shane Yeah, Game Developer magazine was shut down because the company (1,000+ people) was transitioning to more of an events business and away from magazines, and they wanted to cut out X percentage of magazines and staff, and Game Developer magazine with its three employees was an easy answer. I wasn’t there at the time, but that’s how I saw it.
The magazine basically always made a profit but the profit was low - it was like $100-200k/year. Now to me, that’s a lot. To a company that also owns GDC, the black hat conference, etc, it not much money to lose, and a good opportunity to get out of the business.
I truly do believe that the game industry suffered somewhat by the lack of Game Developer magazine. Folks were sharing new techniques there, and everybody got it. We had a circulation of 30,000 at the peak (we cut out about like… 8k that seemed to not be game developers at one point), and through surveys we knew the magazine was passed around to an average of 7 people (like the studio would get a couple copies and pass it around). It was a real knowledge-sharing resource, and once it was gone there wasn’t A Place for all of that, the place became “somewhere on the internet, go search.” So you had folks searching for solutions to problems, but not being confronted with solutions to problems they hadn’t had yet, which was Game Developer’s focus.
I do believe there’s room for long form writing - I don’t know who has time to do it (lol) and I also believe that when an organization makes any kind of money (i.e. the patreon) that money should be shared with participants, so if someone wrote, we’d want to pay them, which means we’d need more money.
I’m not 100% sure I know what the value of long form writing on insert credit is in 2021. It may be there, but I think a lot of others are doing good stuff these days, and the focus we had is no longer exactly necessary since it has been at least somewhat absorbed into the mainstream of game journalism I’d say.
But I still like writing stuff, so maybe it’ll just be like… if we feel like writing something, here it is. I don’t think it would be so targeted in terms of trying to make the website a big thing again. It’d just be a place for us to do whatever we felt like, if we felt like it. That’s not much of an ethos, but I also know that there’s no point forcing an ethos if one isn’t naturally there.
So… we’ll see what happens!!!