Vox Gaming has Launched

http://www.theverge.com/gaming

First impression: It's terrible!

The front page is absolutely inscrutable, with random articles and videos and forums stacked seemingly at random on top of each other under vague categories (which have the result of listing pieces of content twice on the same page), each with it's own visual style. How is one expected to navigate that mess? Sure, it looks slick as hell, but looking at the main page, there's so much visual information coursing through my eye-stems that my brain can't process it! I suppose if I stuck with the site for a bit I would know exactly where in that 8 pages of scrolling(!) I would find the new reviews, but at first glance it's an absolutely baffling sea of text. And yeah, my first impression may be skewed. Maybe if I get used to the site I'll find it to be a revolution in information management. But that doesn't change the fact that, as a newcomer, I look at that front page and basically want to run.

Oddly, when you go to the next page, all the information suddenly becomes understandable in a format that we all know and understand. So yeah, you can see the content on the site efficiently as long as you wait a day or two. Which begs the question - why didn't they make the front page this way. Their front page seems to be innovating for the sake of innovation. I appreciate the effort, and (After looking at it for a while) I can see certain kernels of genius there, but it still just doesn't work very well - certainly not as well as the tried and true blog format.

Digging a bit deeper, the forums are hard to distinguish as such because it's formatted pretty well identically to the actual published articles themselves, with a constant big ol' sidebar filled with recent forum posts and other stuff I don't care about. Maybe it's just because I'm so used to GB's massive text space, but this seems less than ideal to me.

Lastly, and perhaps most dissapointingly, the site is cloying with it's attempts to make you go to it's other branches. There's a huge permanent footer listing all of Vox Media's many many "hubs", and the top bar is the same across all hubs meaning maybe 1 in 5 of the things in the feature dropdown has anything to do with games! It's the same situation with the sidebars while looking at articles/forum posts. No, I really wouldn't like to read this article on AT&T, or watch this video of Toy Fair! That is not what interests me, that is not why I'm here. The meat of the awful main page is the only places that can be trusted to have things only related to games, but even then there seems to be a "breaking" bar that follows from the top, pimping the hottest news whether it be related to games or no.

It's a bit sad to see my venerable dream team trapped in a website they seem to share with about 50 other writers. They'll make good content, I'm sure. But it won't mean too much if it's lost in the sea of their other colleagues' work and overzealous web design. After some further inspection, there are some kind of cool things about the site, but overall it seems just far too crazy for me to hazard adding it to my bookmark bar for the time being. I don't think I could stand trying to wrap my mind around that front page every morning. They claim they're in alpha though - even the name will be changing and hopefully the site will figure itself out too. So I'm still very hopeful that it'll all work out and I'll be able to enjoy some of my favourite internet peoples work without struggling to keep my eyes from unfocusing.

So, that's me. What do y'all think of it?

Edit: Turns out I was pretty wrong here, and for the sake of not spreading erroneous information to those who don't want to read my post down there, I will clarify: Vox Gaming is only piggybacking on The Verge for the time being. At some point in the future, it'll be a full blown website equal to Verge, with it's own hubs and everything. So no more sidebar full of junk you don't care about. It'll be just purely for games down the line.

The front page is kind of a mess probably because they wanted to cram as much of the content they wrote as they could in a place where it would be seen. The layout seems incredibly customizable, so they could probably make it as complex or simple as they like with little issue. It remains to be seen if they can find a good balance and out-do the blog format that we all know and love.

I'd apologize, but man, it took like an hour for me to get to the bottom of this. They need better PR or something. Either way, I think that front page has done the damage - it's probably scared away a fair amount of people.

The first thing I thought of was "Gleeman Vox".

And gee, at first glance that doesn't even look slick. It looks ugly.

Fix it.

the first thing I thought of was voxels

It looks like a mess. There's too much going on, with no clear aesthetic.

MY EYES.

It fully froze my computer for about 40 seconds. 

@coakroach said:

MY EYES.

MY MIND.

That is some terrible web design. Holy shit.

Bugger me it looks like an awful reddit collection app, they need to fix that shit.

communist edit: it also locked my browser up for 10-12 seconds like laughing man's

edit, again: it seems that that's not the 'actual' site and that they're just loitering on the verge's before launching their own? if that's not the case then great trickster gods help them

They combined Reddit and Kotaku? And made then beat it in the head with a hammer?
 
It brought my headache back.

Wait, so the website is a sub-website of a large collective of websites? So where are the links to just...the individual websites? Or am I on the wrong track? What is The Verge? (That totally sounds like a Fox SciFi TV show that would be cancelled after 8 episodes)

i'm not really in the market for another videogame website, so my opinion probably doesn't matter, but that looks like a bad tumblr

After tooling around on the site(s) some more, it has become a bit more scrutable as to how this all came about. Looking at all the other hubs, they're all pretty well under the same banner of "Tech". So much so that I wouldn't really mind the melding of content between the different hubs. Now I understand what they meant by getting their own site - they ain't just gonna be a hub any more. Right now, they're only existing on TheVerge.com, a site under Vox Media. Soon, they'll be VoxGaming.com, with their own hubs probably pertaining to different platforms. So that sort of settles that issue. No more melding of unrelated content.

