If you’ve been visiting the site lately (and there have been quite a few more than usual lately, so welcome and thanks to our new and recurring visitors), it’s probably becoming clear that we have aren’t just interested in what games are coming out, what games are delayed, and what’s selling; we love Gaming as a hobby and as a culture, and we care about it. We hope that in some way, we can contribute to the evolution of our sub-culture forward into a more relevant, or at least valued place than it perhaps sits in now. This is why we’ve been posting stories so heavy on commentary lately, and it’s going to continue, because it’s what interests us.

This is going somewhere, I promise.

Anyway, there has been an increasing trend for the last few months for the gaming blogs like Joystiq and Kotaku, as well as the lesser known sites, to publish stories that seem increasingly tangential and fluff based, and less motivated by any sort of interesting news development. First, I understand some of the reasons behind this: both of those blogs are ventures that depend on traffic for monetary returns, and this year signals a first for the gaming blogs: March leading all the way through May was typically a snowballing news cycle leading up to E3, the biggest news extravaganza of the year, where there would be enough reveals and announcements to come through for the duration of the spring and summer release droughts until the big games dropped starting in September, and continuing through to January. You could tell that things were different in the aftermath of E3’s essential dissolution when every gaming news site has been focusing on every show that involves the video games industry as a possible “next E3″, and paying much more attention to events that used to be good for a day or two of news at most in previous years. These sites are desperate for a replacement to fill their news schedules in the way that pre-E3 and post-E3 coverage used to, and unfortunately, it would seem they’re going the tabloid route to do it.

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