Welcome and happy holidays dearest GD.

Ahhh what a lovely sight, the GD Towers Lounge Pit. Fire stoked and all the deep sofas littered with pillows shaped like keyboards and mice. So snuggle in my lovely friends and lets afford ourselves a moment to reminisce over our incredible year and have a think about what there is in store for us in the world of PC gaming 2018.

The lure of gaming, technology and the most amazing online community in the world, has drawn us together once again on Christmas day. So please, nestle your buttocks onto one of those comfy sofas by the fire, snuggle into that keyboard shaped cushions this is a place of friendship and warmth. Lets discuss the marvels of our shared interests in our amazing, almost secret, land we call Game-Debate.

I continue to be really proud of what GD becomes year on year. Where other online communities around the world drift into darkness through poor levels of communication, GD seems to shine ever brighter, as you each treat one another with renewed respect. Its because we all get it, we are on the same page. As more new people turn up, they are quickly shown their way, by fellow GD'ers. You swiftly introduce them and help them find their way, whether it is looking up some game data, exploring hardware info, understanding our site tools or just having a friendly discussion on our news or review pages. Its truly incredible.

Right onto my Christmas 2017 and New Year $300 Steam Cash Giveaway.

I always get a bit carried away around this time of the year, as I have just finished the 12 games of Christmas hardware giveaway. Like most of us we probably get a little sad once the Christmas rush has passed us by and we are in to the cold boring normality of January. AND SO to counter that I am going to give someone a massive amount of cash to spend on Steam.

$300 of gaming money to be precise. You can spend this money on whatever games you want from Steam. This money will be loaded up into the Steam account of the lucky winner on or shortly after January 2nd 2018. I will announce the winner in this article at the bottom.

To get involved in this $300 game cash giveaway just use the entry area below and do as many of the actions as you fancy. As a regular to GD you may have already completed some of the actions in the list, like following our Youtube channel or installing the GD Anywhere browser extension. Just for your peace of mind these entries are still counted when choosing the winner of the $300 Steam Wallet.

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I continue to design and roll out new features on GD, knowing they will be used by you guys.

Our GD regulars and site backers (the premium members amongst you) pick up those features, learn and test them, informing me of bugs along the way. I refine them and together we introduce everyone to the public versions. Again I am humbled by the interest and support I get from people who are actually invested in GD.

But Game-Debate is always a work-in-progress. The ideas continue to flow and it takes time and resource to weave these throughout our online gamer domain. I still have loads more ideas to come in the near future and I always enjoy hearing your thoughts and ideas throughout the year, all of which can help to improve things. Obviously I dont always get time to respond to everyone who takes the time to contact me, but I do read everything and I love you for taking the interest and time to reach out about ways of improving this place we all care about.

This year a large amount of my energy has gone into a new revenue stream for GD that if it works will support it for a long time into the future. Its scope is incredible, as it comes to completion, but I have to work out how to get it out to the right people while having little to no money to spread the word. But anyway, I will be sharing more about that with you as we get closer to its completion.

I want to use todays Queen's Speech to take a moment to point you towards some of the site attractions that can help and may be of interest to all you avid gamers and tech enthusiasts

MOST POPULAR PC GAMES OPTIMIZATION SCORES

FRAME RATE GRAPH FOR EVERY GAME

COMPARE ANY GRAPHICS CARD

COMPARE ANY CPU

FUTURE PROOF MY PC

EMBED YOUR OWN VERSION OF GAME DEBATE INTO YOUR WEBSITE

2018 GAMES LIST

Average AAA Game System Requirement Comparison - This is something I really like. If you look to the right of this article you will see this feature. I wanted a hardware standard for us to all see when we visited any area of the site. Something we could become familiar with whether we were on a game page, a member profile, a game review or even a specific CPU or graphics card page.

So, for example, if you were reading about a new game that was coming out, lets say a news article covering the upcoming Far Cry 5, then while reading you could look to the right of that article to see today's Avg AAA Game System Requirement compared to Far Cry 5s current or predicted system requirements. Now this could yield all sorts of quick and interesting info to you.

In the image above you can see that, compared to recommended requirements, Far Cry 5 has a slightly lower processor requirement to the Avg AAA game's processor requirement, but a higher requirement than the average AAA graphics card and higher system memory (RAM) requirement. I felt that this AAA game avg requirement was a good place to start and then we can always visit the Future Proof My PC page to see next years Average AAA game requirement and compare a rig to that. Hopefully this information will help you choose your new computer components in some way, when you next go to upgrade.

