In respect of the rise of popularity of youtube gaming personalities, and the decline of print gaming media and the more contemporary decline of internet gaming web sites: I'd like to ask how much did you see this coming? In starting a video/personality based website it seems like you've surfed a wave and secured the future of the site, and the jobs of your team. It seems remarkably prescient. Where you lucky? Or did you just have your finger on the pulse? Thanks Jeff - all the best.

Print’s been on a downward slope since the 90s, it wasn’t hard to see that the internet was going to replace it eventually. Watching the big sites get bigger and more bloated as publishers started to wriggle around and threaten to commandeer standard preview coverage by posting it themselves on YouTube instead of giving exclusives to web sites made it easy to see that what had become the standard model for a video game web site wasn’t going to be viable forever, either. Those sites are largely based on access–they get access to pre-release information and share it, you go there because no one else has it.

But, really, we weren’t in a position to even try to compete with the aging huge sites when we launched. We didn’t have the size to play the increasingly dead exclusives game. And the way Google SEO works makes them too entrenched to take on directly. They still are. So we found different areas that weren’t being taken seriously at that level (launching a podcast at GameSpot was like pulling teeth and was never taken especially seriously) and focused on those. Those were usually the things we had the most fun doing, anyway, so it worked out.

In some ways, YouTube personalities and Twitch streams feel like they’re poised to do to traditional game sites what traditional game sites did to print. At the same time, struggling publishers could swoop in and start a big Fair Use fight to wrangle ad money out of the YouTube people, which would disrupt the whole thing and probably drive a lot of people away, regardless of the outcome. Also, a lot of people coming up these days seem to not really care about the idea of an independent voice for game coverage. They’re happy to get it directly from the publisher or don’t especially care if a personality is only talking about a product because they’re getting paid to do so. That’s a little disheartening, I suppose, but not especially surprising.

I like to think that we have enough of a foot in each world to handle whatever happens from here. We’ll see how it all shakes out.