In case you missed the announcement during our Christmas in July Spectacular: GameCola.net, our Actual Internet Website, will no longer be using the tagline “Gaming Outside the Mainstream”.
Just like when we decided to start using the tagline, not much will be changing—we’ll still be primarily be covering old games, indie games, weird games, and all the rest the same way we have been since 2002. We’ll just also be covering The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
That said, we need a new tagline! We’ve historically used “Gaming Outside the Mainstream“, “Videogame Humor“, and “7 is ABOVE Average!“, among others. What tagline do you think suits our ragtag team of people who play videogames sometimes? Leave your suggestions in the comments!
where video games come to life…and kill you
Honestly, I think “Gaming Outside the Mainstream” suits GameCola well.
I think it fits the content of the site, but we’ve gone from a solid “an article every weekday!” from 2010 through 2015 to “hopefully three times a week but honestly probably more like one and a half” more recently. When I ask the staff what we can do to improve contributions, the #1 response is “There just aren’t enough Outside the Mainstream games to review! There’s nothing to write about!” Since I can’t do much about the #2 response of “I have finals this week” or the #3 response of “It’s hard to get motivated when nobody ever comments”, I figured getting rid of Gaming Outside the Mainstream was worth a shot. Hopefully we’ll see some more content start rolling in.
“There just aren’t enough Outside the Mainstream games to review! There’s nothing to write about!”
This is of course a crazy thing to say, with an average of 16 new games on Steam every day and about a billion on itch.io that literally no one has played but the developer (and that GC staffers could play for free with a media account).
I think “Videogames.” (with the period) sums it up pretty nicely. I mean, we say that on podcasts all the time, so it’s basically already our tagline. Actually, I think “Gaming Outside the Mainstream” could remain the tagline as long as the site doesn’t suddenly become all Breath of the Wild all the time.
I completely agree with Paul, but I also recognize that many staff members have struggled over the years with what actually qualifies as “Outside the Mainstream,” and no amount of clarifying has seemed to help much. Mainstream games have never been off-limits; you just need to be creative in how you talk about them. So I think the #1 response reflects a disconnect between the staff and the spirit of the site. I think participation rates, content quality, site focus, social media promotion, and sense of community all affect the #3 response; that’s an issue that should naturally improve as everything else improves.
I’m on board with reintegrating mainstream games for the sake of improving contributions, but I would emphasize how important it is for the staff to feel like a cohesive unit that enjoys talking about games together. Otherwise, GameCola is just another place where random people can drop off articles if they feel like it. Even if the #2 response can’t be helped, keeping the writers excited about being a part of GameCola will increase the chances that they’ll happily give up their free time to work on an article or video once they finally catch a break.