This is not a link to another story, this is something I am writing myself as a question to the N4G community of readers and contributors.
Assuming that gamers like a little comedy with their sometimes repetitive gaming news feed, Bad Joystick is not a bad idea. So why is it so few of the N4G faithful take the time to support the site?
It has the potential to be a great thing and a nice overall compliment to N4G. N4G has grown with the help of all of us and Bad Joystick can do the same if we just show it a little love.
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Well, I have my very own, very special reasons, but apart from that and to add something constructive - I miss the integration with this site.
When you hit the mainpage, you can click that little thing there and see the two latest submission and that's pretty much it.
When you browse the site, you sometimes stumble across an ad for BJ, but that one doesn't look appealing to me. There is nothing that makes me say "F'ck yeah, I wanna see that and laugh my ass off!". Don't know how others see that, though.
Talking about integration: I like to think of N4G as something like a hub, an overworld. You hit the mainpage with the hotter topics, then you have that bar up there to browse the news for every console, industry, development, tech, all that stuff. Then there is the pending section, the tips, both located a little more to the south. We (yeah, I like this place enough to consider myself a member) even have the blogs, meta and user reviews and the forums mentioned up there
That's all cool with me, I wouldn't change a thing.
But what I don't see there, is Bad Joystick.
I have pretty much all the URLs I frequent regularily memorized. I couldn't tell you the adress of BJ from the top of my head, even if my life was at stake.
Maybe it's because of the resolution of my laptop (1280x800), but between the "More |>" and the "Blogs" tab is a space. Why not squeeze both bars a little together and make a "BJ" tab there? You could also just link to it under "More |>", but with it's own tab, it would get more hits, I'd say. Or just generally shrink all the tabs a little to make place for a BJ tab. You could just cut the "Xbox 360" tab down to "360", IMHO - everybody still knows what console is meant and there would be enough free room for a BJ tab. Besides, all the other platforms are abbreviated as well.
The other thing is that most of the stuff I saw at Bad Joystick the last time I was there (some... months ago, I guess) was mostly old stuff. People submit there with large time gaps in between. Whereas here at N4G, you see several news coming in seconds after another. But I think that problem would solve itself once enough people frequent the site.
Hope that might be helpful somehow.
My opinion is that N4G exists as a fanboy heaven. People come here to read game news but mostly for fanboy wars. If you look at any of the non-controversial articles on N4G they have very few comment's and don't heat up.
There just isn't anything to argue, fight and insult each other about at Bad Joystick.
I think BJ needs to be advertised more on N4G and you need to advertise more outside of N4G. If you expect the userbase on N4G to respond to BJ I just don't think it's going to happen because of the type of crowd it has.
Because this is a news site, not a gaming version of youtube.
N4G actually used to be a useful site, now it is just over run with fanboys. It is very sad because, while I love N4G, I hate it just as much now. F**king stupid fanboys.