2011 has made its way out and 2012 is now officially in full swing. With any new year there is always the prospect of changes on the horizon for everyone whether it is through New Years Resolutions or just the idea of something different. A lot of shake up has happened in both the tech world and game industry recently.
Near the end of 2011 GamePro shut down their US operations, three major editors left Joystiq to start a new gaming related site over at Vox Media and now we have two editors over at Kotaku leaving for other prospects. It’s a crazy time already and we are not even three full days into the year! It is a crazy world and a crazy time for online sites with the threat of SOPA and PIPA looming over us. It is not all bad or scary though, we won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. In fact we have a lot planned for 2012 which is actually the point of this article.
So what can you expect from us in this new year? Lots actually. We will be transforming and evolving as much as we can without hurting the type of quality in our posts and site. We have always strived to bring all the Android gaming news you can handle, usually being the first to report on a majority of the news out there regarding Android gaming. That won’t change and, in fact, we will be pushing the limits this year as we will turn the site into a 24 hour posting format.
This means we will be posting 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. We will be slowly transitioning into this format over the next couple of months. This is certainly not the only thing planned for 2012 though!
We maned to finally get our official app out onto the market which we plan to expand upon greatly as the site grows, adding new features to it as we add them to the site as well. We have been officially published onto Google Currents which a lot of people seem to be enjoying our publication on there as well. We won’t be stopping there though.
Starting this month we will be opening up our Machinima type of service where we will have something similar to Directors who will make video commentaries of game play on Android devices, tournament coverage (both live and recorded) and plenty of videos showing all sorts of Android related gaming. We will also start livestreaming every day game play of games and you will be able to check out the games we are playing and ask us questions about them. We will be partnering up with TwitchTV for the live streaming while recorded videos will appear on our YouTube Channel of course.
We will also be expanding our user blogs section, customizing it more so you can better enjoy it and start up your own community blogs to share your thoughts on Android games. We will also be changing our forum software over to the much better vBulletin system, something which many of you have suggested in the past.
One other thing we have been working on is Podcasts. We will be starting a weekly podcast this month as well which you can listen to right in our official app or you can tune in through other ways which we will announce when it starts. We are going to do live podcasts so, once again, you will be able to interact with us if you want to or just listen to us while at work or where ever you happen to be.
Last, but certainly not least, we are opening up a dedicated game store for Android. This will be a cultivated game store of high quality games for you to easily sift through, purchase and enjoy games without the hassle of digging through the plethora of stuff on the Android Market in hopes of finding a good game. We will expand on this closer to release but it will launch in Q1 2012. The beta sign-up for developers is now live as well.
A quick rundown of the DroidGamers Game Store features include the ability for developers to respond to comments from customers, coupons codes and promotions, the ability to put your game for free on sale then after put a price on it once the sale ends, a “Just In” section and plenty of other features. If you are a developer interested in being a part of this store at launch, you can check out the beta sign-up page for more information or email us directly at 702records [at] gmail [dot] com with the subject line Store Inquiry.
Even with all of this on our plates you can still expect all the breaking Android gaming news you can handle and come to expect from us and, actually, even more of it! So make yourselves at home and be prepared for a great 2012! This isn’t everything but it is the more major stuff to expect from us. Oh, and plenty more giveaways coming up as well, can’t forget to mention the free stuff right? If you have any suggestions, other items to cover or features you’d like to see happen with DroidGamers, let us know in the comments below.
