Late in 1999, about when Dreamcast was coming out, I saw a Saturn at a local used games place and bought it and Daytona USA for . I couldn't afford a Dreamcast, so this was the next best thing. I really enjoyed my Saturn, so being a connected fellow I looked for a place on the Internet to discuss Sega stuff. SegaWeb seemed like the logical place. I lurked for a few months and finally registered in February 2000. The forums then were excellent, with great discussions and tons of interesting personalites. I've been posting there ever since.
Eventually SegaWeb, which was just a fansite originally (and a great one at that), caught the hillarious Internet business investment craze and sometime in 2000 converted to GamerWeb, which was supposed to compete with industry giants IGN, Gamespot, and DailyRadar. I had a bad feeling about it from the beginning. A lot of good forum-goers left after that change. The close-nit community had been shattered. Slowly, the first generation (1998-1999) forum members left. The downward spiral had started. After the first-gen member who had been serving as moderator went nuts, she was replaced by people who supposedly worked for the site, though we had never heard of them before. Things started seriously sucking then, but there was a certain status quo...While the gaming discussion had become very boring after Dreamcast died, the unique politcal discussion that kept me posting was sustained by a few intelligent members.
The demise of GamerWeb is the result of whatever business stupidity was going on behind the scenes. I never got the full story, but this is how I understand it. The details may not all be true, but that doesn't matter. THis is how we, the oh-so-little people saw it happen: The original owner/founder, Adam, wanted to cash in on SegaWeb, so he converted the site to GamerWeb, a multiplatform site, which in my opinion overstreched what little resources he had. GamerWeb never really grew. They added a paid video service about the same time IGN added Insider, which distracted even more from the site's original intent. At some point, the whole operation got bought by Hi2, who apparently never gave a damn. A few months ago, Adam got fed up with Hi2, and left to make a new site. Seemingly, he also took many of the videos that GamerWeb was offering as well as the forum member list. I never quite understood if that was legal or not, and it may in fact have been completely legit, but it seemed odd to me.
The most obvious problem that GamerWeb had was that no one wanted to pay the staffers, so little if any content was produced on a regular basis. This was fine way to run a fan site, but not a big commercial site. recently, one of the few staffers that cared decided that he wanted to get paid. He refused to update the site until he got paid, so the backers apparently just took down the whole site. They replaced it (nearly a month later) with a shoddy looking forum and no content. This new site supposedly exists to promote the "GamerWebTV" show that their making in Europe. Yet another distration from the original intent of the site. It seems that everyone wants to cash in without actually caring about the site itself.
The big losers in all of this are the members of the GamerWeb forum community. We stuck with GamerWeb, hoping for a good outcome. No one ever gave a damn. With the hillariously poor content, the site's best, and only real asset is the forum community. We were and still are treated like some ancilary component. They forget that a site is nothing without a faithful community. Now, with this most recent forum migration, even we are beginning to give up, scattering to other places.
Earth to whoever runs GamerWeb now: Just give a damn for once!
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