Behind the scenes of Reconnect, and my thoughts for the future.

A peak behind the curtain

Hi there folks.

I got the urge to just write a bunch of stuff down about Reconnect, so enjoy!

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The Origin Story

In 2023 the team at Waypoint Games, specifically Rob Zacny, Chia Contreras, Patrick Klepek, and Ren lost their jobs and frantically scrambled to go solo, creating Remap Radio in June of the same year, though Ren decided to go her own way.

Many similar stories had been happening around that time. When Giant Bomb East closed, we got Nextlander. When Kotaku had a rumble we got Aftermath, one of the many Gamespot layoffs helped create MinnMax, and some people like Jeff Gertsmann went solo.

An industry that used to be so well contained under these big names, was scattered to the winds, and every single one of them needed crowdfunding to stay afloat.

But it was in August of 2023, on one of the early Remap Radio episodes, that the spark of what Reconnect would become, was formed.

See I had dabbled in a bit of games writing in the years prior. I had been blogging for over a decade about a variety of things, PC’s, Space, Mental Health, I even had a semi-successful blog about Management, but it wasn’t until I started writing for SuperJump Magazine I got my first taste of what the behind the scenes of games writing looked like.

For the first time in my life, I had an editor who gave feedback. I was in a discord group with other writers who all asked, and answered questions, gave feedback, and collaborated on ideas and articles. For nearly an entire year, I had a dedicated column where I interviewed indie devs who had games that were about to come out. I was finally ‘in’ the industry.

But it wasn’t something I had the heart to pursue. I have quite a successful career that takes a lot of my energy, and truth by told my writing wasn’t good enough and my brain always has about fifty other projects I want to get done. So I continued to write for fun, and if I didn’t have time or an idea, I simply did not write.

But that’s where I met those who were really good at what they did, the up-and-comers. These writers were good at what they did, had an amazing point of view and churned out amazing articles. That was the pipeline.

Before the carnage that was 2023, these writers would write for free at SuperJump and then a few months later would start getting freelance work at bigger named websites. It was so awesome to see these people grow their craft and eventually make it into the industry.

But back to the podcast. On this specific episode, Patrick and Rob were interviewing the founders of 404 Media. Another crowd funded solo venture from some people who had also lost their jobs.

As they discussed the new venture, Patrick and Rob started to talk about the industry at large. Now with everyone scattered to the winds the industry had lost the ability to discover each other. More importantly, those up-and-coming writers had lost their pipeline. Overnight the career of becoming a games writer was practically annihilated.

See, for the likes of Patrick Klepeck, Steven Totilo, Jason Schreier, discovery doesn’t impact them too much. They are already established names, with social media followings big enough to allow them to yell out “hey, i’m over here” and at least ten-thousand people with subscribe overnight.

But for everyone else, the pipeline was gone, and the ability to go solo, either in a funded or non-funded capacity just got a whole lot harder.

And that really stuck with me. Whilst I had no interest in continuing to write articles myself, I still had such a deep respect and interest in the wider community. A community I had seen ripped apart in a very short amount of time.

So I set out to make the Hacker News yCombinator of video games writing, because If I could centralise everyones writing in one spot, and make the website a success, then writers would find readers, and readers would discover new writers to follow.

So I took my mediocre IT skills, and got to work.

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Development Blog

After months of researching all the different ways I could make this happen and experimenting with different platforms I eventually landed on building a Django app.

Django is a python-based framework for creating web apps that are driven by a data model, which as a data-professional in my day job, I knew this was going to be driven by a huge database of blogs.

So I taught myself Django, brushed up on my HTML and CSS skills and in February of 2024 launched the first iteration of Reconnect. What I lovingly call, “The Yellow Monstrosity”.

Version one was an eye opening experience. The code was messy, the design was naff, and I foolishly put two contact forms on my site that were quickly picked up by bots and spammed relentlessly.

Of course in the early days I didn’t have a lot of blogs and I also didn’t have a lot of visitors.

I would spend my weeks combing through google, reddit, Hacker News, Substack, Medium, finding gaming blogs to add to the site. Then I would find that half of them had been abandoned with no new content for months or years, or would find that they didn’t have an RSS feed I could use to bring their content onto the site.

