What's the technical reason that req'd Gamespot to change?

I worked for Blackberry for 5 years. The old Blackberry O/S was like a Model T that had new carbs, new valves, pistons etc. BUT was still a model T. There's only so much you can do to upgrade, but comes a point where you have to start fresh. They had to build Blackberry 10 because the old O/S wasn't cut out for the requirements of today's devices...

Which brings me to Gamespot - I loved the old site too. So other than wanting a fresher look - what was the root problem that necessitated this change?

I read somewhere that the old site was hard to maintain? Was that it? or was there more to it?

from what ive heard and read, the old site had a lot of severe bugs as well.

I rarely experienced bugs and the most severe was probably my avatar not getting updated for a week or so.

some of the bugs were the constant "bonk" pages (500 errors I believe), double posting, and triple posting. happened quite often too from what ive heard.

Thanks for the question askelly35. One of the key reasons was that 15 years of the old platform had meant it was very hard to build or add new features, we had a patchwork of code that meant every time we wanted to add something new the feature had to be essentially built from scratch - we now have a flexible platform that we can roll features out for much more easily - and across our portfolio of sites if we wish. It's also enabling us to launch new sites if and when we see an opportunity - OnGamers for example was something we saw an opportunity for, and being on our new platform meant we could roll out a new site incredibly quickly.

Of course on top of that was all the bugs and problems that come with maintaining a 15 year old platform - the internet has changed alot since then :)

@mondoben: Thanks for your reply - I suspected it was more of a technical issue rather than just a change for change's sake. Tough audience though. :)

I think it WAS mostly change for change's sake. After all, they did a terrible job.

Bullshit. None of this qualifies as a reasonable excuse to put out steaming pile of a site like the new gamespot. Why didn't you just recreate the old site on the new platform? I'm going to go out on a limb with some guesses: you don't know what the **** you're doing? It was much easier to do a shit job instead of a good one? Whatever the true reasons are, it's extremely unfortunate for all the fans of the old site that we're stuck with this ... at least until you get bought out by a company with a lot more common sense than whoever it is in your organization thought this debacle was a good idea.

The old site was broken, and it was getting worse. There's a lot of missing features in the new site, but at least what we have now works fine. And I'm sure we'll get most of those things in time, there's already been a lot of improvements since the launch.

seems like the main problem is that timely fashion for rolling out fixes. they may know what to do, but they may have priorities in other areas as well. though of course, I am just guessing here like anyone else. we may never really know what the true reasons for the slow fixes are.