Following months of collaborative effort, we bring to you a new GameRevolution. This is the single most significant relaunch in over 21 years of the brand’s history.
We’ve been anticipating this for several years, and it’s finally arrived. To say that the team is excited would be an understatement.
To help welcome you to this new era of GameRevolution, I’m going to go over the most important things you should know.
Minimalist Design
The most visible change is in the presentation of GameRevolution. You will notice that we have employed a minimalist design language that foregoes clutter for something more sleek and modern.
This evolution has resulted in several benefits. For one, readability has been improved dramatically. As you read content, you will find fewer distractions, and a more optimized use of page real estate to ensure that your eyes can easily find what you’re looking for.
Another benefit is on the back-end: there are fewer items to load on the server. This means faster page load times, a huge point of interest during development. We’ve wanted to increase the speed of the site for a while, and in order to make the improvements we wanted we needed to make a big jump, such as the one we’ve made today.
This minimalist design extends to the mobile experience, where a large portion of traffic is derived. Expect usability on smartphones to be far better than before.
New Structure
The new layout makes access to each type of content available at the click of a single button, from a list of guides, reviews, features, and more. Several of these pages even have their own cover panel so we can feature our most outstanding content.
Game pages have seen a huge face lift, serving as a beautiful location to learn about games, their vitals, and check out the content we’ve written about them.
On the right side you’ll notice that we have a new Available Now and Coming Soon space. This will be updated on a daily basis to keep you posted on game releases. Incorporated into this element are ratings from our reviews for games (when available), as well as a new Editor’s Pick label, which we will only be giving out to the games we find to be the best of the best (likely no more than two per month).
Forum v2.0
For more than a decade GameRevolution readers have considered our forum a great place to engage with other gamers. There are hundreds of thousands of posts with high quality discussion over the course of more than a decade. We knew we wanted to make the forum browsing experience even better with the relaunch, so we made it happen.
The new forum has seen a complete visual overhaul. Stylistically, it matches the new website layout with a similar effort in minimalism. This has arrived alongside a significant back-end upgrade that has introduced new features in addition to faster page load times.
We will be encouraging dialog on the forum in a variety of ways, including a new weekly feature that asks users to interact specifically on the forum.
Back-End Optimization
Given GameRevolution’s age, it’s not too surprising that the page code and indexing has accumulated a wealth of optimization issues over the years. Although it’s been a huge undertaking, the team has addressed this by making adjustments to how URLs are composed and how content is delivered, resulting in the most efficient version of the site that the brand has ever seen.
The most impactful result of this is page load speed, which has decreased by a notable margin. You can now transition from page-to-page with low latency, and enjoy the content you like most without having to wait seconds at a time.
In addition to this, we have migrated from a proprietary content management system to WordPress. This will allow us to expedite content delivery with more features than ever before. This includes improvements in gallery functionality, how we’re able to make changes to the structure of the site (i.e. navigation bar edits), and presentation of content. In the case of our staff, this also means that producing content and editing will be more efficient.
Staff Restructure
During the past eight months we have crafted an entirely new staff composition. Our new staff ranges greatly in both interests and core competencies, ensuring that we have a great breadth of expertise to share with readers. We have everything covered, from Nintendo to PC, and Xbox to PlayStation.
Extending from this, you will see a lot of new types of content on GameRevolution. We’ll be covering eSports and hardware on a regular basis, in addition to all the favorite content that readers have grown a fondness for over the years.
New Recurring Features
On a weekly basis you can expect to see plenty of game reviews, full-sized features about hot topics in gaming, opinion-oriented editorials, and more. In addition to this, we have a list of recurring features that will be delivered on a weekly or monthly basis. These include:
- Tell GR (Weekly, Monday) – Readers share their opinion on a topic related to a new release or trending news item.
- Community Wednesdays (Weekly, Wednesday) – The forum becomes a go-to place to engage on a weekly wildcard topic. These may include polls, short reviews, comparisons, and much more.
- What Are You Playing? (Weekly, Thursday) – Staff and readers alike share what they’ve been playing during the week, and what they think about the game(s) they’re playing.
- The People Speak (Weekly, Friday) – Popular comments for the week are featured alongside those who posted them.
- GR Poems (Bi-Monthly~) – A giveaway where readers share a poem for a chance to win games or hardware.
- Release Calendar – Buy, Try, Die (Monthly) – A calendar which lists all games coming out that month, and engages readers who share which titles they plan to buy or not.
- eSports Calendar (Monthly) – A comprehensive calendar-esque look at all major eSports tournaments for the month.
- Gaming PC of the Month (Monthly) – A reader’s PC build is featured with an interview alongside several high-quality photos.
- Game Makers (Monthly) – An interview with a game developer, with an emphasis on education of what it’s like to create video games.
- Frustrations of a Gamer (Monthly) – A staff member shares their opinion on a commonly problematic element of game design.
- Dream Sequels (Monthly) – We look at a franchise that hasn’t been seen in a while, and speculate about what it’d be like if it was revived, and if there’s any chance of it happening.
- Under the Radar (Monthly) – Promotion for a commonly unrecognized but high potential upcoming game.
- Versus (Monthly~) – Two or three similar games are compared to help inform readers on the differences between them.
There are more to come, and we’re always open to suggestions.
Have Feedback?
We have opened a thread on the forum where you can share feedback and report bugs that you encounter.
Note that our tech team will be continuing to develop new features and address those that have issues in the coming weeks. There are some quirks that you will notice while browsing that are already being given attention, or have an outstanding ticket. Even then, feel free to submit feedback, and we’ll get to it.
A Big Thank You
I want to take this opportunity to thank all the people behind the scenes who contributed to this incredible evolution of one of gaming’s most long-lasting websites. This required effort from an incredible number of talented people, from the tech team, to project roles, and various leaders in management.
In addition, thank you to the GameRevolution community that has stuck around all these years. We appreciate you, and hope that you enjoy the new user experience.
– Jonathan Leack, Executive Editor of GameRevolution
