This is NowGamer

Welcome to NowGamer, read on for a brief history and explanation of our site

We probably don’t need to tell you that the internet is almost saturated with videogame websites. Its digital highways groan under the weight of millions of reviews, previews, news stories, blogs, and features, all jostling for your attention. In this rush for gaming-related information nearly every niche is catered for. You want a blog dealing with feminist perspectives on games? You got one. One that examines racial minority game characters? Check. Top ten polygonal gusset shots? It’s probably there if you look hard enough. So given the already vibrant and bustling community of gaming sites out there, why should you care about us? What new ideas does NowGamer bring to the table? Well, hopefully after reading this slightly egotistical feature such questions will be answered, and you’ll have a better sense of who we are, where we came from, and why NowGamer isn’t ‘just another gaming site’.

But before we get onto what makes NowGamer different, lets first give you a little history. NowGamer was born in the offices of Imagine Publishing, a UK-based publisher comprised of individuals who have decades of experience producing gaming magazines, as Imagine’s co-founder and managing director Damian Butt explains:

“The founders of Imagine have been involved in videogame magazines ever since videogame magazines were created,” says Damian. “Although Imagine itself was formed in 2005, the people who make up the company have been in the game magazine business right from the beginning. I started my career back in 1991, on magazines like SegaPro, PC Power, Console XS, Super Gamer, and have launched mags like games™ and 360. Games journalism is in our blood – which is why when we formed Imagine games magazines were some of the first launches we did. ”

In mid 2007 Butt made the decision to start work on a new gaming portal, one that would be able to leverage the vast amount of content from Imagine’s back catalogue, as well as the plethora of reviews, previews and features continually produced by Imagine’s team of gaming journalists. Lee Groombridge, Imagine’s Interactive Media Manager explains, “With a project as large as this it was important to get all the planning and ideas set right from the beginning” To get things started two of the company’s senior editors convened for a series of meetings that would go on to sow the seeds of the site’s development. Editor in chief Nick Jones, who started his games journalism career writing walkthroughs “in a bedroom above a dodgy Chinese import shop”, was a part of these early brainstorming sessions.

“The brief was that the site needed to be something different,” says Jones. “It needed to be something fresh. So Damian told us to come up with some USPs for the site, some hooks that are going to get gamers to come to our website instead of the big ones like IGN or Gamespot.”

The first idea put forward at this early stage concerned the site’s aesthetic. Taking their cue from the design philosophy behind Imagine’s print publications, Nick, Damian and games™’s editor-in-chief Rick Porter all wanted to make sure that NowGamer would be as clean and readable as possible, eschewing what they perceived as the cluttered and loud homepages of many other gaming sites, in favour of something more restrained and subtle.

“We wanted it to be a clean and clear site,” says Porter. “As opposed to a lot of the sites you see out there which are kind of cluttered and colourful. Yes we are arriving fairly late to this party and everyone realises that this makes life kind of difficult, but it just means that we have to make a grander entrance and look different. So we needed to make sure that aesthetically our site was as good as it could be.”

“Everyone on the team hated those sites that were all bright with flashing graphics, and difficult-to-read text,” adds Butt. “We all just wanted something that was simple, with subdued colours. If you look at most gaming sites out there they all look the same – like a car crash! But contrast that with a clean site like Eurogamer, which a lot of people at Imagine, including myself, admire, and you can see where we’re coming from.”

As well as a slick aesthetic, “customisation and community” were two other factors driving these early NowGamer brainstorming sessions. “Facebook was really starting to take off during that time,” says Jones. “So that was a really big influence at that point in NowGamer’s development. We wanted user scores, user profiles and the ability for users to get to know the site’s reviewers via their own profile pages. Some of our ideas had to be scaled back, for instance we really wanted to host leader boards and competitions for gamers, but realised the logistics of it would be impossible for us to manage. But most of what we envisioned was taken forward.”

For both Nick Jones and Rick Porter, allowing user customisation of NowGamer’s homepage was another part of making the site clear and easier to digest. This idea coincided with the free availability of Ajax technology, which had previously been put to use on the BBC’s website, and drove the concept of using widgets rather than a static homepage. The use of filters allows users to tailor exactly what formats they want information on, whether its previews, reviews, news, or features. “Looking at the big sites IGN it can be quite confusing to find the info that you want straight away,” says Jones. “So we thought how can we change this and make it easier, and customisation came about while thinking about that. It gives the user a means to reduce clutter, and lets them take control of the website, changing it to the specifications that he wants.”

However, NowGamer’s biggest driver and most valuable asset was always going to be the presence of Imagine’s back catalogue of articles and reviews. With the likes of Retro Gamer, 360, Play and the award-winning games™ at the site’s disposal, finding quality content was simply a matter of opening up the Imagine digital backup archive – stretching back to 1995 – and picking out the cream of the crop.

