PCGamingWiki first birthday giveaway - 9-10 February 2013

Andytizer · February 8, 2013

Giveaway contest

Celebrating one year of fixing PC games

12 February 2013 - congratulation to the winners: ÐšÐ¸Ñ€Ð¸Ð» Ð¢Ñ€Ð¸Ñ‡ÐºÐ¾Ð², William, Kahn, Kory, Pekka and Jmaa!

5 copies of

Dishonored (Steam) to giveaway to 5 winners, courtesy of Bethesda

a Rafflecopter giveaway

1 copy of

Arma II (Steam) to giveaway, courtesy of Bohemia

everything you need to play DayZ

a Rafflecopter giveaway

History of PCGamingWiki: the first year

The problem with PC gaming

I've always been interested in tweaking PC games so that they would play exactly how I wanted them to. Too many times have I purchased a game and then realised that it didn't allow you to alt+tab without crashing, or it wouldn't work on a certain set of graphics cards or it had really horrible DRM, or it plain just didn't work at all and I'd think 'welp maybe it'll work on my next PC'.

I really hated the idea of people spending hours trying to fix a game and failing because their skill in scouring forum threads for fixes wasn't as good as mine. So, whenever I discovered something new about a game, I endeavored to post it somewhere to give people a chance of finding it. These early steps involved me submitting game fixes to magazines or post them up on my blog where I maintained guides like how to implement borderless fullscreen windowed on any game.

The idea

As the blog developed, I found that the fixes I'd written up would get out of date really quickly: new patches and programs would be released, services would blink out of existence, and comments filled in the gaps until I could get the time to edit the main post again with the new information. I began to realise that comments from readers were actually the most valuable sources of information on any page listing a fix, and that I should just let the commenter make the edits themselves. If I could create a site where a single page listing fixes for every game, then this would eliminate the need to ever research a fix ever again.

Humble beginnings

On 4 February 2012, I registered pcgamepedia.com and worked on it for a few days, before realising how silly the name sounded, and so on 9 February 2012, I registered pcgamingwiki.com and transferred everything over. At this stage I wasn't too worried about whether I'd be able to attract other people to the project. I figured that even if no one else contributed, it would a useful place for me to refer to when I reinstalled Fallout 2 again and wanted to get all my patches, fixes and tweaks back.

The first article I contributed to was for Titan Quest, which I had picked up on sale and had spent many hours researching the rich number of mods and tweaks for the game, and managed to consolidate information strewn everywhere on fan sites, blogs, endless forum threads. I figured this was a good start, and I promptly began writing up articles on newer games such as Kingdoms of Amalur.

I tried to put the word out about the wiki onto the forums, but it was difficult attracting people to the project. The first time another person registered was an absolute joy for me. A friendly chap named Moloc decided to upload his Monkey Island fixes somewhere, and chose PCGamingWiki to do it. For the first few days, only 3 accounts were registered, the Admin, Andytizer and Moloc.

Reddit explosion[fright][rimg width=100 height=200:1mszqhqq]http://i.imgur.com/H2AgI.png[/rimg] [rimg width=100 height=200:1mszqhqq]http://i.imgur.com/QMU1L.png[/rimg][/fright]

Initial post onto subreddits like r/pcgaming were very successful, so I decided to try and capture the mainstream r/gaming crowd by posting up a comic, a popular format there at the time.

What I love about PC gaming / What I hate about PC gaming... [fixed] proved to be so successful that it brought our hosting server to its knees, bringing over 200 new users and an explosion in activity. You can get an idea of how it looked like by checking this Wayback Machine cache from 12 February 2012.

PEOPLE OF THE FUTURE - this is what we have figured out so far... was the really big post that took the top spot on reddit r/all, bringing in so much traffic that our host shut down the site and told us to find another service.

Constant improvements

It was around this time that JRWR stepped up to help us transfer over to a new host (and since then, to the dedicated server), and he's been instrumental in keeping PCGamingWiki up and running. I'd like to thank him for all his work, and also the work of our hard-working moderators, who have gone beyond the call to make sure formatting has been applied correctly and spamming has been eliminated, and for taking part in helping to guide the future of the website.

Since the beginning of the site, we have worked extremely hard to improve our formatting and layout to improve the clarity to which fixes are listed. Our main goal now is to complete listings for as many games as possible, and to fulfill a dream of having every bit of information about how a game runs and what fixes are available on a single page, so that it's all kept up to date in a single place. My hope one day that this site becomes as important to the games industry as Wikipedia is to the rest of the world. We want developers and publishers to link and contribute to our articles directly and eventually I want the site to be officially acknowledged and linked to by stores like Steam, GOG.com and Amazon.com. One day, tere'l be a page for every single PC game ever released.

Thanks for being a part of PCGamingWiki. --~~ Andytizer

Milestones

09 February 2012 - registration of pcgamingwiki.com

29 February - Kotaku writes about PCGamingWiki

30 August - more than 1000 concurrent users

09 September - 1000th registered user

09 November - Rock Paper Shotgun article on Dark Souls, linking to our most visited game article ever

19 January 2013 - migrated to a dedicated server

20 January - Kickstarter success, 440% funded

Top 5 game articles

1. Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition

2. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords