As I said back in May 2024, I really suck at writing Editorials, lol. The plan back then was to write an Editorial at the start of each month. Well, here we are after three months with only one Editorial. Damn, I’m good at this.

Anyway, before we continue, here’s a Shoutout to all our Patreon members.

• Tally Lassiter
• Drifted
• Alex PAUL
• Count Duckula
• yep
• SonicX
• Netshark
• Joat42
• Luiz Tomas de Aquino
• Robenger
• Joe
• calculon559

If you want to support DSOGaming on Patreon, you can do so by following this link.

With this out of the way, let’s talk about some boring topics. The first one is our Comment Policy. As you know, each year we have a Poll for our policy. After three years, I believe it’s pointless to have another Poll. It has become clear that most of you want the “Unrestrained” Policy. And, given what has been happening with other sites, we’ll stick to it. So, we won’t have any other Polls because they are pointless.

Now as you may have seen, some words are censored. If you’ve been a regular reader, you know why we’ve been censoring them. If not, here is why. While you can talk about ANYTHING you want, some words will be censored due to Google’s ad policies. If you don’t like this, you have two options. These are: a) support us on Patreon so that we can be financially stable and remove the filter or b) visit another website that has even more restrictions than us.

The good news is that right now, DSOGaming is financially stable. We are not making millions but we are not running at a deficit. Okay okay, we are making billions thanks to all the Unreal Engine 5 stories and the thousands of sponsorships. Hooray. Expect even more now. More. MOOOOOOOOOOORE.

Joking aside, we’re doing OK, even though we buy almost all the games and the PC hardware components we use. The bad news is that we can’t expand yet. That is with paid writers for News/Reviews. In the past, we had freelancers but let’s be realistic here. In the long run, this can’t work. People need to pay their bills and although I was trying to contribute some money to their work (and I was buying whatever game they wanted to review), it just wasn’t sustainable for most of our freelancers. This is also why I’ve never demanded much from them, and why they didn’t have any kind of deadline for their articles. Some of them still haven’t written a review for the last game I bought them. And that’s fine.

Moreover, a lot has been happening in the background with Google’s algorithm. Due to the AI gaming websites that flood the Internet, and the fact that Google’s search engine has gotten worse, we got a noticeable traffic hit. The good news is that we can take that hit without any major issues. Again, if we had expanded… we’ve been talking now about layoffs which sucks because these would have been caused by external factors. I’ve always run DSOGaming with the assumption that things would go downhill the next day. This is why I’ve been extremely careful with each step. And, after twelve years, I can say that this has paid off.

To give an example. In January 2024, we got a BIG hit from Google Search. To put it simply, our traffic was halved. Not only that but our previous ad network stopped paying us. For the next three months, we did not receive any income and we only had expenses. This is what I called a “catastrophic combo”. As such, we took major steps to correct the course by switching to another ad network. We are now with Publisher Collective and things are better than before.

Obviously, as a reader, you never knew we were facing these difficulties. That’s because we never wrote about them. And instead of begging you for money (for the future of DSOG), I wanted to find a proper solution. That’s why I never really paid attention to our Patreon campaign. It’s cool if you support us. However, it became crystal clear when we launched it that it would not be making a lot of money (right now, from Patreon, we’re making… $26/month).

Since a lot of small websites are shutting down, and there have been a lot of layoffs in numerous places, I believe we’ve done the right thing. With the boom of AI, things may become even worse. So yes, we need to be careful.

But what about streaming games you may ask. Why I haven’t started streaming? Well, the reason is simple. DSOGaming takes all of my time, and I can’t be bothered streaming PC games. Right now, it makes no sense to invest in something like that. Once, we expand the team with a person that can handle all the PR and with more News writers, I might consider it. That, or I may let one of the new employees start streaming. As said, this isn’t right now my primary focus.

And that is all. Until the next Editorial (in 2025 as I suck at writing them, lol).