“Basically, although Imagine itself is young, all the material we have on the site comes from magazines that many of the founders of Imagine created at other companies, and then acquired back when we started this company,” says Butt. “It is a crying shame that you have a four-week window to enjoy this content. Loads of companies around the world publish amazing articles that you just cant get hold of anymore because they just don’t make them available. At the worst you’ve got to buy old issues on ebay, which I’ve done, perhaps more times than I should have. So with NowGamer, one of our main goals was to digitise our library of content, so everyone can access it.”

Providing the site with a steady stream of print-quality articles, was not only intended to be a USP of NowGamer, but also an opportunity to increase the content’s exposure overall and raise the profiles of the magazines in the process. As Nick Jones explains, such an arrangement is a real benefit to the magazines he manages.

“Magazine sales have dwindled in the last five years, more so than ever,” says Jones. “In terms of game publications, there is a real battle going on between who can do things first, who can get exclusive content and the best cover games. But the game industry has changed so much over the last few years and now websites are getting precedence over magazines, it is something we can’t fight any longer. So it really is a case of “if you can’t beat them join them.”

“I’ve always thought that it is such a shame that we produce so much excellent content in our magazines here month after month and only a small fraction of people get to see it and experience it. So merging aspects of our print and online operations was the best way forward for us. It promotes the magazines and provides print-quality online content.”

This huge depository of content provided a seed, from which the site’s two other unique features – the Publishers’ Premiership and ‘Powerlist’ search engine – grew out of. Creating a powerful search tool was paramount to Damian, who was always annoyed by the limited search functionality of other gaming sites. As he explains, with over 4,000 reviews, ready and uploaded for launch, it was vital that users could find what they were looking for on NowGamer easily and flexibly.

“If you go to search engines on many other websites its hard to get the result you’d like, unless you put in exactly what you want and know exactly what you are looking for,” he says. “So we wanted to have tools that allowed to look at all our data in a multitude of ways. That’s how the Powerlist idea grew.

For instance, you’re standing in a game store and you’re looking on your iPhone, and you want to buy a game that, primarily, is really challenging. You don’t care about graphics – just something that is good, has a lot of longevity, and is on the 360 or the Wii. NowGamer’s Powerlist gives you that search flexibility. You can search for a game with a high longevity score, which has also scored above an 8 overall, on the 360 and Wii. That is something that is more powerful than the searches on any of the other site. And you can do the same thing with graphics, sound, publisher, developer etc. It would be an absolute crime I think to give you all that data and then make it really hard for you to look at it in a useful way.”

But whereas the Powerlist was an endeavour to improve the functionality of game sites, the Publisher’s Premiership was intended as a more fun way to crunch the data produced by NowGamer’s reviews, showing which companies are at the top of their game, and which are floundering at the bottom of the pile.

“The Publisher’s Premiership is not something that has been massively popular with games publishers when we’ve demoed it to them,” says Butt. “To make it fair we split it two ways: points awarded for number of games released and the scores for each games, which is like a general popularity score and obviously more skewed to the publishers that release 80 games a year. But then we have another tab, which ranks publishers on average review score, so if they release just two games, but they’re very good, then they’ll rank very high. It does give an interesting perspective on which publishers are doing well, without relying at all on sales. And because it is affected by user reviews as well, it’s a very democratic system too.”

The next stage of the site’s development was to find a technology partner with the right credentials to bring all these ideas to fruition in the space of just four months. So the NowGamer team put all its ideas into a detailed site spec, before pitching it to different tech companies. Damian and Lee wanted to find a partner that shared the same values as Imagine, as well as one that could meet its high expectations. “We needed to find someone who looked like they could deal with us,” he says. “We’re a pretty demanding media partner – we know what we want and we want it yesterday.” After an extensive search Bedford-based Evolving Media rose to the challenge.

“Developing a gaming site is great for us because most of the team at Evolving are gamers,” comments Evolving Media’s managing director Pete McCormack. “The main challenge was really scalability as this is a big issue with digital publishing. With such a large site it is important that the user journey is thought through in detail and although we had our ideas the Imagine team’s experience in both web and gaming helped significantly.”

During the four months between its development and launch, NowGamer’s first two editorial staff members were brought onto the site. Dan Howdle joined as Games Editor from independent Xbox magazine X360, and Christopher Reynolds came on board as News Editor, following a two-year stint on Play. Together with Imagine’s Interactive Department, led by manager Lee Groombridge, they worked on setting the agenda and tone of the site’s news section, put systems in place to facilitate content sharing with the magazines, conducted extensive bug hunting, and of course uploaded lots, and lots, of content.

“It has been challenging,” says Groombridge. “With every development complete we would find new bugs to report, and the sheer volume of content to upload to the site made for some very long nights. But now that it has all come together and the site is up and running, it really makes it all worthwhile. I can’t believe in just eight weeks how many reviews the team managed to put up, and we really have an amazing selection of features also thanks to Chris Reynolds. It’s still not perfect, and there are still a few kinks to iron out, but overalI I think users are going to get a real kick out of this site.”

But of course NowGamer’s launch doesn’t spell the end of its development. The site will be constantly evolving as it moves forward. NowGamer was created out of a love of videogames and a desire to create a site to be proud of.