GO Goes Pay-to-Play

Would you pay a dollar a month to read reviews and get into flame wars? Aaron Powell of Gaming Outpost hopes you will. While the articles and forums at GO will be accessible only to subscribers, the news page will remain free, and will go to a Slashdot-style model with discussions of its own. Will this set up a caste system, where the rabble gets noisy, unmoderated discussion for free, and paying customers get the discussion with intelligence? Or will the paid forums simply turn into a ghost town? GO’s forums are among the most heavily-trafficked and opinionated gaming forums online, and this change will mean something, either way. As for the articles, Pyramid was an online subscription-based magazine before it was cool. Can GO compete? Will all fans of non-mainstream interests (that’s us) be paying for all of their web content soon?