Eurogamer will be quiet this weekend, and when it's back there'll be some small changes

UPDATE: We're live and back online! Thanks for your patience over the weekend - and please bear with us the next couple of days as we iron out some inevitable quirks. Give us a shout if you see anything that looks out of whack - we'll be able to see it in the comments now that the notifications are back online!

ORIGINAL STORY: It's going to be a bit quiet on Eurogamer this coming weekend, with some big changes being made behind the scenes that mean from 3pm BST this Friday it won't be possible for us to post new articles or for you to post new comments until the tech team has finished working its magic some time on Monday morning - and when the site's back there'll be some small tweaks you'll notice too.

So what exactly is changing? The boring truth is not very much, as it's mostly confined to behind-the-scenes stuff - this isn't a big redesign, and please don't expect big new features like dark mode. Not yet, anyway.

A few years ago ReedPop's product and engineering teams embarked on building a fancy new platform for all the network's sites, and having successfully rolled it out across Rock Paper Shotgun, VG247, Cosplay Central, Jelly Deals, Metaverse and Dicebreaker it's finally the turn of the oldest, biggest and indeed grumpiest of the bunch to make its way over. Importing over 20 years of content is no small feat, hence the downtime, but the site you see on Monday morning won't look any different to how it does now. But the people who work for it will be empowered by some new tools and a content management system (CMS) which is a mite more modern than what we were wrestling with before.

Which is great for us, but there'll also be some changes for you too. If you've been to the likes of RPS, VG247 or Dicebreaker in the recent past you'll see an improved commenting experience - and from Monday, that'll be the same experience you'll be getting on Eurogamer. Indeed, after the port you'll be able to use your login across all those sites, with the new ReedPop ID working across the network (and if the ReedPop ID moniker sounds ominous, I assure you it's not - it's made by the same lovely team in Brighton that's been behind Eurogamer all these years).

What does it require of you? Hopefully very little - we're importing all existing users over to the system and the experience should be as seamless as possible, though unfortunately you will have to log back into the site once we're back up and running on Monday morning. Which means I need to remember the password on the account I set up back when I started reading Eurogamer in the mid-noughties...

It's been no mean feat porting Eurogamer's frankly colossal back catalogue over to the new system, and I'd like to thank our amazing tech team for their incredible work. Once they've accomplished that remarkable achievement we'll have all the sites in the network running from the same platform, meaning big new features will be that much simpler to implement (and old ones that have been a bit funky recently will return - I'm pleased to say the on-site notifications are finally coming back).

I'd also like to thank you for your patience. While we're not able to post any new articles over the weekend, and while you're not able to post any new comments, the site's not going anywhere. We've still got a couple of weekend features prepared that we'll be pushing out a little earlier than usual - so your Sunday read will be arriving on a Friday afternoon, should you want to be sensible and ration it out for that peaceful morning coffee. And if you do have any questions please feel free to drop me a line. I'll be around in the comments until they're closed off on Friday afternoon, and I'll be around when they're back on Monday morning, but if there's any point you've got anything you'd like to ask you can always grab me at martin@eurogamer.net.

Thanks, as ever, for reading, and see you on the other side!