2020 is almost upon us and I believe it’s the best time to post a new Editorial about the future of DSOGaming. 2019 was perhaps our best year to date as we saw a noticeable growth. We founded DSOGaming in 2011 and after 8 hard years, I can safely say that we’ll be here for a long time. Or at least that’s the plan.

Going into slightly more details, in 2018 we had 5.5 million visitors with 8.5 million pageviews. In 2019, we had 7.3 million visitors with 10.7 million pageviews. So yeah, we are slowly but steadily growing.

We’ve also been trying to be as “friendly” as possible to our readers. Back in the early days of DSOGaming, our community complained about our Interstitial ad. To be honest, I don’t know whether we’d be here right now without that ad. However, in 2015 we decided to remove it so that we could keep our readers happy. We’ve also decided not to block our content behind any “remove_ad_blocker” plugin. We’ve also decided to let you, our readers, decide our Comment Policy, and we also have a column – Users Articles – dedicated to you.

Now one of the reasons DSOGaming is growing is because of you. We wouldn’t be here without you, so we’d like to thank you for your support. In order to show our appreciation to you, we’ve decided to have monthly giveaways. Each and every month, we’ll be purchasing a PC game so we can give it away. Our goal is to be giving away a triple-A game, and not indie games. Later this month, we’ll have a giveaway for Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.

I also want to make it crystal clear that these giveaways are solely from us. We’ll be buying new copies of these games. Of course this isn’t something new to us as, contrary to other websites, we also pay for our very own hardware. DSOGaming has never been sponsored by NVIDIA, AMD or Intel. Moreover, a lot of publishers have blacklisted us, however we’re at a point right now that we can buy each and every new PC game we want to cover. As such, we’ll be letting you know on Twitter and Facebook whether we’ll have Day1 PC performance analysis articles for your anticipated PC games. We’ll be also letting you know in our articles whether we bought the games ourselves, or whether a publisher had sent us a key.

Now while we’ve been doing our best to appease PC gamers, we’ve seen some people accusing us for ridiculous things. Some believe that we’re being paid by NVIDIA or AMD, and others that we are being paid by Ubisoft, EA, Epic Games, you-name-that-company.

I’ve also seen people that really hate DSOGaming for no apparent reason. And to be honest, this is something that really disheartens me. I’ve seen people wanting and asking moderators to ban DSOG from Reddit, from Google, from forums. Some are even wishing us to die. And sometimes, I kind of wonder whether it’s worth staying true to our guns or not. I mean, it would be easier and less anxious to sell our souls to a company, have a bigger marketing team behind us, make more money than now, offer proper salary to our writers and live a happier life. Of course by doing that, we’d be giving the middle finger to our readers. Seriously, it’s really hard sticking to your ideals when people falsely believe you are a sellout, especially when you’re doing things that other bigger websites are not even attempting to.

We are one of the few websites that does not bother with political stuff as we only care about PC games. We also try to cover as many mods as possible. Fan remakes are also something that we’ve been pushing heavily. Some may find these articles useless, however, we’ve seen that a lot of people are interested in them. And, to be honest, we are happy to see other bigger websites following our lead. We also know that a lot of websites are stealing our content without sourcing us. And that’s fine by us as we can provide you with new original content each and every day; we don’t have to steal stories from other websites.

In conclusion, DSOGaming is currently in a “healthy stage” and is not going anywhere. Since we’re still growing, I think we can safely say that we’ll be staying independent. What this means is that we’ll be buying the games and PC hardware ourselves. Of course things can go south in 2020. As such, you can support us via our Patreon, by whitelisting us on your ad blocker plugin, or by simply sharing our stories.

Thank you for your support everyone!