Continue .Com Discussion?

Disclaimer: I don't speak for the site. I'm just a regular person who was granted power to moderate out some of the spammy-spam on the site.

I think it is more a brand issue than anything. Gamedev.net already has a very strong brand. Adding a domain with .com might not be much of a business benefit.

It would be interesting to see a comparison to see how many visitors it gets, but ultimately one would simply be a redirect to the other. It would be roughly akin to registering common misspellings and redirecting them to the legitimate site.

Personally as running my own small business, I don't see much of a compelling reason for it. This kind of question is brought up occasionally on the business side of the site --- what domain names should I purchase --- and the answer is that you should purchase whatever domains help your business. If it helps to have something descriptive in your name, {BigCity}{Action}, such as LasVegasGambling, or DenverFootball, or MiamiVoting, then by all means use something like that as a secondary domain. But I don't really see how a secondary domain name would help the site.

Again, I don't speak for the site or the administrators on the issue. They may see it differently.

Yet in this case historical whois records show that the .net was actually bought over a year after the .com - and the .net team told me they had the option of buying the .com at that time but chose not to - so the analogy of redirecting a misspelled site doesn't fit here, since the .com was around first but simply was not open to the public. I think of it more as a set of twins, one is the social guy and already knows people, the other is lesser known around town but now wants to do good things.

The core issue I have is that if I start to promote or advance the .com, it could have an impact on the .net site, or worse, be seen as against them when that is not my intent. I would rather support the general premise of what the gdnet team is doing - and support game development as a team together -than I would want to compete directly with them.

I really respect what they are doing and I want to support that; But if as you suggest I should instead be looking at this as a business thing where they only care about money and are not interested in working together, I need to be told that. That said, I would much rather be friendly with the gdnet team.

Any particular reason you'd want to create a competing site to begin with? gamedev.com was never anything but a parked domain. If you want to contribute to a game development community we've had one going since 1999 and there are plenty of ways to contribute back to the community without trying to fragment it.

In fact, we are open to new ideas as well. We are a small team, but even still have invested thousands upon thousands of hours into the site. And even with all the long nights I've spent working on this site, I couldn't do a thing without all the moderators who have spent an ungodly amount of time helping people out, reporting problems and bugs, and in general being a driving force behind the site. There is an even larger group of regulars who keep showing up for some reason to help everyone out and they are just as awesome.

I read your blog and I'll be honest with you.. your fiancé would probably appreciate you being around a whole lot more. We bring in enough to keep the site going and that's about it and honestly that's fine. This isn't a gold rush here. But you really have to take a good look at *why* you want to get into this in the first place. It may be substantially easier to start a discussion here and see if we can go anywhere with your ideas.

At this point in time I just want us to be able to help people.. and there is a lot I want to do better. Hell, there is a lot I think we screwed up and need to fix. But at the end of the day I'm going to do everything I can to provide something people can use to share information. I used to think of myself as a programmer who wandered into the teaching profession.. but I've seen so many people greatly impacted by good teachers that I've come to deeply respect the value of a teacher. I'm proud of my profession and I use my own students to motivate me to keep driving forward with Gamedev.net. Sharing information, collaborating, and providing a central area to learn from are hugely important aspects to our site.

As with frob, I'm not staff here -- the mod tag just means I volunteer to clean up spam and very occasionally shut down trolling... I'm really just another user on the forums here.

I'm not sure what kind of "working together" you're after? You should probably refine that line of thought into some kind of concrete proposal first.

Basically, there's a successful website (from what I can tell from the outside, running GD.Net isn't much of a profitable business, so successful just means, "long existing and not bankrupt") and a 3rd party has gone and bought an extremely similar domain name and then approached said business with a vague request to work together. I'm not surprised that this is a conversation that 'sort of trailed off'; there's not much substance to it.

I mean, if I emailed Coca Cola saying "Hey, I just bought cokacola.com, do you want to work together with me?", I wouldn't even expect a reply...

If I was GD.Net or Coke, and someone gave me these alternate URLs, I'd take them and just set them up as redirects to my real URL.

On the other hand, if someone with these alternate URLs said, "let's work together", I'd wait for their proposal, because all I've thought of is using their URL as a redirect...

But if as you suggest I should instead be looking at this as a business thing

You've invested a lot money (apparently enough to pay for an overseas holiday for two) in acquiring a domain name -- that's either a business decision, or an investment into an extremely expensive hobby.

I can only assume you'll want that investment returned over time? The common way to do so is to make great site that people want to visit and then putting ads on it. Hopefully the ad income will be greater than your hosting costs so that there's a small amount left over that will gradually pay off your initial investment...

To be frank, you probably should've thought a bit about your business plan before making that initial huge investment

What sort of "working together" did you have in mind?

We're happy to coexist with other similar sites, and there was even a moderately successful forum operated at gamedev.org until fairly recently, but how exactly were you proposing that the two separate sites could cooperate to help the development community?

I do not want to fragment the community, that is why I started this thread. And I am glad you feel the way you do about the great people who show up to learn more about game development, because I happen to be one of them at the moment.

