burn books
burn game making
burn knowlege
from the embers we will extract a new community
from death will come new life

to all game makers i say:

i am the herald of your destruction

the kind of humorous thing about this is the site already exists as many of you apparently want it to, more or less.  we have ten times more GENERAL content than we do game dev content; what most of you seem to be advocating would more or less just be a superficial shift that reflects the content we already generate.

yes

good luck generating tons of game making content

ill write articles in the case that anyone wants to hear hand-me-down anecdotes about drugs and fights. or...first hand stories about hanging things on a wall for a store no one comes in to.

also, why is dom such a huge dick in like every single post i've seen him make for like the past week?

yeah it's hard as fuck and not even gz or myself or anyone for that matter is sure we can do it.  don't be patronizing about it though; it's pretty obnoxious and fairly presumptuous considering we've spent hours upon hours discussing this very thing.  whoa you're right it never occurred to any of us that this would be a struggle!

another funny thing about this topic is how completely useless it has become.  i like how people come out in droves to talk about WHAT THEY THINK GW SHOULD BE.  these topics are always annoying to read because it is a bunch of conflicting opinions of people who do not have the full picture of things and apparently just want to think up ways for the site to be better and stand back while someone else does the work.

anyway these are pretty poorly conceived suggestions.  while there is a glimmer of hope that we can, with enough work, turn gw into a functioning indie game site with a decent amount of content, especially considering how easy it is to just HAVE GAMES, there is no way gw would thrive as a general entertainment site.  initiating such a radical shift in focus as to DITCH ALL GAME DEV would basically put gw in its death throes.  it doesn't really matter if you are embarrassed to tell your friends about gw, or if you don't care about game dev anymore; it is literally all we have to base a site around that would be of any interest to anyone.  the quality of the GENERAL writing we have is not good enough for this to take place, and our community at the moment is weak enough that we probably would not recover from the hit we would take by cutting off the game development segment of our community.  when it comes right down to it, we just do not have that many interesting people here.  the site would be subpar.  you need to be FUNNY and ENGAGING for this to work and we have very few people like that here.

you do not need to be nearly as funny or engaging to just write game dev articles or tutorials, or reviews or whatever else.  this is why the chances of gw surviving as an indie games site are still much higher than gw surviving as random mediocre entertainment website #3257.  the problem right now is obviously a lack of people to generate game dev content, but we will have a much easier time pulling in people who are willing to write about indie gaming than we will pulling in people (new members or current ones) who would be consistently interesting enough to write general articles.

it will be very difficult but gw might someday actually be a decent game dev site if we can get it out there to the right people (as in, non rpg maker people).  this is because there just aren't that many legitimately good game dev sites, and in general i think it is easier to succeed in this area with what we are or could feasibly be equipped with in the future.  conversely, basically no one RUNNING GW feels like we would ever have a shot at having the members or pulling in enough of the right people to be a good general entertainment website.  it is much harder for a site to gain any amount of notoriety in this niche as there are just so many websites that would be as good or, more likely, better than us.  this might be the case with the game dev niche as well but it is 10x less daunting in terms of how GOOD you need to be to even get noticed and how many sites you are actively competing with and what you can do to attract new members.  i feel, along with gz, steel, and many others, that pursuing game dev over GENERAL SHIT is our only realistic option and that shifting the focus of the site to something more general would probably KILL GW or, at the very least, ruin any chance of it being a successful website that more than current members read (heh, ggz. . .).

I'll repeat gw is not dying, GW does not need to recover, GW is successful now

let game making fall into the shadows
viva gaming world

nah the activity has actually been drastically dropping off for quite a few years now and at this point the forum is sustained by a relatively small amount of CORE MEMBERS who themselves are slowly leaving without being replaced because we have perhaps a tenth the stream of new blood we had in the past (as in, we have maybe 5 ACTIVE NEW MEMBERS from 2008 who continue to post and become part of the community).  we have NO NEW MEMBERS who actually join the community, essentially, and real members still continue to leave on a fairly regular basis.  idk how you quantify successful for this to fit the bill.

im not sure your fully thinking about the implications of these 'problems'

ya got me