02.12.2004 11:30 - The Cost of Everything, The Value of Nothing.
Something that I particularly hate is when Big Business marches in and \"acquires\" a successful little company that was doing everything right and proceeds to completely screw up everything. The classic example of this was the takeover of Fender Musical Instruments by CBS in the 60\'s, where Fender went from making instruments and amps that every player in the world wanted to own to producing cost-accountant-dictated price-driven crap.
Well, it\'s happened again, only this time to a company I used to work for. Gamesdomain was a little office above a hairdresser\'s in Sutton Coldfield when I first went to work for them. It was one of the first computer gaming websites ever. Whilst I worked there I wrote a few reviews, but more importantly wrote the original version of the Gamesdomain Cheats Database, amongst other things. It was a fantastic place to work, one of the few places where you could actually get paid for sitting round playing games. We all worked hard to try and make Gamesdomain the best possible resource for gamers. Gamesdomain was renowned for telling the truth - if a game was rubbish, the review would say so, unlike a lot of other advert-driven sites who kowtowed to advertising pressure.
Well, look at it now.
Where\'s the extensive back-catalogue of reviews? Where\'s the walkthroughs? Where\'s the cheats? Where\'s the level downloads? Where\'s the stuff that used to keep me coming back even years after I changed my job? I\'ll tell you where. It\'s in the bins at the back of Yahoo, that\'s where. Yahoo have done their usual castration job on an acquired website. It\'s now basically a storefront for selling games.
I hate Yahoo. Bastards.
