The webcomics blog about webcomics

Penny’s Worth?

What’s with Penny Arcade these days? Updates have been spotty, and today is hardly the first day that the main page has been updated with no comic. Now when I say “spotty”, I don’t mean Mac Hall spotty. I mean spotty for Penny Arcade. I remember a time when there would be an update in time for my 11 am ICT class, last week I had to wait until nearly midnight.

Usually, I’m firmly in the “webcomics are free so quit your yapping” camp when it comes to complaints about quality/consistency but this is Penny Arcade we’re talking about here. These are the pros. I know they’re busy these days, what with their childrend, charity and awesome convention that people are calling the new E3 (but not Gabe), but I hope they don’t loose sight of what got them there. Regular, high quality updates that had me laughing when I should have been building databases.

As of the time of your post, the update had come up.

I don’t believe Penny Arcade has, as of yet, actually missed an update – however, they have been consistently updating late in the day.

It has actually been happening on and off for quite a few months now – Tycho acknowledged the concern back in March, and even apologized, stating, “Our stuff should be available when you want to read it, and I’m sorry.

It’s frustrating, sure, given that the PA strip is one of the things I most look forward to each morning – but they get the strip up every assigned day by the end of the day, and that alone is more than I can claim they owe me.

My understanding is that it’s less about getting the comic done and more about the tech behind the site. Of course, I could be wrong.

it is 100% the tech behind the site.

Traffic is growing for them and they keep getting hit with huge spikes. When it was announced that E3 was going away they got slammed with traffic.

It’s a combination of things actually but a lot of it is tech side. The strip is done and we’ve uploaded it but it doesn’t always show up. We can’t upgrade our hardware fast enough to deal with the traffic we get.

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