In case you missed it last week the man behind the shill, a nerdy, 40-something year old dinosaur of the digital & interactive business was revealed. I’m sure everyone will have a difficult time understanding why I game, and sometimes blog about gaming, under an alternative identity once they’ve discovered my true identity, and all the pictures of me hanging out with my cat.

That said, to anyone who feels deceived by the news that I’m not actually named after the captain of the seal hunting schooner in Jack London’s ‘Sea Wolf’, I’m genuinely sorry. I’ve been gaming under various alts since my Mom first bought me Intellivision for Christmas back in the early 1980’s. (Burgertime for the win!)

In other news, more importantly, INN was also named THE NUMBER 1 STAR CITIZEN SHILL SITE in the world. After thinking about that for a few days, I have two things to say:

As far as being number 1 is concerned, hell yeah!

Hat’s off the the incredible team at INN and all our fans for making this happen.

Although we recognize there are individuals who have the opinion that CIG is not diligently building the best video game anyone has ever imagined, we just happen to disagree. We also disagree that all our readers, and the legions of Star Citizen fans behind them, are the world’s largest collection of suckers being deceived by a sweeping, hundred million dollar conspiracy to pretend to build a video game starring Mark Hamill, Gary Oldman, Liam Cunningham, Gillian Anderson, and Andy Serkis.

Shilling ain’t easy

While I’d love to take credit for all the hard work it takes to receive the high honor of being the number one fan site, the truth is INN always has been, and always will be, a labor of love produced by the contributions of over a dozen incredibly hard working volunteers who still do it for nothing more than the love of the game. I can understand why the community around far lesser games find this difficult to believe, but we started this for the love of the game and we keep doing it because of this same passion.

But more than the team, we have you, the members of the INN community to thank for our meager success. Without your engagement, encouragement, and thousands of views daily, we are nothing. Every person on this team has a full time career, and a family, and other hobbies…But the community is what drives us all to stay connected and keep creating content about the game we all love.

INN’s Future

All this said, something has changed in 2016 which challenges our perception of ourselves as merely a fan site and we welcome your feedback on the subject. As you may have noticed we’ve added content about games other than Star Citizen in the last few months. At the beginning of 2016 a few of us, quite surprised by the success we’re experiencing covering Star Citizen, decided to experiment with branching out. As we make this transition from Star Citizen fan site, to legitimate coverage of other games and the industry as a whole, I am wondering what we need to watch out for, as far as ethics are concerned. To the best of my knowledge only one person on the INN team has a background in journalism (hell, I can barely string together a coherent sentence) but we do want to do the right thing and that’s going to take the help of you, our readers, whenever we are crossing the line.

As always, INN is a highly participatory, community driven entity. If you have any questions, concerns, or suspicions about our motives, please feel free to contact us. If I can’t answer your question I know there’s a whole team of people around me who can.

In the meantime, INN, like Star Citizen, is still funded by the individual contributions of fans who are gracious enough to donate five or ten bucks a month through our Patreon page and a very small pool of advertisers, which does not include CIG or any of their subsidiaries. We’re barely making enough to cover the cost for our servers now, so if you like our content, and you’d like us to keep making it, please consider supporting us!

-Jake a.k.a “Wolf Larsen”, a.k.a. “Al Swearengen”, a.k.a “Animal Mother” DiMare