My story of how I got the .Com domain is pretty public knowledge, as I have made no effort to hide how it happened. I honestly had no idea gamedev.net was around when I bid on it; I'm a Sr. Software guy, but very old-school in terms of game development as I got my start with MUD's (Yes, for the few of you old enough to remember the title, I can honestly tell people I am a a Wizard with a straight face) and until recently didn't have a reason to branch out into OpenGl or DirectX very deeply unless you count some xbox dev work that was more back-end If it helps you, just consider me new enough to the games side of the software business that if it looks like i am missing something its probably because I'm ignorant (I'm not stupid, really) and just learning the ropes. It is actually kind of nice, because I have an opportunity to be a noob again, except a have a good CS foundation so I do not feel as lost as many of the poor souls who are starting out without a software programming background spanning over two decades. I *like* being a noob for DirectX, because it means I get to learn something... and i am LOVING the learning I have done so far.

But I am now stuck in a situation that admittedly makes me uncomfortable; I paid thousands of dollars for a domain name thinking at the time I would make a very epic blog/portfolio/educational site, only to find that there is in fact a group of people I respect who had a similar idea. And I have that debt now, to boot.

There are other events in my life that as of this week make this an interesting development; I'm going to get married this month and so the cost of the domain has been on my mind a lot as well. Either way, if it seems like my offer to work together seems sort of lost or without direction, that is because it is, and the only compass I have to point the way forward - such as my CS or entrepreneurial biz-dev skills - are skills that now make me feel sort of guilty that if I use them i would be going against people I respect. I'm not sure what else to do except to ask if you want help, or if we can work together somehow.

Can I at least have your blessing?

There are other events in my life that as of this week make this an interesting development; I'm going to get married this month and so the cost of the domain has been on my mind a lot as well. Either way, if it seems like my offer to work together seems sort of lost or without direction, that is because it is, and the only compass I have to point the way forward - such as my CS or entrepreneurial biz-dev skills - are skills that now make me feel sort of guilty that if I use them i would be going against people I respect. I'm not sure what else to do except to ask if you want help, or if we can work together somehow.

Can I at least have your blessing?

What exactly are you trying to make? Are you trying to do this for money? If so, don't use us as a model. ;)

Note: I'm not speaking in any official capacity on behalf of GDNet here, this is just my own personal views and opinions.

It sounds like you have a lot of enthusiasm and good intentions of creating something useful, but I think Hodgman expressed our position pretty well when he said...

If I was GD.Net or Coke, and someone gave me these alternate URLs, I'd take them and just set them up as redirects to my real URL.
On the other hand, if someone with these alternate URLs said, "let's work together", I'd wait for their proposal, because all I've thought of is using their URL as a redirect...

If we had control of the dot com domain ourselves we would set it up as a simple re-direct to our existing site. Beyond that we have no ideas for how it could be used in conjunction with our site, and we certainly aren't in any position to even think about making an offer to purchase it from you. If you have any ideas more specific than just a vague notion of "working together" we're happy to hear them -- and we're more than happy for you to contribute to our site by answering forum topics, submitting articles, writing journal entries, or any other normal user activities -- but as it is we simply don't have any uses in mind for your domain.



Honestly -- and unfortunately for you given how you've described your situation -- I think you may have made a mistake in purchasing the dot com domain without a much clearer idea of what you wanted to do with it. It might be ok for a large corporation or well funded start-up to spend a lot of money on a killer domain they simply must have, but as an individual looking to launch a new blog and resource site and without a clear plan of how you might make returns on your investment you almost certainly would have been better off with a new, un-established name that you could have purchased for <$20/year rather than spending thousands of dollars.

For better or worse you've already paid your money and now own the dot com domain name, and you're free to do whatever you want with it. We'd really hate for that to fracture our community, but we already co-exist with a number of other sites (DevMaster, GPWiki, Flipcode et al) covering the same topic, and there was even a gamedev.org forum for quite some time, so if you want to make use of your domain all we can really ask is that you don't intentionally mislead anyone who might be looking for our well-known site by using overly similar colours, layout, etc. I can say however that amongst all the similar sites that are already established you'll have a hard time getting anything off the ground unless you can really offer something of value.

GDNet is a well established brand and active site that has been operating continuously since 1999, whilst as far as I'm aware gamedev.com has never been used for anything of significance, and it's simply not something that would be of use to us.


I hope everything works out for you, but unless you have any more specific suggestions for how we could work together I just don't think we can help you.

Well thank you for giving me your blessing to do whatever I want with the domain, but my offer still stands as I do not personally feel like just because we can not think of a way to work together right now, that we should close that door for the future,

Please feel free to let me know if you think of something, and I will do the same.

Well thank you for giving me your blessing to do whatever I want with the domain, but my offer still stands as I do not personally feel like just because we can not think of a way to work together right now, that we should close that door for the future,

Please feel free to let me know if you think of something, and I will do the same.

Sure absolutely.. build something cool. =)

Absolutely, feel free to approach us if you have any ideas for how we might help each other out -- and I hope you continue to get value out of our site as a user -- but for now we'll just wish you well with whatever you decide to do with your domain.

There's some good ideas in this thread for stuff you could try and do with your site.