We've been growing at a very nice, exponential rate. After the first year of Game Sense existing (in March), we're pretty sure we'll release some traffic information. Gamers have been joining us at a nice pace lately, and everything is heading in a good direction. I want to thank everyone who has been here with us in the first year. Everything helps, even liking and retweeting us. But those of you who took the dive and joined and are writing reviews, posting news, comments, etc and rating games, I can't thank you enough. I know sometimes things have been a little rough here. But that was always part of the deal. We didn't ask for a ton of money or anything major when we started Game Sense. We genuinely want a place where people know they can talk about games and issues facing gamers and developers, without having to worry about being censored or anything (within reason). 2016 saw a worrying trend where editors and moderators felt like they could police which games you read and learn about, and what you think of them. We've always believed in letting gamers choose what they see, and we developed Game Sense in a way to let gamers compete with journalists for reviews and news. Part of creating an honest place for gamers means not owing developers, publishers, or anyone any favors or giving them power to cause us problems. We want to focus on our mission of creating an awesome place for gamers to talk about and find games without having to worry about someone getting in our way.
Generally, I focus on one major project for Game Sense at a time. A month or two ago, we wrapped up some user improvements to help make Game Sense make more sense to people. It's been a pretty big success, thank you to everyone who has joined us. We're also wrapping up some performance improvements.
When we started Game Sense, we focused mostly on the program's speed, it seemed the most important. Front end (how it works in your browser) seemed like it could be fixed later, and there wasn't much in the database at that time, so optimizing that didn't seem like a big deal.
However, as Game Sense grew, and gamers posted more and more, the database started to get a little large. So, we've been using our debugging tools and tracking down queries and database tables that were causing problems. You should notice that the vast majority of pages are loading a lot faster. We didn't ugprade any hardware or anything, we just improved some of our code.
The biggest area of improvement though, has been the front end (how fast Game Sense loads into your browser). There are two tools you can use to measure this, there's a tool from Google and a tool from Yahoo! They measure a lot of things that determing how fast a web page gets to you.
Through at on of optimizations, plugins, and other stuff, we managed to get our PageSpeed score from 62% to 98% on the main games page (https://gamesense.co/games/all/). Our YSlow score increased from 63% to 86%. Page load speed (according to GTMetrix) dropped from 7.24 seconds to around 3 seconds. Page size dropped from an extremely poor 4.6MB to 1.13MB.
All of our front end performance metrics all come in well above average (in a good way).
We're pretty content with these changes. They've helped a lot, it's showing in how people are more eager to join Game Sense, page views have been going up, etc. So, we're going to move into our next major project.
We used to talk a lot about what we're going to do, but we're pretty strapped for money, time, and staff, so it was taking a while. However, we're planning on a lot of interesting rewards and cool things for you when you sign up and start posting things. There's a few ideas on the table, but hanging out with everyone on social media and stuff, it seems there's some good demand for things that are an extremely good fit for gamers and Game Sense, and I'm not aware of any other sites that do something like what we're planning.
Our first stage has already been deployed, we've improved the "User Level" system. You earn points by writing reviews, posting comments, or basically doing anything on Game Sense. The more you level up, the more your ratings, reviews, votes, and more affect the score of what you're rating, reviewing, etc. We plan on expanding on this in a huge way to make writing reviews, rating games, posting stuff, and more a lot more fun and a lot more rewarding.
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