As some of you, the five of you that actually read this, may know I posted a rather honest and long winded blog about my experience and feelings with Shogun Gamer. I did this mostly to get things off my chest in an outlet that's larger than 140 characters since I was just annoyed at how things went down and were developing with the Shogun Gamer brand as it stands now.
I hadn't checked the blog stats for a while, and randomly thought to do so today. To my surprise I saw two comment bubbles from none other than my former colleague Casey White. Now I didn't, and won't, delete the comments since that's not my style really. He can say whatever he wants, and in turnju I'll further say stuff.
Below is my official reply to the comments made by Casey, which I just thought I would do as a post since it's easier for people to track. So whoever decided to "tip" him off about my comments can feel free to do so again if y'all want to stay in the loop.
Don't know if you'll actually see this considering I just did, but I'll reply to your comments, or at least a select few of them.
In no way did I "kill" the site. When I was EiC for that three month period the site was running smoothly in every possible way. A few upgrades to the site were made in the cosmetic department to make it a bit more streamlined, as I could best do given my small tech know-how in web design, and stuff was going well in terms of the staff at that time and lining future content up (interviews, features, reviews, etc.).
But as I claimed in my blog post, which I don't know if you fully read, I DID NOT DELETE THE YouTube channel. To say such a thing is a bit idiotic since it impacted me, and the overall brand of Shogun Gamer. Yes, the "most popular" video, which technically it wasn't anymore since my Power Rangers vid had 4 million views, was deleted as were countless videos I made, dozens of which I had uploaded to actually give the channel some depth given it was extremely barren when I started developing it prior to my EiC tenure, I began cleaning and upgrading the YT channel in April 2013 since we had a ton of copyright strikes from game trailers and sourced music, and virtually nothing else to show for it besides the Pokemon vid and a few random interviews & hardware reviews.
Here's exactly what happened: something, of which I still don't know, took the site down when it comes to the domain name. This immediately killed ALL the Google accounts (Shogun staff accounts, Admin account linked to YouTube). When I noticed the site went down, whilst I was trying to upload a review, I immediately tried the email but got nothing. Tried YouTube. Got nothing. Couldn't sign into a damn thing since it said the accounts were deleted, and considering my staff email didn't have certain privilege access and what have you, I really didn't know how to rectify the situation since Corey had already blocked me.
So again, I didn't delete the YouTube channel, and to this day I'm still a bit baffled as to what exactly happened since one minute it was all good and then the next it wasn't.
To say that I threw a tantrum and deleted everything isn't exactly correct. Sure, after the site went down and i couldn't make any progress in retrieving anything, both with Google and Namecheap, I decided to say fuck it and delete some base articles in March since I was under the assumption that Shogun was completely dead and I was just going to see what I could retrieve of my own. Did I delete these articles, which occured in March for the record, out of anger? Sure I did. I was upset that the site was taken from me in some manner and there was nothing I could do to retrieve it since Corey, who I had to use JJ as the middle-man for contact, had "no info" to help things out.
So again, I didn't delete anything when the site when down in late January, this includes the site itself and the YouTube account. The stuff I did delete on Facebook, photo galleries, posts I made, was done since I was going to see if I could essentially rebrand that channel, rename it etc. for my new project before Michael-Sean contacted me about whatever it was he was trying to rope me into.
To move onto another thing you brought up, yes, I had to bail out of two conventions at the last minute. This sucked, and when it pertained to GDC I paid you for the hotel room, I think it was like $300 something. For PAX no one ever asked me and I honestly couldn't pay anything since I was dead broke at the time due to only having my gig for two more months. That's life. But to say you had to salvage relationships for cancelled meetings is being a bit melodramatic. With GDC I don't recall making many meetings, if any, and for PAX Prime I booked two whole meetings both of which I emailed you about to cover for.
So no, you didn't have to rescue the sinking ship when I thought it was "beneath me" to attend those events. And why the fuck would I think it would be "beneath me" to show up? I loved going to industry events, both to learn about stuff, meet new people, and of course partake in open bars. But I didn't bail on those events because I was being an ego driven prick, but because some personal stuff came up and I just couldn't make the trips, and that definitely bummed me out to say the least, especially since the resulting coverage was lacking for both events.
Moving on to other stuff, yeah you did some stuff on the side when we were working together. The thing is at least from my perspective, and this even goes back to when we were colleagues, is that none of your stuff was really impactful. You sent out review request emails to folks, did some occasional Photoshop stuff, and yeah... that's about it.
What exactly did we have in Marketing, HR, and web dev? We barely had any ads, either coming in or going out, that were significant besides free shout-outs on sites run by your friends like EXP, LOMC, and whatever the hell happened with AirBehr.
HR? Uh... yeah, it was five people tops, so I guess if you had to send emails to folks about random things or lining up hotel booking that counts as something. And considering that the site literally did not change its layout for five fucking years then I would love to know where the web dev came in, that's unless I'm misunderstanding the definition of that term. Yup, the logo was changed and some boxes went from grey to white, with rounded borders instead of square. Slow clap moment indeed...
I don't think I ever knocked you as a writer, and there's really no major point in doing so. That's not me backing out of a further argument, it's just the truth. The stuff you wrote was mostly good, and however I disagreed with how you handled your reviews you at least backed up your thoughts to a degree. The thing about you, and this actually a bit of good-willed helpful advice, is that you just need to expand on concepts, delve deeper, and take a gamble with some stuff by going with your gut and sticking with your vision (like that game journo industry thing you had on the backburner for ages). In the end there's a major difference between mediocre, serviceable, and being great in what you do and ultimately provide to your audience, however small or large it may be.
After all that off my chest round two, I really can't say that I did any major long term damage to the Shogun brand, at least in terms of stuff that you need to tidy up and fix on your own. I didn't delete YouTube, and it would be fucking idiotic of me to do so since it was the only revenue stream at the time and I was making some decent money (around $25 on the vid) from the Power Rangers video I made. If I really wanted to motherfuck the site I would've completely pulled the plug on the hosting and/or delete every piece of content, and close the Twitter and Facebook accounts but I didn't. That would've been a true "Ian doesn't give a fuck" style trantrum. All I did was delete a few user accounts to make it easier for me to find stuff, and delete some pure garbage articles written by former staff members that definitely don't need any attention.
And with the blocking and stuff on social media that's pretty straightforward to be honest. Corey started it all first, coincenditally on the day the site went down prior to contacting me, so that was an easy decision to make in terms of blocking. Then you deleted me from Facebook, no biggie really, a few months later so I thought that was pretty much in the books when it comes to ever talking to you again since I couldn't foresee a scenario in which it would happen either personally or professionally. Michael Sean was the next big block because he was a jackass that threatened to sue me. Everyone else on the block list is just there since I don't see myself talking or working with them again in any way. I have nothing against anyone else like JJ since he was a solid dude, but it's just like I don't see myself working with him due to how you two are connected, and we never really casually chatted in the first place. So that's just a general example of my thinking I guess you could say. It's just one of those things where I'm on my side of the equation, they're on that side, so I'm just going to draw the line in the middle between us and keep it at that.
I think that covers it, but if you actually see and read this, whenever that is, then feel free to reply since I did after all.
Cheers,
Ian
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