Racketboy and the Future

[Ack]

Hi folks,

Ack here again to talk about the current state of Racketboy.com and its future plans.

For years Racketboy has been a staple of the retrogaming community and knowledge base on the Internet, with key articles which spread information, generated interest in consoles and their libraries, and attracted praise and page views. Founded in the mid-2000s by the Sega-loving eponymous Racketboy, this website was started with the intention of becoming the gateway to retrogaming for outsiders trying to get down the basic facts or expert enthusiasts looking for new games to seek out or new genres to explore. We've posted a variety of articles, ranging from the likes of the big names like the Sega Dreamcast to the obscure like the Casio Loopy.

Hisotically Racketboy.com experienced roughly 10k unique visitors a day up until 2012, with peaks after the release of certain articles. Our best day saw us attracting 150k unique visitors in one day and reaching the top spot on Digg in 2007 when Racket unveiled Fastbilly's article GoldenEye 007: Ten Years Later. Unfortunately after 2012 our number of visits began declining until our current place, where we receive about 6k unique views a day.

What happened?

Well, a variety of factors as it turns out: server troubles saw a sudden decline in 2012 that we successfully recovered from after a few months, but in 2013 content became erratic. While we have still had the occasional spike(70k unique visitors in one day for the most recent SHMUP article), the unfortunate truth is that we weren't really pursuing our audience anymore. The release of new articles slowed to a crawl, the podcast ended, news aggregators and websites we had been featured in steadily lost favor and were replaced by new forms of social media and mass communication, and those of us who were big on the convention circuit slowed or stopped giving panels. In many cases the personal lives of the key content creators also took off, with new employment, marriage, children, falling out with friends, moves, and so forth all causing us to step back from our creation for some time. We even closed the store because it just wasn't pulling in customers anymore. While we are still the darling of Google(search for retrogaming topics, and we're almost always on the front page and often the first link presented), we have recently even been forced to fight off a small game development firm from Brazil that wanted to infringe on our name and refused to cooperate with us.

In the meantime, look at what has happened to mass communication and the Internet: the old print magazines have largely died, many of the smaller specialty sites relating to our hobby have dried up or are fueled purely by a core niche group, Digg has been replaced by the likes of Reddit, and video reviews on YouTube have now become the dominant means by which the youth get their information on video games. Certain specialty sites still run strong, but retrogaming took off in new ways that attracted the big name websites as well as helping to form the inspiration for the indie games boom of the last decade. Retrogaming in general has changed too, with new avenues to approach it, new ways to play, rising prices, and once fruitful libraries now so heavily mined that we joke there are no hidden gems left to find. All of these elements combined caused Racket at one point to consider closing the website, and the most common response received in the wake of our most recent article has been, "We thought you guys shut down."

Things look pretty scary for this website, huh? Well, take a look below this line for answers:

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The Racketboy.com creative team sees all of what I previously said as a challenge worth taking on. We have set a goal to go back to 10k unique visitors a day, and we've already quietly begun combating these issues head on in the last few weeks, with new plans for more.

You will notice that we recently released a new article about hidden gems on GOG. There are two important components to this article that you may not have realized: 1) it covers a digital distribution network for PC games, territory where we have never previously dared to venture, and 2) it was undertaken by a group to split the writing duties and allow for ease of production. There are unexplored avenues of retrogaming on this website which we intend to attack, avenues we have considered but never actually tried. We are looking to expand the conversation from beyond just consoles, and GOG seemed the obvious choice, but future plans include genre-specific articles mining the GOG library, similar explorations of the Steam library, PC gaming(as well as Apple and other computer libraries if possible), and pinball. Yes, we're breaking into pinball.

We also intend to continue with our community outreach and crowdsourcing article opportunities. Already several of you have reached out or been contacted about producing content. Articles with new updates on retrogaming scenes, recommendations for people looking to break into other areas of the hobby, breakdowns of more genres, all of these are things we are working on or are interested in finding people to work on. We also want to bring in experts from other sites and communities to write up pieces for us, to further the exchange of ideas and help fill in the blanks that our community might not be able to handle.

Racket has a wishlist of articles that he would like to see done. As soon as he unveils it, we intend to start searching for members willing to help out. The creative team has numerous ideas for things we'd like to see(I'd love to see more obscure items to fill out our knowledge base and make us the key source for the basics, like an Action Max 101). We also intend to unveil a new kind of collaborative article perfect for enabling community involvement: the Master List.

The idea behind the Master List is to provide paragraph write ups of entire libraries of games, but to spread these write ups out over a group to prevent burn out, enable collaboration, and ensure that things aren't held up by a single member. It's the only way we could conceivably examine the massive libraries of certain consoles like the SNES while also easing the burden of writing for even the smallest library, like the Virtual Boy's. We plan to focus on one console or handheld at a time, present a list of all the games for that device, and have community members volunteer to write up individual games. To make things simple, we will work on only NTSC-U releases at first(sorry PAL folks, we mean no offense), then spread into the international realm. Our first attempt at the Master List will be the Neo Geo Pocket Color, because it has a small library with a solid variety of titles based on big names. Details have to be finalized on how we present this to the community so you can help out, but we are actively working to hammer those out.

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Our interest in collaboration and community engagement doesn't end there. Do you know how many different groups, tournaments, and organizations we offer on our forum for members to play and discuss games with each other? Take a look at these:

Together Retro
SHMUP of the Month Club
Together RPG
STGT
Summer Gaming Challenge

This is all on top of the various subforums and threads we run, like the annual Games Beaten thread. We want to find new ways to highlight these groups and encourage people to participate. This may involve front page features, finding new ways to advertise, reaching out to other groups for cross promotion, or other potential ideas. We want to highlight these as a feature and a challenge to all of you to continue to participate, play, and discuss retrogaming as well as attract new members who would like to join in the fun.