As for the front page: Looking at the other hubs, there is a way to make it seem a lot less insane. They just didn't manage to accomplish that with their first run. The system they're running off of here seems to be infinitely customizable, and the other hubs on the site have figured out a format that is a lot less eye-burny. It seems like it can be as complex or as simple as they want it to be.

However, I still don't think they really need to be braving new worlds of information presentation here. I can understand wanting to differentiate themselves from their blogging brethren, but unless their method is straight-up better then what their main competitors have to offer, they shouldn't try and force it on us. It seems like whatever they try to pull with their fancy layouts, it won't beat what is already here on Giantbomb, Kotaku, or Joystiq.

Anyway, after thinking about it I'm a lot more confident that they'll be able to clean up their act. Though obviously they really could have handled this better, since it took me about an hour of deep consternation to get to the bottom of this.

The hell is wrong with you? This isn't the site. Think of this as the shitty blog that was originally Giant Bomb while they were building the actually site. Vox Games isn't even the final name. This is like Arrow Pointing Down level shit right here. Right now just look at the writing content to get a very vague idea of what the final product might be sorta-kinda like.

Edit: I should add that I don't know if that name is going to change. I remember hearing it was just a placeholder but they seem to be promoting the name pretty heavily.

Sounds like you've never been to the Verge before.. because it's identical. Hell, it is the Verge, it's just a new hub where all their gaming news is collected.

The real Vox Games has not actually launched yet, no matter what people say.

@TheGorilla: @Enigma777: Yeah, I realized that. Sorry!

So what are you looking at right now? We had no plans to hide in the background while working on The Site so, as I've been saying, we're crashing on The Verge's couch while we build a new house. Being a temporary home, we're taking the opportunity to experiment and we're treating this launch as an "alpha" ... meaning not-yet-beta. For those of you unfamiliar with software release jargon, that's early. We haven't even shared our name yet!

Source.

@Akrid: It's cool. I just always hate to see someone get shit because of a misunderstanding. But they happen constantly on the internet. And I have a weird love of telling forum people that they're wrong and/or crazy.

@easthill: Such are the perils of trying to beat the internet to making a topic about something! Research and careful thought suffers. Sorry. Not doin' this again.

wow so much stuff wrong with that. it needs to be cleaned up.

Who cares? GiantBomb and RPS is all one needs for down to earth coverage. GB is there for my video needs, and rps for general knowledge.

Yeah, I don't like the layout of the homepage either. In fact, I dislike the layout of most websites. That's why I use an RSS reader. I just get all the latest articles from all the websites I follow in a nicely formatted list. No navigating horrible homepages that float dumb articles I have no interest in reading to the top for months or anything like that. Just a nicely formatted list of articles. Plus, I follow far too many sites. It would take an age to visit them all individually to see if there are any articles worth my time.

But the writing from Vox has been really solid so far, and I'm looking forward to reading more.

Once you actually get into an article or review I think the layout is pretty clean and functional. Just the main page looks cluttered.

Wow the site really does look like shit. Jesus.

I love the look of their articles, and the content's been good as well. I'm looking forward to their "true" launch.

@Beaudacious said:

Who cares? GiantBomb and RPS is all one needs for down to earth coverage. GB is there for my video needs, and rps for general knowledge.

this dude knows whats up

@Animasta said:

@Beaudacious said:

Who cares? GiantBomb and RPS is all one needs for down to earth coverage. GB is there for my video needs, and rps for general knowledge.

this dude knows whats up

Both of these people know what's up.

@countinhallways said:

@Animasta said:

@Beaudacious said:

Who cares? GiantBomb and RPS is all one needs for down to earth coverage. GB is there for my video needs, and rps for general knowledge.

this dude knows whats up

Both of these people know what's up.

I can get behind this.

it looks like the internet exploded

So can we have a redo of this thread when the site actually launches.

Whoever thought the Metro interface was a good way to present information in written text needs to be shot.

At least we still have Giant Bomb, right?

WHY IS EVERYTHING DIFFERENT SIZES AND SHAPES?

WHO DESIGNED THIS?

Yeah, that site is a little.... unfortunate?

That is just about the worst website design I have seen in quite a while.

You realize they are just pigging-backing off of the main Verge website so they can just post their stuff right? They're working on a totally different website to launch later.

@believer258: it looks like an incomprehensible, intimidating mess to be honest.

I think my mind broke just watching it.

