Christmas 2011: We've called it

If you have a merrily on high, it's time for the ding dong. We're stopping the full-time news here, but we'll have any major stories and monthly retrospective features every day throughout the Christmas break.

Here we are again. Johnny and Brenna have both finished for the Christmas holidays, and Steph's got one last shift which she'll probably spend typing obscenities through a sherry haze, so I'm calling Christmas. A few things first, though.

Brenna's worked herself into a revisionist frenzy compiling daily features for the holiday, each one looking back at a month in 2011. Together, they give you a complete picture of a vintage year in games news, from PSN-Gate to Wii U, from Xbox 720 to the Japanese earthquake, from Skyrim to Saints Row, from Modern Warfare 3 to Battlefield 3. It's all there. Come back every day for 2011's full story. We'll be putting the January feature live later today.

We're only going to be updating major news stories between now and our full return in January, so if someone tells someone else that something may or may not be cancelled, you'll have to read it somewhere else for a little while. Sorry.

The news team will be back full-time on January 2. This means Brenna will begin updating from Australia on the night of January 1 European time, to be followed by myself and Johnny the following day.

And that's this year done. VG247 is nearly four years old. In 2011 we've doubled our traffic, and we hope to be announcing audience figures very soon. We now run one of the most updated video games websites on earth. This year we published nearly 13,800 articles, and we're one of only very few games sites in existence with a 24 service focused directly at news.

I want to say thank you to Steph, Johnny and Brenna, VG247's central news team. I've worked in games editorial a long time, but it'll always delight me to see passionate people apply themselves completely to writing jobs, and I feel extremely lucky with our team. Every member works incredibly hard and constantly strives to be better, to produce better work, and to serve our readers to the best of their ability. They travel all over the world to see games and cover events, but their ability to maintain constant pressure in the face of the grind of daily games news is amazing. This is not an normal job, and VG247 is staffed by extraordinary individuals. To see people fight to improve both themselves and our site is a joy, and watching people respond to training and develop their skills is one of the main reasons I still do what I do. I'm proud of them all.

I'd also like to thank you, the reader. There are more of you visiting VG247 now than ever, and the development plans we have for the site in 2012 will increase our audience further. Without you there is no VG247, and the fact you return day in, day out for our content makes us very happy indeed. Thank you.

So Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Come back every day to read Brenna's news wrap features. Open some presents. Don't get p**sed and set fire to the Christmas tree. I hope you get what you wanted this holiday. And thanks again; have a great break.

Patrick Garratt
December 23, 2011

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