Shame on us for not writing an Editorial on our second anniversary (which was back in August). We originally planned writing Editorials each and every anniversary, and we failed to deliver. Well, that’s okay as we have right now a brand new ‘Christmas’ Editorial. Yay.

[Thomas] So let me start by saying that I’ve been posting some articles the past weeks or so. Unfortunately – or fortunately, depends on your perspective – I won’t be able to write more than four or five articles per week. The reason is simple; I’ve got a new job, therefore I have to concentrate on that one. I will be still passing some articles to John though.

[John no1] Which puts you in the same situation with me. Yes, I’m still informing John about some articles that need DSOG’s attention but that’s it. I won’t be contributing more than this. Which is not bad as those articles are basically from Thomas and me – you simply won’t see our names on those articles which is fine by us.

[John no2] Yeah shame on you two, though I may publish Thomas’ articles with his username.

[John no1] Yeah well, a lot will be asking the simple question as to why we are not focusing on DSOG and the answer is quite simple. Want me to start discussing this?

[John no2] Sure, go ahead.

[John no1] You see, currently we are at a point where we can only sustain John as a full writer and pay our server bills (plus games for which we don’t get review keys). Which is why Thomas and I are not abandoning our daily jobs for DSOG, at least yet.

[John no2] Yeah, well the good news is that DSOG is getting bigger. We’re now at 300K monthly unique visitors and 440K total visitors. These are good and healthy numbers. We’re no longer banned in Guru3D (yeah, it was my fault for spamming in there, two years ago) and we’ve been featured in a lot of websites (from PCGamer and Kotaku to Videogamer and NeoGAF). But why are we not making a lot of money? The answer is simple; we’re not affiliates with anyone and we’re still independent, despite some efforts from various companies to acquire us.

[Thomas] Yes, I think that if we cared about money, we’d sign up a deal with a company and that would be the end of DSOG. Of course you wouldn’t be aware of that and we would try to ‘justify’ some new ideas (like covering consoles) as really cool and as something that the majority of our readers wanted to. Hell, if a company acquired us and told us to cover consoles, we would because… we’d have to. Generally speaking, if we want to make money, we can. However DSOG will stop being what it currently is. We’re taking the hard and long road here.

[John no2] Which results to what we have now. Obviously it’s the lesser evil in this situation as we are free to express our opinion on anything. We can criticize EA or Ubisoft or DICE, or you_name_the_company. We have the freedom to do so but that freedom comes with a cost.

[John no1] So you’ve seen our article about Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, right? We were among the first to criticize Ubisoft for its awful CPU utilization. Since we wrote such an article, Ubisoft may put us in its blacklist (for simply writing the truth). To its credit, Ubisoft was really open to our interviews and was the only triple-A company that sent us a review key for its title, without even asking for one. Say what you want about them, but they were really pros on that, so kudos to them. I don’t think they will change attitude after our ACIV article, but some other companies did. Which means that we are not getting review keys for a number of titles (in other words we have to go out and buy them).

[John no2] We’ve also moved to a new server after those issues we had with Hostgator. Man, what an awful week that was. Glad that everything is working fine now, but that was a really awful week for us.

[John no2] Moving on to DSOG’s looks, we may have a surprise for you. Can’t really say much but you can look forward to a Christmas present.

[John no1] So, what’s been happening these past months? We are getting in touch with companies. That’s something we should have done long ago, but we wanted first to build a fan base. As you may have noticed, we are interviewing companies about their games. To their credit, all of the companies have answered our questions. Ubisoft was awesome, as was CD Projekt RED, Theory Interactive, Xaviant and Square Enix. So feel free to tell us what studio we should interview next (do note that we concentrate on the tech stuff which is exactly why we are not interviewing indies).

[John no2] Still, I’d like to thank all indies for getting in touch with us. We’ve tried to feature all of them on our ‘First Impression’ section, and I think we did. Apologies if we did not. And more power to them as they’ve been replying to our emails.

