I've been putting off this entry for about three weeks.

Now that i've set a properly ominous tone, let me say that GA is not going away.   My life over the past 6 months has gotten crazy and wierd and then normal then batshit loco.  Some of you know I've been having health problems since the summer of '06, and my ability to put out a good podcast was really affected by that - While that problem is finally dealt with, it had a pretty profound impact on my life and so things are changing for me.

I think thats really the bottom line here, things are changing. 

When we started GA back in summer of '05, it was very much a casual thing - we wrote because we wanted to get our opinion out there, and made the podcast for the same reasons.  It was fun, and it was something to look forward to when I came home from school.   Somehere along the way, you people started paying attention and it changed the way we did things.  We hired more writers, and began taking ourselves seriously.    I don't regret the way things have happened, i've met incredible people both as readers and as contributers, but things now have to change.

As of next week, GamerAndy Live! will be dropping its live format and returning to the realm of pre-recorded - This is due entirely to the brutal increase of time and energy it takes from all involved parties to make a good show happen every week.... With Hawkes at his new (and rather time intensive job) and my also new and also time/travel intensive job, being able to record the show when its convenient to the hosts is a big plus.   As of right now, the plan is to record on Thursdays and release the show on Saturdays.   Instead of confining ourselves to a strict two hours, the show will run as long as it we have things to say - anywhere from 45 minutes to 3 hours... You know how we do :)   Let me be clear, I bear no ill will towards AllGames and we're not burning any bridges - If such a time arrives when it makes sense for us to do a live show, either temporarily or continuously, we'll discuss it. 

As far as the site is concerned, while a strong effort was put out by all the writers who got in on the "Lets try to beat joystiq" thing, it's just too much work.  Well, let me restate - It's too freaking boring sitting in front of a computer all day waiting to repost news for 8 horus at a time.    One of the founding concepts of GA was to give us a place to voice our many and varied opinions - We used news stories as the launch pads for our merciless tirades on the state of the industry from the perspective of we schmucks who arn't in the industry, but choose to patronize it and (in some cases) make it our obsession.  This was good, and somewhere along the road we lost it..   Welcome back to the good ol' days!   The past few articles you've seen Hawkes put up are representative of the future of GA posts - Lots of opinion and discussion, much less fact.

This means there will be less posts than November had for us, but ultimately if you want up to the minute news I recommend Joystiq or Kotaku - They get paid to stare at news tickers.

In the coming months we'll be losing the ads altogether, for the first time in my life i'm on the verge of being financially feasable and with that comes a bit of extra money to spend on the site - The new forums i've been promising our faithfuls really are coming, you just have to be patient with the spambots a bit longer - Expect me to be more active on our forums as I once again begin to enjoy being less a "Journalist" and more an "Idiot with a megaphone".

I know we've been having some stability issues, and that will be fixed as well in the coming months (We'll change hosts if we have to).

So this is me,

GamerAndy