possible.
But what if they don't pay us? What if they simply come to us with content that features or utilizes their technology and say "You guys rock, we want to publish stuff on your site, can you do this?" Things get a little trickier.
Let's look at another example - Make a Particle Explosion Effect. This article features particle effects from the Vicious Engine 2, used to explain how to create a particle explosion. A link to the Vicious Engine 2 is included at the bottom. The feedback for this article was great. No one voiced an opinion about this maybe being an ad for the Vicious Engine 2.
Why is this?
Well, first of all particles are obviously way cool and fun to play with. Second, the article seemed to have a lot of "meat" to it - video, images, lots of text. Thirdly, it was directly informative - meaning you could take away a new skill or technique from that article.
Now to the streaming article: Well first, online streaming isn't as fun as watching things explode. Second, the article is very short - but I think it's stupid to set a word count minimum and 1) say that anything under that is just too uninformative to be worthwhile and 2) make people fill an article with fluff just to hit that word count. Third, it leaves you wanting - because it doesn't go "in depth" on the topics it discusses. Fourth, it doesn't offer up anything many would consider new or unique.
Therefore, since it's brief, "uninformative" and basic - why would we bother featuring it? To people who have reached this conclusion, the logical answer is it's just a bland push for the Trinigy Engine. I have two things to address regarding this.
There is no such thing as a stupid question
I'm sure we've all heard this saying before. Teachers, especially, like to tell their grade school students this. It is, for the most part, very true. I say "for the most part" because questions can appear stupid, especially online where the common response is LMGTFY. Or even in person, if the question is about something widely considered to be common knowledge. Like an 25 year old asking a friend "Hey, where do babies come from?" It's a very good question, but seems completely idiotic coming from an 25 year old.
I'd therefore also like to posit that there is no such thing as an uninformative article. Articles can be off-topic, they can be wrong, they can be misleading, or they can be inaccurate. We would certainly never knowingly feed you an article that falls under any of those categories. If it doesn't, then it is considered to be an informative and thus useful article. Maybe not to you, maybe not to a lot of you, but certainly to somebody - like that poor, sheltered 25 year old who doesn't know about sex. (Just to be clear, that was an analogy, not a direct inference :P)
That brings me to my second issue.
What, exactly, is a Featured Article?
I had not considered until just now the misconception that could be surrounding the concept of Featured Articles on this site. We have quite a collection of articles in our Resources section (2,354 if the count on the left nav bar is accurate) so it's easy to take "Featured Article" to mean articles that we decide are worth mentioning amongst all others in our database. So in other words, stand-out articles of high quality and substance.
This is not true.
The real reason an article is listed as Featured is because it is an article that we've published. You won't find it hosted on any other game development site except ours, at least for the first 30 days. This was all so much more relevant back in the day when Flipcode, DevMaster and GameDeveloper.net (among others) were still around also publishing content (DevMaster forums are still active, but their article publishing is almost non-existent now). We would link out to a lot of other websites (still do, every now and then) and add those articles in our database, but those we featured were always our own.
"But wait!", you say. "Ok, so these aren't some picks from the bunch, but shouldn't they still all be of high quality and substance to be published on this website?" Yes, but what we're really talking about here are standards, and I've already stated what isn't acceptable in an article, technical-wise. Content-wise, obviously direct plagiarism is a "hells no". Articles that are too similar to an existing published work (that is both recent and well-known) or that seem to draw directly from such work with no reference is also a no-no. Articles that are just incomprehensible grammar-wise are turned back for editing. Articles that ramble or stray off their focus are rejected as well.
So if an article meets all these standards, why should it not be published? If I decide because it's too basic, or not widely-applicable, or just not very interesting, I'm factoring in personal opinion, and that's not very fair. The thing about proper standards is that they do not discriminate. We are very serious about upholding technical accuracy and content validity, but beyond that there's no reason to judge an article.
After all, that's your job. Which continues our discussion...
But, dude - it still looks like an ad
Right, because what would normally just be considered a "meh" article is under-toned by the use of the Trinigy Engine as the main example, and written by the head of that company. Now that I've explained why a "meh" article would be published from a standard content view (which I feel was also an issue here with this article, tho lesser in many minds), let's address the advertisement part.
The idea is new for us, and given that this is only our second attempt I'm not ashamed to admit that we've made mistakes. And by the way the "we" equates to myself and the company producing the content, whether that be Trinigy, Vicious, Xaitment, FMOD... oops I gave away too much info there.
The goals are 1) The company in question gets to highlight their product 2) The reader gets to learn something that is not tied directly to that product 3) We get to work closely with various companies, which can lead to other things down the road.
So everybody prospers.
Unlike with Intel, this process is completely collaborative, so companies aren't just shoving stuff in our face and saying "here, put this up!". We have as much say in the content of these articles as the people actually writing them.
Uhm. This is all very sneaky isn't it?
I suppose it could be construed that way, and seen as some form of subliminal advertisement, which is largely perceived as evil. Why can't we just stamp "Advertisement" on these articles and just be obvious about it?
Well, they're not really advertisements. To look at it another way, how would the recent article in question have been perceived had it not been written by anyone involved with the Trinigy Engine? What if some user of the Trinigy Engine had decided to write a short treatise on things to consider when designing MMO worlds to stream smoothly? Did you know that a member of the Vicious Engine 2 team wrote the Particle Explosion article? What do you think of that article now?