[Thomas] And since we are about to talk about our future plans, let me tell you that we know that you want us to cover AMD’s cards. Hell, we also want to. However, AMD did not reply on our request for an AMD GPU to benchmark (and feature in our Performance Analysis articles). Hell, a simple <<Well guys, we don’t want you to cover our cards>> would be better than simply ignoring us. Oh and here is the funny thing. When we covered AMD’s claims about OpenGL not being the bottleneck, they included us in their Newsletter. So when we have something good to say, they include us in their Newsletter but when we ask them about something… just silence. Hilarious to say the least. But yes, when Mantle is being used in more games, we will get an AMD GPU to cover it, but until then we won’t because it appears that AMD does not want us to include its GPUs on our articles.

[John no2] Yeah we’ve seen this happening a lot of times. When publishers/studios ‘need’ us to clarify things, they immediately contact us. Bethesda did it when a video from Skyrim leaked prior to its release and Nvidia did it. But when we contacted them for an interview or a giveaway, these two companies did not even reply back. I mean, come on. If you don’t want to, just say so. Would you prefer us to ignore you when you contacted us? I think not.

[John no1] So what can you expect from DSOG in the following year? Obviously more interviews, analyses and PC news. We will obviously build a second system to cover “8 CPU threads” once games actually take advantage of them, because right now there isn’t any game that benefits from them.

[John no2] So yes, about the ‘Performance Analysis’ articles. We’ve seen a lot of complains about the system we are using. As we’ve already said, these articles are meant to give you an idea of how a PC game performs. Is it taking advantage of SLI? Is it taking advantage of more than three CPU cores? Are its official requirements real? Is it optimized for our platform? Because if we wanted to simply built the ultimate PC system, we wouldn’t be able to inform you about COD: Ghosts’ fake requirements. We would be like “Well, it requires 6GB. Go get them because we can play it and RAM is cheap.” No, our articles are not about that. And since there aren’t many games taking full advantage of more than three CPU cores, there is no point having an 8-core CPU system. Why? Because the advantage you’ll see with such a system will be due to its better architect. Imagine this scenario: a PS4 game comes out that uses 4 out of its 6 CPU cores. It runs awful due to its CPU not being able to keep up with what the devs have thrown at it. Wouldn’t you demand developers to use all of the extra CPU power in order to avoid performance issues? Of course and you’d demand that. So why are you not demanding better optimization on PC games? Because it’s ‘cheap’ to get a newer CPU? Laughable.

[Thomas] We’ll also cover G-Sync, even if Nvidia does not send us a monitor. And as I already said, we’ll cover Mantle even if AMD does not send us a GPU.

[John no1] So yes, lots of things to look forward to.

[John no2] We’ve also updated our Header image with the one sent by eaze2009’s friend, so kudos to him for providing us with a Christmas header.

[John no1] Before closing, I’d like to also address the DSOG’s manpower. So we are three people and we’ve been asked to expand our team. As we’ve already said, we cannot sustain full writers which means that you’d be volunteers. And we hate this thing. In case you’re not aware of, every gaming website (from big to small websites) has volunteers. And most of them are not getting paid (or they pay them 1 buck per 1000 views, more or less). We’ve been there, we don’t like this ‘volunteer’ thing. Which is why we have our “User’s Articles” column. Those who want to contribute can do so by writing an article. Contrary to ‘volunteers’ who have to meet deadlines, though, you can write whenever you want to. You can write about anything. There are no demands from our part apart from a basic guideline. You’re not obliged to write three articles per week. You’re not obliged to “bring” with your article additional traffic in order to get paid. None of these ridiculous things.

[John no2] Yeah, a lot of websites are taking advantage of young writers with this kind of job. Kudos to some websites for offering a good payment to their volunteers, but those can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

[Thomas] And that is that for our ‘Christmas Editorial’. Enjoy everyone and happy holidays.

[John no1] Happy holidays.

[John no2] Nyaaaaaaaah, I’m not sending my wishes yet. After all I’m not going anywhere.