To clarify: EGM is NOT going anywhere.
We are going to continue publishing daily news without interruption, just as we’ve done for the past 9 years. We will also be returning to producing features and other content soon, and have some surprises that we can’t wait to reveal. As well, we are continuing work on our other projects outside of this website, just as we were doing before. Our intention for this post was to celebrate what we’ve been doing over the past year, highlight some of the great features that have been produced, and let you know that there was a transition coming.
But, given some reporting that misinterpreted this story, it obviously now requires a clarification. By no means did we intend this to be read the way some have read it. EGM has been around for 30+ years, and over that time has changed and adapted. And soon, EGM will be undergoing another change. We think you’ll like what we have planned, and while we won’t be focusing exclusively on long-form features, we will still have them along with some other surprises we’ll share soon.
With that clarification, we encourage you to read the post below and sample some of the work of our writers. We think you’ll like what you see…
Let’s get to the point: As of today, EGM will no longer be publishing the daily features that have defined the site since we relaunched last year. The site itself isn’t going anywhere. We plan to continue daily news coverage, and our feature archives will stay up and be accessible by all as we transition to the next chapter.
When we started working on this latest incarnation of EGM, we firmly believed there was a need for more longform feature writing about games, for thoughtful, in-depth articles about games and the ways they intersect with culture and with human stories. Other sites were, and still are, publishing work in that vein. But far too many more stories were going untold. We still believe in all this—more than ever, in fact—and while we won’t have all of our focus on this format we will continue to do features as part of our daily news coverage.
The work we published regularly featured in round-ups of the best gaming writing, like Critical Distance and Video Game Deep Cuts. The feedback we received from readers, from talented writers, and from those working in the game industry was frequently astounding and humbling. This is, of course, a testament to the skill of the freelancers who were kind enough to bring their work to us. But we’d like to think it also validated our mission and our editorial vision. We’re proud to have done something that didn’t just generate traffic for the sake of traffic, to have published features that never felt disposable and were always rooted in a sense of humanity.
If you enjoyed any of the work EGM published over the last year, we want to thank you for you support. Please do whatever you can to boost writers and sites that place a similar emphasis on great content. Make it known to the publications you read that you’ve got an appetite for even more.
Should the gaming press—or game journalism, or gameswriting, or whatever else you want to call it—lose the ability to seek out and tell original stories using the power of the written word, it won’t just miss out an enormous opportunity. It’ll also be risking its own future. There’s certainly a place for access journalism, and for reporting PR announcements as news, but those things become less and less necessary as publishers build more channels for communicating directly with fans. Clickbait, listicles, and news-cycle outrage pieces may generate pageviews, but they don’t enrich the conversation around video games, and they’re not enough to ensure a healthy, independent, and thoughtful gaming press. Our shared hobby deserves so much more.
In case you haven’t been following EGM since the relaunch, or have only popped over occasionally, we wanted to leave you with a selection of the stories we’re proudest of running over the past year. To be clear, everything we’ve run on the site is great, and so little of it is tied to the news cycle that we think it’ll all still be worth reading for years to come. Narrowing this list down was painful. But if you need an intro to what we did and why we think it mattered, these 10, in no particular order, are a great start.
The Most Obvious Way in the Universe, by Hart Fowler – Faced with an unexpected tragedy, Hart transformed what would have been a straightforward story into a deeply empathetic elegy.
In My Waking Life, by Jacob Farmer – For all the countless articles that have been written about Red Dead Redemption 2, there’s never been anything quite like this story.
On Killing Hitler, by Michael Goroff – The topic might seem silly on the surface, but Michael used it as a jumping off point for a nuanced and complicated discussion of his own identity.
The Closing Walls Around China’s Independent Game Developers, by Khee Hoon Chan – Khee Hoon is one of the best freelance reporters working today, especially when it comes to shedding light on regions that are often overlooked in the mainstream American and European gaming press. This article is an excellent example of why.
Pauline Jacquey’s World Tour: The Unlikely Journey of Ubisoft’s Punk Nomad Fixer, by Samuel Horti – Samuel’s profiles were a regular highlight on EGM, and his piece on Pauline Jacquey showcased his unique ability to connect with his subjects and communicate their humanity in beautiful, compelling fashion.
Digital Demonology: The Historical Origins of Gaming’s Infernal Obsession, by Andreas Inderwildi – A fascinating deep dive into the rich history of demons, as it’s been reflected in video games.
What Science and Philosophy Teach Us About the Dream World of Link’s Awakening, by Brendan Hesse – Tying a classic Nintendo game to discussion of theories in neuroscience and philosophy is pretty strange, but Brendan does it so effortlessly that it seems anything but outlandish.
How Warsaw Captures the Brutality—and Complexity—of the Historical Uprising that Inspired It, by Reid McCarter – The amount of research and thought that Reid puts into everything he writes, whether for EGM or elsewhere, always shines through. This look at a World War II history through the lens of Warsaw shows him in fine form.
Video Games Face Mass Extinction. For Some, It’s Already Too Late, by Zack Kotzer – We published a few great stories on the need to preserve gaming history, but what Zack did here, giving a human face to the business decisions that lead games to disappear, has stuck in our memory.
The Split-Screen Man, by Josh Harmon – It might be poor form to include a piece of my own writing on this list, but I spent years waiting for the opportunity to write a big, ambitious profile like this. This story is one of my proudest professional accomplishments, and I imagine it will be for the rest of my career.