Yes, it's sneaky, but only of you choose to perceive it as an advertisement. Many people got a lot of use out of the Particle Explosion article, so they saw it as a valid content piece, and not an ad. On the other hand, not so many people found much use from the recent Streaming Worlds article, and so they "saw through" the thin content to what was perceived to be lying underneath.
The point is that the purpose of these articles is primarily their use as content, not advertisement. Going back to why I bolded and emphasized parts of goals 1 and 2 in the previous section, if you strip out Trinigy references in the Streaming Worlds article and relegate the Particle Explosion article to using some generic engine, you're still left with valid content. Nowhere does it say that the product utilized for examples in these articles is the best option. Nowhere does it say it's the only option.
The authors writing these articles are focused on sharing knowledge, and it's within reason to do so using the technology that they've worked so hard to develop and make useful for other people.
Okay, moving on
Are there more of these types of articles on the way? Yes, as I alluded to earlier. Now that we've tipped both ends of the scale, I'm obviously going to work harder to make them all more like the Particle Explosion article and less like the Streaming Worlds article.
Will we stop if people don't like them? Of course, but I hope it doesn't come to that. I'm really liking the mutual benefit amongst all parties that comes from producing each of these pieces of work.
As always, I'm dependent on the feedback from the community, so this isn't me telling you all to shut up and deal with it. This is my explanation for you to challenge if you feel it necessary. Keep throwing rocks!
A Side Note: The ERB
For those who may be curious: The Editorial Review Board watches over and verifies the technical aspects of all our articles to ensure they meet the standards I mentioned earlier. So where do they fit into all this given that I said it's just me and the companies working on these articles? Well, the board is not a committee - individual members are tasked with individual articles and use their technical expertise (most times in specific areas) to review the article. Therefore unless I feel I am unable to affirm the technical accuracy of an article, it is faster for me to collaborate directly with authors. These articles still fall under the ERB when my knowledge does not suffice.
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| Wednesday, December 23, 2009 |
| A few words for the end of the year | |
Posted - 12/23/2009 7:40:28 PM | This has been another exciting year for us here at GameDev.net. A lot of that excitement comes from what's happening to us as a business. We dedicated a lot of time this year to attend various trade shows around the world (not just here in the states) and meet with many, many people in the industry. Mad props to Frizzlefry for taking those long hops over to Europe to connect with our second-largest audience outside of the US.
Besides business stuff, our community has also gotten bigger and stronger. In addition to our regular crowd of forum users, we have over 1000 followers on twitter and 3,870 fans on our Facebook page. Both of these outlets have been great ways to directly reach out and interact with our community for people who don't always frequent the forums but do come by the site every now and again for information.
Obviously by now you've been pointed towards Superpig's journal, where he's been updating sporadically with new information about V5, the next iteration of the site design/technology. It's not really his fault information hasn't been streaming out smoothly, and we're working hard to fix that and find the right balance between revealing our plans and over-hyping the new tech.
Rest assured every one of you is going to love the new site, rolling out early 2010. We don't expect the launch to be perfect in regards to everyone's expectations, but we will be prepared to work hard to correct and fix things very quickly.
I used to do weekly journal updates, but I have to admit the lack of feedback, when asked for, was a bit disheartening. I do know a lot of people are reading, however. Starting next month I'll be updating my journal on the last Wednesday of the month, every month, to do a review of that month and call for community response to any current items. This is a great chance for you to help shape the future of GDNet, so please let me hear you!
I'm going to start rambling soon, so let me just say that I'm really, really, really looking forward to 2010. We're still only halfway through our 10-year anniversary and have a shit load of stuff planned to make GameDev.net an even more vital resource to game developers of all fields around the world.
And of course, let me once again thank all of you, in the community, for supporting us and coming back every day for more. Safe and happy holidays to all, and I will see you in the new year!!
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| Wednesday, November 11, 2009 |
| Twitter Coverage Notes | 
Posted - 11/11/2009 1:57:37 PM | Quick note on twitter conference/event coverage that'll take me a bit more than 140 characters to explain 
In the past, we've always prefaced coverage of a session by tweeting something like "Mary Margaret Walker. How to get a job in the games industry" to introduce the speaker and the topic they will be covering. Subsequent tweets would just focus on interesting tidbits from that talk.
The problem with this approach, however, is two-fold - for one, someone coming late to the tweet stream will have to search back and find this tweet to help gain some perspective and for another, if we have more than one person tweeting more than one session... well things can get confusing fast.
The solution is simple - we will now be replying to ourselves, or more specifically to the speaker introduction tweet. So after announcing Mary Margaret, a later tweet on her talk would read "@gdevnet networking benefits us long term in ways we don't expect. approach by asking advice of them. #IGCW" This will then let people click on the "in reply to" link attached to the tweet to see what speaker/topic this tweet belongs to.
Of course, this takes our character count down by 9 (not counting the conference hash tag) and will ultimately be dropped if we need those extra characters, but it'll at least offer up some additional perspective on the meaning of various tweets popping up during the course of a conference/event.
And for those of you followers (if you're still following) who are annoyed by the stream of tweets, we really do wish twitter could let you filter out certain hash tags from your tweet stream. Hopefully that's a forthcoming feature (or available in some clients perhaps?). It appears tho that we seem to gain a decent number of followers during these tweeting events, so for now we're sticking with it.
Follow us on @gdevnet!
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