I’m sorry. I tried everything i could think of, overextending myself to ridiculous extremes in the process; and i’m no closer to my goal of making any of this sustainable.

So i need to scale everything back, wrap up a few loose ends, and try to finish my Combo DVD for the handful of people who preordered it – while catching up on all the things i postponed or sacrificed along the way. I’ll try not to disappear completely, but no guarantees.

For those of you wondering what happened, here’s the problem. Anyone can do what i do for three months, maybe six months, maybe even a year. But it burns you out, like you wouldn’t believe. The 4-5 casual matches of MvC2 that i happened to play at SoCal Regionals were literally the only video games i’ve played in the past 2-3 months!

What can i say? Running these websites is a grind. Up until now i held onto hope that i could make something out of all this effort, but it’s just not happening and it’s time to face facts.

Our whole system of publishing content is broken beyond repair. If you look at any given video i’ve posted on u2b, roughly 2k views originate directly from Sonic Hurricane and roughly 10k views come from an embedded player on eventhubs.

That means “news” sites like eventhubs make at least five times as much ad revenue for every single video that i produce. Yes, we’re only talking about a few dollars here, but think of all the material that eventhubs leeches from external authors like me.

Over the last year, Sonic Hurricane has averaged around 95k hits per month, which probably makes me the most successful dedicated content producer in the community. For the record, i still haven’t made a single dime. I’ve actually lost money! That’s a really bad sign if you’re a video maker or article writer hoping to go somewhere with this.

On the other hand, eventhubs gets three million hits per month, which probably translates into a couple thousand dollars every month for that guy. Now ask yourself how much original content eventhubs produces. Yup, it’s damn near zero.

All their frame data is copied from Shoryuken.com translations of Japanese publications, all their strategy guides are stolen from SRK forums, and all their embedded videos are created by people like me. And the worst thing is, they’re actually pulling the community away from Shoryuken.com – using SRK content to do it!

It’s a sad state of affairs when the only person profiting from all this work is the guy who’s never produced a shred of original content and given nothing back to the fighting game community. And every single day, i have to watch people linking to eventhubs left and right. It’s just impossible to stay motivated when things are this fucked up.

It breaks my heart to see people talking shit about Shoryuken.com for every little error they make, then turning around and praising eventhubs. Where the hell was eventhubs when our community was struggling to stay alive, when all we had were decade-old games?

Say what you will about SRK, but you can’t deny everything they’ve done for the fighting game community. They’ve organized the best fighting game tournament in the world every year since 1996! And they lost money every year until at least 2006.

For the last three months, SRK has consistently posted game industry news faster than eventhubs. Yet every single time they slip up by a few minutes, some fool comes out of the woodwork to talk shit. Why?

You know, someone actually had the audacity to complain about a John Choi strategy article on SRK last month, because i guess he didn’t want to take advice from a top player who hadn’t won a recent tournament. I’ve had the same reaction to a few of my strategy articles. So why isn’t anyone questioning the matchup information on eventhubs?

I actually met the owner of eventhubs briefly at Evo. He seemed like a nice guy. I don’t blame him for trying to cash out on the mainstream success of SF4. But nobody knows who he is or where he came from. He just showed up with SF4 and capitalized on its instant popularity. And everyone jumped on his bandwagon and happily rode down the path of least resistance.

Honestly i love this community to pieces, but it’s hard not to be disappointed in the way this is playing out. For someone as burnt out as i am, it’s the final nail in the coffin.

Anyway i’m sure i’ll get a lot of flak from eventhubs supporters for pointing all this out, but whatever, bring it on. I can’t see any upside whatsoever from eventhubs becoming as insultingly popular as it has, and i haven’t even touched on half the negative impact that website represents. It’s just sad to see it go down like this after everything SRK has done for the community, and i’ll be quietly rooting for SRK to come out on top in the end.