Contrary to popular belief, independent sites like All Things UNCHARTED don’t receive any support from Sony Computer Entertainment of America/Europe, nor is Naughty Dog allowed to allow interviews or pre-release material to anyone without Sony’s PR department’s approval. That’s just how it works in the industry, whereas it seems like corporate/monster blogs like Kotaku, Destructoid, Joystiq, or GameInformer get everything they need and more. They’re not our enemies: they’re actually our favorite blogs.

Indepdenent sites like All Things UNCHARTED are often run by a small group of dedicated fans, by the community itself, for the community itself.

We don’t get handed promotional materials to give away for free to help the buzz, we don’t get “leaked” clips, and no, we don’t get access to hang out and talk with the people responsible for making the game franchise you love. Everything we’ve done has cost us time (and in my case, money), and it’s made All Things UNCHARTED the most active UNCHARTED-focused community in the world outside of NaughtyDog.com’s forums. That’s awesome!

Our interview with Greg Edmonson? Pure luck maybe, although Greg is one of the nicest guys I’ve talked to in the industry. Our upcoming interview with Emily Rose? Emily is amazing and had some downtime between Haven and whatever else she’s working on whatever else we don’t know about yet. The giveaways? My credit card still hurts from those, but it made you guys and gals happy, and it made us happy!

Don’t get us wrong, we’re not complaining.

But we’re fighting to stay active in a sea of silver platter handouts just because the bigger guys already get a lot of eyes on the site. We’d love to dive deeper into UNCHARTED and get exclusives from Naughty Dog, but their hands are tied, and so are ours.

Quite honestly, we have yet to receive a single response to our many formal, written requests from Sony’s PR department. While we don’t know the exact reason, we can only assume one thing: we’re too small. Not worth the time maybe.

But you have the power to change all that. You’re already doing it: by visiting more often, by commenting on our news updates and original articles, communicating and collaborating with others like you on our forums, tweeting and retweeting, liking and posting on our Facebook page… and you’re amazing!

We’ve grown from a few hundred monthly visitors to over 5,000 unique visitors a month and growing even faster thanks to our new forums. That’s incredible!

What else can you do to help?

• Tell your friends and other UNCHARTED fans like you about us.
• Tweet about us. (You don’t necessarily have to retweet us, that’s only if you like the story!)
• Like our page on Facebook to subscribe to updates, and share our content with your other Facebook friends. Invite them to Like our page too!
• Join our forums and stay active!
• If you can afford a little spare change, send us a donation of any amount big or small to help keep us afloat, continue to fund giveaways, and occasionally send a nice gift to our contributors. (Remember, we don’t have any banner ads on our site. The other guys have tons.)

But we can’t do it without you…

You have the power to help us show Sony that we’re an active, thriving community that reads, writes and speaks UNCHARTED where they’re fighting to be noticed by distracted readers on the other, bigger sites. And by our numbers combined, we’ll pull in our friends who haven’t yet seen just how awesome the UNCHARTED franchise is and where it’s going. That’s better exposure than any media buy can get- word of mouth from passionate fans like you beat everything. Together, we can do this.

Thank you!

Chris Fullman
Senior Editor, Founder
All Things UNCHARTED

Have another idea on how to help us? Let us know in the comments below! (A rhyme, how quaint.)