I was also trying to find the balancing point. I wanted primarily editorial writing. People who were writing about games, not pumping about 20 articles a day that was just the news and reviews.

In the early days I was adding about 1 out of every 5 sites I could find. Honestly, it felt dire, it felt like the industry had truly died and maybe I was too late.

It was around this time I got the idea to make the newsletter, it wasn’t until February or March that the idea had even occurred to me, so I started to look into Substack a little more.

As we all know Substack refuses to have a gaming category, and so it took a while to get my footing here, which was fine, the newsletter needed some time to cook. I knew what I was trying to emulate, which is the Verge’s Installer Newsletter, but It took some time to get it right.

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Version 2

In February 2023, just after I launched Reconnect, I lost my job. The company I had been contracting for had royally fucked up the project I was working on and decided to clean house.

I decided I needed a break. I hadn’t just lost my job. I was going through a divorce at the time, I was dealing with the house my ex-husband and I owned that was bleeding me dry, I had recently had three deaths in the family and after years of struggling with my mental health I finally got the correct diagnosis for what I was going through, but that meant trialling a plethora of different medications with very fun side effects.

So for about two months I ignored applying for jobs and I got working on Reconnect version two.

I knew I had a bunch of bugs to fix, I knew I wanted a more mobile friendly design, and I really wanted to remove those contact forms that the bots were spamming me with.

Luckily at the time, I had just started dating, my now partner, who was a designer who helped heaps with the new design and the logos I needed.

In about June of 2024 I relaunched the site and gave the newsletter a bit of makeover, I had also found a job.

Version 2 contained a bunch of new features

• Automatic posting of featured Articles to Bluesky, 1 post every hour.

• Removed the vote button, as clicking on the article would equate to a vote

• Added an age-out to the articles rank, allowing popular articles to slowly drop down in rank over time rather than living on the top of the popular page

• Added a page for every individual blogs RSS feed incase the user wanted to sub to a specific RSS feed, as well as there being a RSS feed for everything on Reconnect.

• An age counter that tells me how long it has been since a site has posted a blog allowing me to remove dead blogs.

• Keyword filter allowing me to automatically hide content I don’t believe in supporting. This is mainly for anything related to trans / queer hate speech.

• Improved the thumbnail code to get a more relevant image and failing getting an image defaults to a code generated image that uses a gradient background and the blogs title.

• Added a rude cow to my import scripts that screams MOOOO and stops the script if it gets stuck on a particular site for too long. Which happens from time to time and burns all my compute and can cost me extra money.

It was around this time I looked seriously into advertising. I went both broad and targeting. I used Facebook Ads to run campaigns that I don’t think were all that successful for the money I invested, but I also used targeted channels, like MinnMax allowing you to pay for a certain Patreon tier to advertise on their videos. I think in the future I’ll stick to targeted channels, meeting our niche community where they are likely to be is the best bet.

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How I run the platform

The backend of Reconnect where I curate articles for posting to Bluesky.

Thankfully I have gotten the job of Running Reconnect down to the fine art.

Everyday I:

• Log onto the back end of Reconnect and run through all the newest articles and most I flag to be automatically posted to Bluesky.

• I’ll open and personally read any that take my fancy

• I’ll then jump onto Substack, give every article in my subscriptions feed a glance through, a like, a retweet (is that what we’re calling it?), and maybe a comment if I’ve got something to say.

• Then I’ll jump over to Bluesky, where I had a feed of everyone who is on reconnect who i’ve been able to find and interact with what people are posting there.

Can easily get it done in 30 mins maximum.

I also have buttons only I can see to feature or hide an article from the front page

The newsletter which I try and write on a Sunday, but If I’m too hungover which is often the case will happen on Monday, is a bit more of an involved effort and I’ll be looking to implement systems in the future to make it easier for me to do.

But because every article I like the look of during the week gets posted to my Bluesky, I just open up my Bluesky page, go back a week and open every single link. Then I’ll quickly jump back to my Substack subscription feed to see if I’ve missed anyone (the Bluesky automation can fail sometimes) and also quickly scan through the newer articles on the site.

