My apologies for the late news post, this is actually for *yesterday* (the 5th).

A few times a year, if not more, a discussion is raised about how our scene is declining. Everyone always wonders what the reason for the decline is, and why people are not coming through here looking for the old games we all love. Looking through the statistics for our little ring, our traffic has slightly increased every year since 2002. Before 2002 we had about 5x as many visitors as we do now, but in those days we listed sites with warez/oldwarez content.

While traffic is slowly increasing year over year, the number of member sites has not. We have remained around 80 sites for years (I want to say our all-time high was around 140). I can't come up with a reason of why this is... our little web community has barely scratched the surface of what we *should* be covering. Going by the "4 year rule" abandonware sites could have games as new as 2003 up for download. Unfortunately, only a handful of new titles (from any year) have been added into our little web scene since 2002. The late 90's have a tremendous amount of great games from companies that no longer exist that we don't cover.

The games are being covered however on torrent websites, usenet groups, p2p networks, IRC, and other venues. While we are never going to be able to match the content that is available on these networks, simply because we pay for our bandwidth, we should be offering some newer titles to our visitors.

I guess the bottom line of this whole post is this. Instead of simply uploading Dangerous Dave on the next update of your website, which every abandonware site has offered since 1998. Look around in your archive a little more, or on usenet, and find something that hasn't been uploaded to our scene yet. I'm sure your visitors will love it.