what happened to the original gamespot and will it ever come back?

will the original gamespot ever come back?

No, the original GS we all love is gone for good and never coming back. 2013 Revamp hurt the site badly, losing like hundreds of great GS poster alike who comes for great news and gaming reviews are long gone.

@rvg_kirito: Well, I'm not quite sure what you're looking for when you ask that, but if you let us know specifically what you're looking for - articles, news, site features, whatever, I can try to address them for you.

@wemmick: what i mean is the old GS where there were topic pages that people ran and had page officers back in 2007

@rvg_kirito I am hoping too, our feel become happy and not boring

@wemmick: Lately there's been nothing but short click bait or not exactly relevant articles. I'm not sure what's been going on , it's like there isn't much to write about if we're getting snippets about why Harry Potter's uncle hated him , or the presidential candidates as pokemon. So much is gone from this site over the years and not much if anything new has been added. We've lost unions, feedbackula, heck the reviews barely stand out, and it always seems like GS is two days slow with news. Unions were a great feature, we had people dedicated to a certain series or genre coming together to chat, make friends, and share what news they found. I know they weren't popular with some users, but I miss Tom McShea and Carolyn Petit. Their articles had some meat to them and gave you something to think about. GS has lost so much steam over the years, that it feels like a lemon. I can even see the forums beginning to creak to a halt. It's actually gotten to a point where I look at System Wars for news I'm not seeing on the front page

Everything fun about the community has been stripped away:

Leveling system: We were already promised a new one that would account for our existing "legacy" points

Blogs on the front page of user profiles. Everyone profile currently looks the same. They've been reduced to "activity feeds" and nothing more.

Emblems: Made user profiles unique and were fun to collect.

Customisable signatures/ coloured usernames. The forums look so dull now. We don't even have emoticons.

Plus various other more technical features like choosing the number of threads per page and posts per thread.

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Since we've been giving feedback like this for years to no avail, let's try a new approach.

How about you tell us what's interesting about the GameSpot community right now? Stacks? Ummm... the ability to sync with Twitter?

I mean, look here. This is what a tab on my profile looks like.

What do you want us to say at this point?

I really miss reading user blogs. I

liked the old "Soapbox" feature on the front page that highlighted the most interesting weekly user blogs. User pages now are sterile, ugly garbage. Emblems and leveling were awesome. The "legacy" feature is pretty pointless, since the emblem pictures have disappeared from the trophy room. They might as well just scrap it completely. God, this site sucks balls so badly now.

@rvg_kirito: I think you're referring to "Unions." Those unfortunately were quite time-intensive for us to build and maintain, and while a small group of folks used them regularly, they never really caught on with our visitors at large. So, short answer, no, Unions are not on the roadmap.

@Celsius765: As you've noticed, we've been branching out into "Entertainment" content for some time now. Our gaming news process/approach really hasn't changed, but there's just extra non-gaming content that we have seen has been popular with our gaming audience. Naturally, not every gamer appreciates Game of Thrones, but a lot of them do, so we're trying to provide more content that our readers are looking for, and the response so far has been positive.

As for some of the content and features you mentioned that are now gone, well, we can't just continue to produce things that are not performing and are on the decline. The business of running a "gaming website" is not what it was 10 years ago, so we adapt. We have to experiment and try new things if we are to stay relevant and keep growing.

Sterile sums it up perfectly. There's no personality left. I'm pretty sure those features encouraged people to use the site more back then.

@wemmick: That's all well and good but there's little left to keep people here now that the site has gone bland and the article section has gone abysmal. Most if not all articles have dropped to two or three paragraphs tops. GS has lost it's personality is all. It used to be fun to be here but now all I do is skim the front page check SW for news that the front page always misses and leave. Exactly how much more are you guys gonna strip the site?

Seen people complain repeatedly with snarky comments about it no longer being fully game focused - no issue personally.

However the method, not the content is the issue imo. It's quite obviously barrel scraping click-bait, desperately latching on to whatever is currently popular.

A website such as Den Of Geek covers a wide variety of content over a spectrum of media and most of the time, it's interesting content.

More to the point as well, someone like Totalbiscuit, who basically made a career out of covering unknown indie games, sits with what? 2-3 million views per a video.

Part of the reason for this is because he was doing what basically you (and IGN, Gametrailers and others) weren't, giving information on pc games, be it smaller titles, optimization, port quality, frame-rate; many things pc gamers care about, large sites didn't bring up.

Games like this here, which is also on the pc, how am I suppose to know if it's good? Just a PS4 review, great for them, useless for me.

In many cases, basically, if it's a big Publisher, regardless of the games quality, it will be a biblical event - it's less informative and feels more like an ad campaign.

I'm not going to pretend I know anything about media, I don't, but the front-page has became very poor imo.

I was thinking of creating a new topic for this, but it really is a response to this statement you made as well so I'll post it here.

I think you guys have lost touch with your 'core' audience. It's not just the 'entertainment' articles you guys are producing, but the flood of Pokemon Go articles in the gaming section as well. We used to come here and see quality articles with a healthy amount of content. Now we get that same article broken up into 3 or 4 separate articles and filled with 2 or 3 paragraphs of fluff that only exists to flood google with old links. The worst part is sometimes these split articles send conflicting messages with quotes taken out of context. We end up getting a completely different story here than everywhere else on the internet.

Your most loyal users are the ones who keep your business going. If you lose us, it's only a matter of time before you're being mentioned in the same breath as GameTrailers and 1up.com.

The old site was hands down the best gaming news site on the internet while this new site is practically worthless in that regard. The revamp eviscerated everything that made the old site great. The options for how you could search for games both old and upcoming could be parsed with a variety of variables; by genre, year, developer, whatever you wanted. They took all of that and shot it right out their ass then gave us ... whatever the hell this is. Really, really awful site redesign. There is literally NOTHING better about this redesigned mess for the end user versus the old, vastly superior site.

@Zakule: The game filtering/searching stuff is all here now: http://www.gamespot.com/new-games/

@wemmick: Well look at that .... I'll have to play with it a bit to see how it holds up against the old system. The old one was damn near perfect.

@Zakule: It's all the same data, so if there's something about the tools that isn't working, please let us know and we'll hop on it!

Curious to know, how are your users supposed to find this tool? I don't see a link to it in the topnav nor the footer nav... Where is this linked?

@suicidesn0wman: If you go to a Platform door, such as this one, then click the link below the list of top games on the right, you'll get there (it's a list for that platform, but you can adjust the filters from there.) Admittedly, it's not obvious at the moment...I have some plans to surface it better, but it's going to take some rework of the nav.