| Let me take you down the road I have travelled...
GameBanshee has grown from covering a small handful of games (I think I had three or four up at launch) to twenty-one now, with a few behind-the-scenes projects being worked on as well. Without having to detail my daily jobs around the site, it's pretty obvious that they have been compounded several times since the beginning.
Now, although the site has grown immensely, the number of people working on it has not. I still do all administrative work, all news posting, and a vast majority of the content on the site. There are a handful of people that help moderate the forums, Applebrown and Demis have helped out on a few walkthroughs, Aegis has written a few reviews, and Fable recently provided a review for ToEE. Other than that, everything you see is the work of *one* individual. If you look around the internet, you will find other gaming sites that are actually much smaller that are run by a sizeable group of people. I would bet that you'd be hard-pressed to find a single gaming site of this size that is, for the most part, run by a single person.
In the beginning, I covered Baldur's Gate II almost exlusively (and I created the heavens and the earth, but that's beside the point... =) , which allowed me to focus nearly all of my free time on one game. Nowadays, after I get home at around 5:00 PM from my day job, it takes me 2-3 hours just to pull email, do administrative tasks, and post news. By the time I'm done with that, I have very little time to spend on one game, much less all of them. This is why you'll see "BioWare has once again provided their weekly update of..." in the news summaries; it's simply a matter of time management. If my only job was to provide news, I guarantee you that each newsbit would be far more elaborate and descriptive.
I do see your point, though. The site isn't quite as concentrated and thorough as it used to be for certain aspects. That's because I made the decision to grow GameBanshee into a leading RPG website instead of a game-specific fansite that will eventually dwindle and die. Because of that decision, the site continues to climb in traffic, content, and users. Today, it is far more attractive to advertisers than it ever was before, which means it has far more potential for future growth.
So... while GameBanshee may appear to you as "declining", it is only because I've made some difficult decisions over the years in order to keep the site alive. However, you should be happy to learn that I've invested all advertising revenue into the research of human cloning. Soon, if all goes well, we should have several clones of Buck maintaining the site... and taking over the world, of course.  |