Open For Business

The idea behind this blog is to keep an eye on major updates in the wild and woolly world of online games. At GameSpot, we understand that online games are constantly changing and evolving, so using trying to shoehorn them into our traditional preview/review format doesn't always make sense. For your standard retail game that you find at your local store, you might pick up the box, look at the pretty pictures on the cover, read what's on the back, and maybe even decide to buy the game and play it. Then, when you're finished with it, you toss it onto your shelf and probably never look at it again. This isn't necessarily the case for online games.

To put it another way, if we were to write a big, long standard story for every single online game out there, those big, long stories could be out of date in a matter of weeks, since the information we covered in those stories might change very quickly indeed ("In patch v2.03.21, this new game will have flying horses!" One week later: "Flying horses have been removed from the game because they caused Necromancers to have their computers explode"). Using big, static stories to cover these constantly-changing games doesn't really do them justice because a big, static update can't keep up with the changing face of that game. And so, big, static updates don't really serve you, the reader, since updates like that become inaccurate over time and may not give you the most accurate and current info you might want for that game. So, this blog is about having quicker, ongoing updates that can keep up with the changing face of online games, with the caveat that many blog entries may be covering stuff that could be changed in the future. You'll know you're looking at a blog post like that when you see this disclaimer:

So, what are we looking to cover here? Well, we're not necessarily looking to always get super in-depth about things like the latest patch notes for every single game...because we're assuming that if you already play a certain online game, you already know what's in the notes for the latest patch because they're generally right there when you launch the new game.

What this blog is intended to be, is a top-level view of what's going on in the world of online games--the major updates, the new games, the issues that we imagine you, a player of online games, will want to know about. So, this blog is intended to be both a way to concisely cover the big news around these games, and also to be a launchpad to jump into conversations about the online games and issues we cover here, by way of the comments section.

Speaking of comments, if you have any thoughts, suggestions, or questions, please feel free to leave us a comment, below. Thanks.