I like some of the guys behind the site and I'll give whatever podcast they end up producing alongside it a chance, because Joystiq's podcast went downhill almost immediately after Justin and others were no longer on it. As for their site . . . well, I dislike Vox (another of those hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars-spam-the-internet-with-networked-content-farms companies with something like 450 different websites under its belt) and I don't care for The Verge anymore than I cared for Gizmodo, GDGT, or Engadget (seriously, I don't need to see 800 articles a day about cell phones). I'll give whatever their final site becomes a shot, though. Unfortunately, most of these "we have hundreds of sites in our content network" things turn out to be pretty shitty. Joystiq has good people working there, but their site has always been fucking hideous and their form bullshit needlessly confusing and complex (I've been using the internet for nineteen years and the last time I tried posting on an AOL-owned entity, it wound up identifying me by my real name somehow, so I've never touched it again).

Who knows, maybe their endeavor will become the one truly good thing VOX does and I'll be a big fan of it.

Wow. Typical content-network-farm bullshit. I went back to their Vox hub on the site. I clicked on the first article. It was about some simple jumping game a dude made. They talked about playing it. They talked about the guy's former game. They talked about how they covered the guy's previous game. But they never linked to the fucking game, the fucking guy, or the guy's fucking site.

So, typical "we don't like to link to things outside of our domain" site. All links will probably link back to their own site, just like at Joystiq and all of the shitty AOL sites do. Man, that really just turned me off of their new thing.

@Branthog said:

Wow. Typical content-network-farm bullshit. I went back to their Vox hub on the site. I clicked on the first article. It was about some simple jumping game a dude made. They talked about playing it. They talked about the guy's former game. They talked about how they covered the guy's previous game. But they never linked to the fucking game, the fucking guy, or the guy's fucking site.

So, typical "we don't like to link to things outside of our domain" site. All links will probably link back to their own site, just like at Joystiq and all of the shitty AOL sites do. Man, that really just turned me off of their new thing.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/25/2823981/play-this-you-say-jump-i-say-how-high That one? Because there are source links under the article. Also I do agree with you on the content farm remark, Vox Gaming is not doing anything new.

They're trying to hard.

@dekkadekkadekka said:

@Branthog said:

Wow. Typical content-network-farm bullshit. I went back to their Vox hub on the site. I clicked on the first article. It was about some simple jumping game a dude made. They talked about playing it. They talked about the guy's former game. They talked about how they covered the guy's previous game. But they never linked to the fucking game, the fucking guy, or the guy's fucking site.

So, typical "we don't like to link to things outside of our domain" site. All links will probably link back to their own site, just like at Joystiq and all of the shitty AOL sites do. Man, that really just turned me off of their new thing.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/25/2823981/play-this-you-say-jump-i-say-how-high That one? Because there are source links under the article. Also I do agree with you on the content farm remark, Vox Gaming is not doing anything new.

Wow, they did everything they could to make the outbound links non-obvious. I looked for something at the bottom that would be a link to something else and when I saw that, I just thought it was part of the categorization tags for their content management system.

To be fair, I know this is all part of how The Verge does things (and they're just a variation on Engadget and other link-baiting post-it-first-get-hits sites) and it's not like it's Justin McElroy's doing or the rest of that crew, but that doesn't make it any more appealing to deal with the crappy "gawker, but tailored for an iPad" interface and practices. I just hope they're able to ditch the bad elements and somehow retain some integrity in the end-content in a network that is otherwise about getting content out there first and fast and selling ads and increasing page-views. I like the guys behind it (the ones I know, at least) so I want it to be good. I just think they have a major uphill battle, because of the nature of the beast.

It looks like they just adopted the design of the main site's (theverge.com) main page. When I go there, it feels like everything is scattered at random. Their tech podcast is good, but the site looks like a mess. I agree with the OP that they should make the main page of vox the same as the archives page, so it is more streamlined and easier to parse through.

At least it doesn't look like a blog. And remember what Giantbomb looked like before the site was done, you're all pretty judgey for something that's not finished.

Yeah the frontpage is really quite a mess... They need to do a better job organizing this. It's too hard to read.

@Vorbis: I spent some more time with it yesterday and once you start getting a grip where most things are supposed to be it's not that bad. Oh I meant that my eyes farted and then exploded and my brain is melting because it's soo fucking bad, I've never ever been to a terrible website on the internet before this is the first time oh my virgin eyes oh it's so fucking awful oh lord, oh how can I one up the person before me in hyperbole.

The site looks like a mess. I would love to read more of the content but my eyes and brain hurt trying to process the layout. I'll come back when redesign it.

I don't know if you guys read Chris Grant's origins post, but they aren't officially launched. Their content will be intermingled with The Verge's content until they get the games site up and going. They don't even have a name for themselves yet as Vox Gaming is a placeholder. Besides, their editorials have been good thus far, maybe a little long, but good.

Here's a link to Chris Grant's post explaining what is going on.