I do my best to keep designing and then putting new tools into our hands, to better help us all understand what the PC hardware and gaming market is doing and how these two areas relate to one another today. I will continue to do this for as long as I can but its really hard to cover the costs associated with this site, while ads are being blocked or the ads pay next to nothing. So I ask you to consider joining our premium member area. Our Elite member base, as this really does help me keep things alive.

Since the site began, years ago, I have built almost all new site features with added bonus tools for the premium members. So the whole site is layered with Premium goodies everywhere, all of which you get access to upon becoming a premium member. Every single dollar you contribute is a huge boost.

I have said this before but I think its a great way of looking at things - if every visitor during a single day, who use the free services I have built, gave Game Debate 2 dollars (basically bought GD a cup of coffee), then I would be able to afford to pay all of GDs costs for a year. I would be able to remove all ads, while turning GD into your dream website. New features and tools would be rolled out far faster and with much more polish. And above all, it would mean that you would know for certain that tomorrow when you go to visit GD, it would still be here for you to use.

A lot of things are crowdfunded nowadays, why not websites you like?

However, I also know that not everyone has access to that crazy thing we call cash money. So if you want to help on GD and dont have money to become GD Premium then all I ask is that you take a moment to say hi to someone on GD. Be nice and help each other out. Its a lovely caring community that makes me and all of us the most rich.

So go on, help each other find things around the site. Also, try not to judge too fast if mistakes occur, as I am only human and doing my best. So definitely report errors or problems to article authors or tell me directly if you see technical problems and I will do my best to get them fixed as quickly as possible, when possible.

Other than that perhaps you can go forth and talk to the world about GD. Visit forums and other related sites and add links to our content if you like what you see. This really strengthens us online as we are judged by every relevant link that is found across the internet. Perhaps you could Tweet or write and link a Facebook post? Anything really.

Premium /Backer membership

A quote from an older article by me - While a lot of people think the internet and its content is free, the harsh truth is, nothing is free and eventually the price for managing and generating online content will be far more than publishers can afford. Something will have to change. If you had talked to me a few years ago I would have told you that owning an influential website, like the one GD is today, would have made me rich. Many of you already know that I have made no money myself from our GD adventure so far and spent a lot of my own cash getting us to where we are today.

Do I regret it? Hell no, its been great fun and a privilege to build an online space where so many millions of people can enjoy the creations that plop out of my brain. I have also made tonnes of long term friends and proudly watched many of you make online friends here as well.

And so that brings me smoothly on to the GD Admin. These guys rock. Each and every one of them are hand chosen from the ranks of the most amazing community in the world. You. So from the millions of lovely GD'ers, these few are selected carefully by me to help us keep GD the friendly place that it is today. And they have never let me down.

How do you become an admin? People ask that all the time. And thats aweseome and thank you for being interested. In short, ask an admin, dont ask me. They have the best answers for you and can help guide you. If you look hard enough you will notice that a bunch of old retired admin still turn up to the site, because of their close bonds with us all, and they are some of the most knowledgeable people around.

I would like to take this moment to offer a special thanks to my dear admin friends. Thank you guys for helping keep GD on track and giving me time to focus on creating more and more for our lovely community.

For those of you who drop in and out of GD but have never signed up (which is FREE to do so) I say to you, just take the plunge and join us. Its easy and you will not regret it. Everyone will welcome you with open arms, no matter what your native language or gaming preferences.

We will keep bringing out new content to entertain you each day during the holidays - As you will know and have noticed, a lot of news and content dries up around the world during this holiday period. But rest assured, keep popping back here as you will find we will keep writing lots of topical new features and our world famous Up-For-Debates between now and the new year here on GD. This is done to make sure that we all still have lots to chat about with our gaming and hardware friends here on GD despite the industry closing its doors.

Ok then, big love to you my fellow GD’ers and thank you all for coming by on this family day. It means you think of me and GD as your family and by that very thought it makes us a GD family.

Happy Holidays everyone and best of luck with everything you want to happen in the New Year.

Your pal,

Felix ;)

Winner announcement - Congratulations to Leyliegh K from Canada for following Game-Debate on Twitter. What better way to start the New Year than selecting $300 of games from Steam. Well done and we will do another comp in the coming weeks.