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Now obviously all of this relies on a heavy commitment from the key staff and a willingness to work to help out in the community. But we already all share a commitment to this hobby. We want to ensure that we all continue to enjoy it and spread our joy to newcomers. And we want to ensure that all of our members are able to have a good time and participate in the retrogaming conversation. Most of all, we want to have fun.

We cannot do this without you. Racketboy.com exists as a beacon of retrogaming information. Fans of video games deserve to have access to that information. Won't you help keep that information flowing?

Because we are Racketboy.com: Your Guide to a Retrogaming Lifestyle, and we need your help to keep it going.

[prfsnl_gmr]

Awesome. I am happy to help (and would love to do an article on Nintendo eShop games).

EDIT: I can also do an article on the Arcadia 2001 (if anyone is interested in it...).

[Forlorn Drifter]

Looks good so far. I have a couple of suggestions/discussion ideas I'd like to throw out, if anyone is interested.

For one, I think cleaning up the homepage and re-invigorating certain areas might be ideal. We still have the store listed, despite it not being operational, the same with the podcast section. If either of these are to be brought back, this is a moot point, but for a random visitor that may look odd/unprofessional/as if the site is no longer running. The journal portion of the site is somewhat sparse. I think we could have some good insight for some articles there, although I don't know what has previously been done in writing for that section. Just as a thought, I'd also like to see something on the front page for game rooms/setups and tips for those as a full section, but I imagine keeping that going would be hard.

Being on top of the "new" retro might also be something considered. While we have a huge thread discussing whether or not PS2 should or is considered retro, I do think that the general consensus is that the system is. We have articles for it, and other systems of that generation, but due to the age ranges and such here, I believe we could be the forefront of coverage and information about that sort of stuff if we have the time and effort put in. Good coverage of items such as the Retron5, retro controllers for PC, etc, would also be good to cover.

Finally, I was wondering if some bits of cross promotion and heavier promotion of the forum would be appropriate. We have members that make youtube videos, have their own blogs, etc. If they and the site were interested, I think the site promoting them and their creations, while they promote the site and forum, could be a worthwhile endeavor. I also feel as though the forum isn't promoted enough. We have tons of stuff here (that huge Wii thread that one of members made detailing various games, accessories and such is something to keep in mind for an article at some point, either if they are willing to let someone use it, or write it themselves.) that could be interesting to a casual viewer, but how many actually browse the forum?

[J T]

I have been considering writing an article about how business practices in the video game industry affect game design throughout gaming history. I think retro business practices played a role in what made the classics so great. I am also concerned about modern business practices that erode consumer protections, focus more on "capturing" consumers rather than attracting them, and setup network effects that lead to winner-take-all business scenarios that harm the overall gaming industry and reduce diversity.

I would be happy to have this published on racketboy.com.

[fastbilly1]

A frontpage overhaul is coming soon. Nothing drastic, removing the store and moving the podcast to the store slot are the main changes. The question is what should we put in the podcasts current spot?

Ideas that have been tossed around are:
- Link to random old article
- Biweekly gameplay video updates - provided by users on the site and uploaded to the Racketboy Youtube.
- Biweekly paragraph updates of random games
- Random game screenshots from the screenshot thread
- Porn - obviously not going to happen.

[MrPopo]

A frontpage overhaul is coming soon. Nothing drastic, removing the store and moving the podcast to the store slot are the main changes. The question is what should we put in the podcasts current spot?

Ideas that have been tossed around are:
- Link to random old article
- Biweekly gameplay video updates - provided by users on the site and uploaded to the Racketboy Youtube.
- Biweekly paragraph updates of random games
- Random game screenshots from the screenshot thread
- Porn - obviously not going to happen.

We could compromise on the porn and put up ecchi pictures?

I like the idea of a general "I feel lucky" button. You click it and it dumps you onto a random article or screenshot or maybe to one of a handful of threads for the various Community Events like TR and Summer Challenge.

[Blu]

I like the idea of an "I'm Feeling Lucky" button or a "StumbleUpon" feature. I think that would work well and be a meaningful placeholder.

I know we have the thread where we tried to come to a group consensus on the top 25, which included some shenanigans on a few of the lists. What I'm getting at is maybe a poll of the month could be an addition.

[dsheinem]

What kinds of new support for publication or new venues of promotion will be given to content creators? As someone who has created a lot of content for the site over the years, I always felt that this was the weak link in getting someone from the forums (e.g. me) to feel it was worthwhile publishing content to the front page. FTP, Wordpress, passwords, linking, RSS, and other kinds of issues were abundant.

I also know that in the early years of the site there was per-article compensation provided to some of the writers. Is that in the cards for the revamp?

[Jmustang1968]

What kinds of new support for publication or new venues of promotion will be given to content creators? As someone who has created a lot of content for the site over the years, I always felt that this was the weak link in getting someone from the forums (e.g. me) to feel it was worthwhile publishing content to the front page. FTP, Worfpress, Password, linking, and other kinds of issues were abundant.

I also know that in the early years of the site there was per-article compensation provided to some of the writers. Is that in the cards for the revamp?

I even told them I would consider starting back given I had an editor again lol.

[puke_face]

For years, I have thought about contributing an article along the lines of "The complete history of the Intellivision".

If there is interest, I will attempt to get it started.