Then, with easily over a hundred articles open I set about picking what I want to put into the newsletter. I try and avoid anything too much like the news, I tend to veer away from the depressing stuff like “4000 people lost there job at X studio”, if the article is fully paywalled I’ll also skip that, though I’ll allow some partials through.

Then I start dividing up the newsletter into its two sections, Great Reads and Fun Tidbits.

I aim to get at least ten in each bucket, will do more If I’m feeling generous, pick the images for the blog, write my silly blurb at the beginning and schedule the post.

What makes it into each newsletter is honestly something I can’t explain. It’s a bit like a fever dream. Sometimes there will be a bit of a theme when a bunch of people write about the same thing, other times I’m looking for maximum diversity because I love, and I mean REALLY LOVE, that there are so many people writing about different things.

Please never feel upset that your awesome article didn’t make it into the newsletter, after reading through a hundred different articles my brain does turn to mush. It’s not a reflection on your work, it’s very random.

I’m also not gaming the system, I almost never look at analytics, I don’t care that some articles may have gotten more clicks, I’m never going to try and tailor the newsletter for the algo, I’m just here to highlight awesome work and if one newsletter is a dud, that doesn’t bother me.

In terms of finding new blogs, I take more of a relaxed approach now. Whilst before I was actively hunting, I now basically let the new blogs come to me. People reach out on social media or the amazing substack community here tags me in posts of new blogs which I really appreciate. Some people are shy, which I understand and just follow me, hoping I’ll see their new blog whilst others are a bit more brave and reach out directly. Either is fine, I don’t presume that everyone is falling over themselves to end up on Reconnect.

Then I normally wait until I have a handful of new blogs to add, go through the process of adding them to the site’s backend. Generate a new image for them, do an initial import of their content then normally do a Substack post announcing the new arrivals.

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Closing thoughts and the future

It’s been a really fun ride, and I’m so immensely proud of what the community has accomplished.

It really feels like we are bringing games writing back, but like any normal person I do feel a large amount of imposter syndrome. I don’t really write about games any more, I don’t have the time, and running Reconnect can be as little as a ten minute task for me, so there are weeks when i’m not thinking too much about it.

Then I see the awesome comments, the way the community engages with new writers and how you all support each other’s work, and feel so proud and a bit guilty I’m not doing more.

To be a bit controversial here, the one thing that has saddened me on this journey is the lack of engagement from the big names. We are all in this together, and maybe the big popular writers have too much on their plate keeping their business afloat to spare a thought for the up-and-coming writers in the industry, but it still saddens me that they never look back and think about how they could help those in the early stages of their journey. I feel icky just writing that.

But exposure matters. When the Verge featured Reconnect traffic quadrupled, article clicks sky rocketed and I suspect so did subscriptions. More exposure can help the community, it’s just so hard to break through the noise.

So where to next? Well I said in June of last year I wanted to rebuild Reconnect, I still do, it’s suffering under the weight of its success. I want to redesign the website so it’s less a chronological feed, because articles that were written a year ago will probably still be worth a read and at the moment they are hidden deep inside Reconnect. I’ve got some other ideas I want to implement, some to improve how people use the site, others to help me run it more efficiently.

I’m also thinking about how do I incorporate a bit of advertising, so this is your warning that I’m considering it. I don’t believe that page ads are worth the return on investment so don’t worry I’m not spam the page with ugly ads. More think the way Reddit makes an ad look like a post. At first, the only advert will probably be for the newsletter, then if the right opportunities come along I could be advertising new indie games or other relevant industry content. It will probably only earn me enough money to pay for the hosting that I pay out of my own pocket every month, but like I said, this is your very advanced warning.

Beyond a Version 3, i’m open to what Reconnect could become in the future. I could in theory expand it to other game genres, Brian Schneider ‘s yellow pages has blogs about board games and TTRPGs and whilst that isn’t my personal cup of tea, that doesn’t mean Reconnect can’t host those blogs. Though I would probably want someone else to write a Reconnect Recap for board games / ttrpgs.

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Well I hope you enjoyed my brain dump, I guess after a few years I just wanted to share a bit of my world, what i’m doing, and how I’m doing it, I do like being transparent and its your hard work that makes Reconnect as awesome as it is.