It’s been a while since our last ‘proper’ Editorial, right? Well, since we’ve hit our first FB milestone (a small one but still, a milestone that was not achieved by spamming or using other ‘dirty’ tricks), we decided to share some of our thoughts with you. In this Editorial, we’ll be discussing our past, our present, and our future plans (more or less). We’ve also included a small gift to everyone, and we are certain that it will be mostly appreciated by our trance lovers. So off we go.

DSOGaming has been live for almost one year and a half. During this time, we’ve seen some changes to the layout, some server outages, some hacking attempts (yes, back in February we got hacked), and some really awkward moments.

Let’s start with the layout. Our goal is to give a friendly and ‘blog-ier’ look to DSOG. We believe that this layout suits our needs, and those small changes (the addition of Disquss and the article borders) was ideal to give it a better look. We want to keep this look, as we feel it’s a good one. The problem with re-designing a website is that regulars may hate the new look of their favourite site. We’ve seen it happening before, therefore we aim to slightly improve it in the future. For now, though, we feel that it is good and functional.

[Thomas] As we’ve stated in the past, we are a three-person team. Yes, you only see John posting but know that we are two more individuals behind him. Our names are John and Thomas. Every Sunday we sit down and discuss about the future of DSOG and what we want to do, what we think is the best for our readers, what can we do to improve things, whether our decisions in various topics were the correct ones, etc.

[John] Which brings me to the website’s ads. We know that a lot are frustrated by them (at least those who are one-time clickers). Most of them believe that our Interstitial ad runs every 10 minutes or so. If you are regular visitors, you know that’s not the case. Our Interstitial runs every 24 hours, meaning that you’ll be getting it once every day. That’s of course the case only if you don’t reset the Internet connection (and get a new IP), reset your cookies, or use another browser. We feel that this ad type is better than the annoying pop-up ad we had in the past. What you have to realize is that we’re also readers of DSOG (obviously visiting, fixing various typos and taking part on conversations) who can be annoyed by such things as much as you do. And we feel that the Interstitial ad is the lesser evil in this case.

But what about the other ads you may ask? You have an Interstitial so why do you use other ad networks? The answer is simple; despite our almost daily 10K visitors, our revenue is sometimes not enough to sustain the website. Sounds ironic, right? Well, it’s the truth as a lot of PC gamers are using Ad-Blocks these days. So the big question is: would  you like us to be up to date all the time with PC gaming, or remove the ads and feature outdated stuff? As always, it’s a matter of perspective and we think that you’d prefer the first one.

Naturally, some may say that we can increase our revenue with a Subscription model. Well, we tried something a bit more risky a month ago. For a week, we decided to completely remove all the ads, and add a Donation widget. Needless to say that our experiment failed. During this whole week, there were less than 10 donations, meaning that DSOG could not function with such a model. We also don’t like the Subscription model because your information might get compromised from a hacker. As it is now, you can participate in discussions with the Disquss system and there is nothing to be afraid of. Worst case scenario is the closure of DSOG, but you won’t lose anything, your credit cards won’t be stolen, your passwords won’t be leaked. Nothing. Nada.

[John] Moving on to another topic, I’d like to talk about expanding the team. We’ve discussed this and before, and we want to feature more opinions from our readers. However – and at this point – we can’t hire them. We don’t also want to take advantage of them with this ‘volunteer’ thing. We’ve been volunteers in the past, we hated it, and we don’t want to do to others what people did to us (in other words, use us for their needs without getting paid). That’s precisely why we launched the ‘Users Articles’ column, a place where everyone can share his or her article. A place that belongs to you, our readers. A place where you can write about any topic. Our future plans are to expand the team, but this will happen only when we’re able to pay our readers.

At this point, let me give a big hug to all gaming portals that have featured us so far. Kind words to Eurogamer, RPS, PCGamer, PCGames.de, PCGamesHardware, Gamevicio, Kotaku, VG247, TheVerge, VentureBeat, Examiner and Joystiq. I’m sure I’m missing some, so apologies if you’re not included in this list. It does not mean that we are ungrateful. You are simply too many and we are only humans, so thanks for featuring us. And of course to all of you, our readers for sticking with us.

As promised, today we are offering you a gift. Back in the days, before DSOG and when he had more hair, Papadopoulos was a DJ. A trance DJ. Sounds funny, but he actually was good at that. In fact, this guy is good in two things: mixing/playing trance and PC gaming. He tried to follow his dream of being a super DJ and got pwned. Now those were some truly great days. But anyway, his last trance mix is by far the best he’s ever created, and you can download it from here. After creating this mix, John talked with us and we three decided to create DSOG. And that was the official end of John’s DJ career. Not that it was a successful career, but it was something at least. Bet that if there was any trance club in his city, he would be playing. However, trance is not very popular here so it was natural to see him fail. And we are glad he failed as otherwise we wouldn’t have him in our team.

We hope that we answered to some of your questions. We want DSOG to be your home. That’s precisely why we don’t delete comments and why we ask most of you to be a bit more polite with others. We don’t want to censor your posts, and we are not deleting or banning those who have a different opinion than us.

And now, enjoy a short video of John mixing live. Man, now this is hilarious stuff (pay attention to his hand movement, oh boy, priceless). Nyah, we love him but this is funny as hell (well… at least for us).