https://www.msn.com/en-us/gaming/gaming-platforms/beloved-27-year-old-gaming-site-wipes-forums-relaunches-as-a-gambling-affiliate-cash-grab/ar-AA1HtZZE (https://www.msn.com/en-us/gaming/gaming-platforms/beloved-27-year-old-gaming-site-wipes-forums-relaunches-as-a-gambling-affiliate-cash-grab/ar-AA1HtZZE)
Whoa, what sad thing to happen to that website. The forums had been running as long as ours I think. :~(
It's a bit crazy. I'm wondering if they'll even do AG reviews anymore, the last one was May 26, 2025 (which wasn't all that long ago I know, but there was a steady stream before that...)
The company that bought the site (which I will not name so as not to boost its SEO, which is what they bought) apparently has this as their business model. They'll buy a well-respected, high-traffic site in a given field (though in this case there are those who feel that the quality and integrity of the site had been going downhill for some time), pivot to some tangentially-related but easily monetized topic, and pump out content written by freelancers—or nowadays more probably AI. There may or may not still be the occasional genre-related content, but if so it will be the most low-effort stuff possible (very likely plagiarized from other sources).
Ugh. Luckily the offshoot site, Adventure Game Hotspot (https://adventuregamehotspot.com/), seems like a worthy successor.
It's been a while since I even visited the site. It's been a shadow of its former self for a while. There was a period about a year or so ago when they were spamming their social media feeds with dozens of posts about the same game, each one worded slightly differently and obviously written by AI. Thankfully that didn't last long, but you can tell they had the soul sucked out of them a long time ago.
It's definitely a niche market. I think you can probably only have a few sites dedicated to it. I very much like AGH. Totally satisfied with it. This site is kind of the defacto developer site. I'm satisfied. I visited AG about 6 months ago and decided I wouldn't go back.
Very sad. But inevitable. :~(
I'm seeing this kind of stuff happen to more and more websites recently. At least now I know why they always become random gambling sites. It always did strike me as being particularly random.