After an amazing year and a half at SCEA and just shy of a decade in the videogame industry, it’s time for me to say goodbye.

I’ve met some truly amazing people throughout my 9-year career in gaming, including many life-long friends and many people that I consider family. It seems like only yesterday that I was just a bright-eyed kid, fresh out of college, ready to embark on a career in game writing. And in the blink of an eye, here I am.

I’m extremely excited to move on to the next stage of my life and career outside of gaming, but there’s no denying the saddening feeling that comes with saying goodbye to so many wonderful people, especially here at PlayStation. And then there are the journalists, the third-party publishers, developers and beyond. These are all people that made this one big, happy family.

To everyone in the PlayStation community — you truly made this job fun. When I look back on the community meet-ups, events, live chats, online games and even the quick comment exchanges…those are the little things that brought me joy on a day-to-day basis. Being a part of something that brings people happiness, and being able to go out and share that enthusiasm with you, that’s where this job truly shined. It’s what kept me going. I thank you for that, and I’ll miss you all. Yes, even those of you who thrived on pointing out my .01MB file size mistakes in the Store updates ;-)

I am leaving you in more than capable hands. Your main man Jeff, obviously, but also the newest addition to the PlayStation.Blog family, friend and former coworker Sid Shuman. Treat him well. Minimal hazing, please.

So let’s consider this farewell, but not goodbye. Cheesy? Yes. Heartfelt? Definitely. You know where to find me:

PSN: godofgwar
twitter.com/chrismorell

Best wishes,
Chris Morell, VP of PlayStation Community Awesomeness

I love mashable things: potatoes, music, monsters. Especially with gravy.

Why bring this up? Because, as some of you more social-media-savvy readers might already know, Mashable has opened its 3rd annual Open Web Awards. If you don’t know what these awards are about, there’s an international voting competition where major online communities (blogs, Twitter, Facebook fanpages, etc.) duke it out for the top spot. I think the winner gets cookies or something.

First round in the competition is the nominations period (NOW – November 15th). The top 5 nominees in each category will move forward to the voting round (November 18th – December 13th). Winners for each category will be announced on December 15th.

Here’s where you come in: please help nominate PlayStation.Blog in the “Best Corporate Blog” category! PlayStation fans are undoubtedly the most vocal on the Internet, so show your PlayStation love and nominate the blog, and we’ll win this thing for sure.

Nominating is as simple as a few easy steps:

• Go to http://mashable.com/owa/votes
• Sign in with your Twitter or Facebook account
• Once logged in, enter http://blog.us.playstation.com/ in the “Nominate Name or URL” section
• Select the “Best Corporate Blog” category
• Hit submit

…and you’re done! You can nominate once per day per category, so vote early and vote often. The nominations period ends on November 15th. Hopefully with your help, we’ll make it to the voting round. Then we can ask you for a bit more help :-)

We don’t ask for much, right?

You may recall our short outage last week; we were messing around with the servers here at PlayStation Central Command. By doing [whatever it is the engineers have done], we’ve enabled some new functionality. Reading the comments, a few of you have figured it out - the PlayStation.Blog is now mobile compatible.

The next time you head over to the blog from your PSP, Blackberry, or iPhone (or probably whatever mobile device you’re running, assuming it’s newer than a Star-tac), you’ll see a specially formatted, easy to read (and load!) version of the Blog. You can even comment; now you can tell us what you think from the comfort of your office restroom!

There’s no special URL to go to, just hit up the normal http://blog.us.playstation.com address, and our patented Internet Gnomes will do the rest. Please let us know if you’re experiencing any compatibility issues, and we’ll flog the Gnomes a little harder. It’s ok, they deserve it :-)

UPDATE: aaaaaaaaand we’re back. I really expected that to take longer. We’ve now increased our server capacity, which will allow us to continue to grow and implement new features to the blog. We’ll let you know what they are when we roll them out.

In case you missed it last week, Capcom’s John D. broke the Blog. Steaming pile of wreckage, it was.

So today, we’re adding another server. Truthfully, we had planned to do that anyway. I think Mr. Diamonon wants to take credit - and since they’re adding Trophies to Bionic Commando: Rearmed, I’ll let him do so.

Either way, if you try to log on to the Blog from about 2-3pm (Pacific) today and it doesn’t work, it doesn’t mean your internet is broken. Necessarily.

Note: the PSN is unaffected by this maintenance window.

I’ve been out of the office almost the entirety of the past 3 weeks (New York, Orlando, Tokyo), so I’m a bit behind on some of the paperwork. But on September 21st, 2008 at 4:43 pm, user “jskillzball” commented:

thanks for the post i always feel better after i come home from football and read these blogs.

Well, that was a nice sentiment. The Blog Bean Counters (they’ll *love* being referred to like that) informed me that jskillzball also helped us reach a milestone. And by “us” I mean “you” - comment #100,000. Seeing as how we had published about 650 posts at that time, that’s an average of over 150 comments per post! Take a look around the internet - you’re not going to see such a consistently dedicated group of readers too often. It’s like everyone in Burbank, California or Cambridge, Massachusetts posted one time each! (I don’t think that’s what happened, right?)

It’s been an interesting ride, as you readers are just as likely to point out what you don’t like as you are to let us know what you enjoy. For instance, I believe roughly 78% of the comments were demands for In-Game XMB (I kid, I kid!). Seriously though, we definitely appreciate the constructive critiques, and when you see an often-requested feature show up in a game’s patch or firmware update, I believe it’s proof that “the system works.”

And I can tell you from experience that game developers have told me the feedback they’ve received on this Blog, from readers like you, has been incredibly useful to them - hopefully as much as the post you’ve commented on was to you.

So please, keep them coming, even if it’s just to say “trophies, kthxbai!” And please continue to keep them (mostly) on-topic, as that helps make sure that the right sets of eyes are reading your opinions. I’m sure we’ll reach comment #200,000 in no time. Thank you.

Oh, and jskillzball, I’ll be contacting you when I get back from TGS, I believe a schwag bag is in order.