It's no secret that The App Shack is a very small review site. At the moment, our 'staff' is made up of me (Syntheticvoid) and Alister. Our 20,000 hits a month is nothing compared to sites like Touch Arcade, 148 Apps, AppSpy, Slide To Play, ect... Don't get me wrong, I feel very fortunate that we do get as much traffic as we do, and I'm actually pretty glad that we aren't a big review site.
Because of this, we're able to pretty much do whatever the hell we want to in regards to everything. We're able to not worry about charging developers for adspace or reviews, we don't have to cover all the top stories and rumors that other sites obsess about, and we can (luckily) write reviews at our own pace, and for whatever games we want.
Now, after a LOT of mulling it over and thinking, we've decided to do away with our star rating system. This is mainly because we generally only review games that we feel deserve more attention. This is all because we have real jobs, lives, families, ect... and can't sink hours upon hours into this site, no matter how badly we want to. It would be great to be able to review every single game that's released every week, but we just don't have the time, so games that catch our eyes are basically the only games we review. Because of this, almost every single game gets a 4 or 5 star rating, making star ratings pretty pointless here at TAS.
So, from now on, we will keep bringing you reviews, but they will not be rated. We will keep our previous scores up because back when we actually had a staff working on reviews, we were able to review not only games that we enjoyed, but also games that we didn't.
WE hope you'll keep sticking with us through this sort of 'dead time' for our site. And if you, or anyone you know is interested in joining up and writing reviews for The App Shack, feel free to contact (or have them contact) us @
TheAppShack@live.com
3 comments:
Hmm, you know, I like the rating system. If you only review game you know you like and they turn out to be crap, it's sometimes easier to see the low star ratings at the bottom in case I miss or just skim over a section of the review.
I just think that using star rating system is a good thing for a review. I mean sometimes readers are too lazy to read the whole article, so they prefer to take a look with the rating first then continuing to read the main review. Keep using the star rating is the best choice. It doesn't matter even if you only review the popular games only. FYI, I also love to write game reviews on my blog, though i doubt if people might read my write. However, I wrote reviews cause I want to share it and I love to do that... :)
I'm thinking I might do something like AppSpy with their Pro/Con section highlighting the important things for those of you who don't have time to read a whole review.
Pretty sure we're going to stick with the no more star ratings thing - since yes, we only have the time to review games that stand out to us - so just consider every game from now on as a 4 or 5 star game from us. =oP
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