Slashdot Mirror
Gamecenter Gets Fragged
Banjonardo writes: "Cnet's Gamecenter, for years one of the greatest sources of gaming news and the most reliable source for good ratings, is quitting the business. The story is that since Cnet acquired ZDNET, they're gonna go with Gamespot now. We'll miss them." Useful, fast-loading Web site replaced with nested-tables monstrosity, story at 11.
I would say that slashdot is pretty much a nested table monstrosity
Doesn't it always seem as if mergers end up hurting consumers rather than helping them? I'm sure from an economics standpoint there's something to be said for economies of scale, leveraging assests, etc. But I have yet to see the truly positive aspects of mass corporate mergers. c|net acquires ZDNet and we lose a great game site. My cell phone company morphs into Cingular and suddenly has no record of me being a customer. Fleet buys out my bank and suddenly my free student checking account is $10/month and I have to pay $2 to speak with a teller (in person or over the phone). Nynex becomes Bell Atlantic becomes Verizon, and all I notice is that it costs more to use a payphone. And of course in all these cases I'm overlooking the workers whose jobs are "no longer necessary." I realize this whole argument is rather cliché and early-nineties, but I'm honestly wondering--has anyone's life been improved by the last decade of megamergers?
I'm surprised nobody else on here caught this in the letter at F*ckedCompany that somebody else posted here, but SmartPlanet's employees are getting the axe too. But somehow they twist it around to say:
But creating courseware and handling customer maintenance as well as developing courses, is extremely resource intensive, and not a core focus of our business. We feel that by focusing on our core strengths, we can actually make SmartPlanet even more successful than we have to date.
Huh? How do you lay off most of the staff and at the same time make it more successful? Unless most of the staff was involved in sending out the spam I usually got from them, I can't quite understand how that would work.
Part of the original strength of SmartPlanet was knowing that the people behind the tutorials actually knew what they were talking about. SP had guys with doctorates teaching the classes, and when you interacted with them, you walked away with the impression that they weren't just holding paper certificates they got through the mail. These were smart people.
So now they're going to downsize to a few monkeys and make it a better site? Huh? Hope my company doesn't take that same attitude.
What's your damage, Heather?
Fucked Company has the letter sent to CNET employees about this. It's always a delight to read of the misery of others.
I read both of those sites relatively frequently, but even now I couldn't tell you the difference between the two.
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Doesn't phase me, Gamecenter lacked personality. I never saw a scolding, blatently honest review on there and sites without negative reviews have no credit in my book. Obviously not every game is good. I recommend sites like http://www.shugashack.com and http://www.firingsquad.com.
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Shouldn't that be a telefrag since Gamespot took their place?
It used to be that Gamecenter had extremely interesting and poigniant editorials. The editors had personality, creating within the mass that was Gamecenter several small subcultures.
A while ago, they squelched the editors (except GamerX, whom they kept on as a much-toned-down reflection of his former self, to provide blurbs and sidebars).
The Top10 lists that Gamecenter does are one of the few vestiges of their former "interesting" status.
What happened? Did people lose interest in the editorial lines? Did Gamecenter Corporate decide that they wanted a homogenous front?
In my opinion, they killed off Gamecenter a long time ago. This is merely making it official.