Welcome to Reconnect
A warm welcome to this site built for you.
What is it ?
Reconnect is a feed of video game related articles, updated regularly.
But it’s not just any articles.
It’s curated to only those writing about games, editorial content if you will. You won’t find game guides here, you’ll rarely see a review of the latest game or news, and you won’t see anything from the industry’s biggest sites (Or is that Site, singular now that Ziff owns everything 🤷♂️).
It’s purely gaming content written by people passionate about the industry.
You can expect deep dives on games, a peak behind the curtain on development, or commentary on the industry in general.
Why did I make Reconnect?
I love games writing.
I love reading a dev blog, or a love letter to some obscure game, or reading about some forgotten moment in games history.
But that has became increasingly harder to find these days.
That is because paid games journalism is going extinct.
The games websites either disappeared, or, stopped publishing that content in favour of reviews and articles that trafficked well i.e guides.
As someone that followed all their favourite sites on RSS I began to dread the launch of any major game as that meant my RSS feed was about to be spammed with a thousand game situation specific articles like “how to solve X Shrine in Zelda” and when there are about fifty shrines and I follow several sites the spam came in thick and fast.
And it’s not their fault. Most of these websites are backed by your typical “doesn’t know anything about video games” types who only want to see “number go up” which lead to a race to the bottom.
Now it’s all just SEO spam, but if they don’t write it. They can’t stay in business.
My frustration didn’t stop there.
As those websites stopped writing editorial content, that had two major implications.
My favourite voices in the industry stopped writing.
They either accepted that their job was to stop writing amazing articles and to save their critical insight and opinions for podcasts and video content.
Or they left their jobs, ending up using their talents behind closed doors mainly working on games themselves or they simply left the industry completely.
I could write several essays on how these voices and their writing have influenced so much positive change in the industry, but for now I’ll say my opinion is simply that we are worse for wear now that games writing has been devalued so much.
The other major implication was that new games writers no longer had a viable career path into the industry.
I’m a writer myself, albeit hobbyist and not very good, but I’ve worked along side some very impressive up and coming talent.
I used to write the bulk of my gaming content for Superjump Magazine, an Australian publication that focussed on great games writing, no bullshit.
For a while a talented writer would write for us and then they would announce that they’ve started to get freelance work with one of the big sites and normally that meant they would soon be gone, and every time I would be excited for them.
However, now that the only sites left in gaming only want to writers for their SEO bait, that promotion rate for the talented writers around me has slowed, nearly to a halt. No longer do these amazing voices around me have a reliable path into the industry.
Where we are at now
Now, the games writing industry is nearly at rock bottom, but is slowly making a recovery, but in a new world.
For the most part, games writing now exists in two places.
Either at smaller publications, who are slowly growing their readership. The catch-22 here is that the best thing is for them to go it alone and keep costs down, else if they accept money and ownership they risk being shut down, bought out, or ultimately end up back writing SEO-bait.
Or they go it alone, primarily on a free blog or a crowd funded platforms like Substack or Patreon.
To which the next problem becomes access and discoverability.
Alongside the rapid decline in games writing, we also saw the rapid decline in the traditional discovery channels, social media.
In a very short span of time we lost Twitter and Reddit. Their user bases plummeting as the platforms become hostile to their users. And now, those user bases have either exited social media, or are split between several different platforms; Mastodon, Threads, CoHost, BlueSky, Fuse, etc etc.
These writers need discoverability to keep their writing afloat.
How Reconnect solves this problem
Reconnect is my way of giving back to the community, by providing a platform for discoverability.
By doing the work of building this site, I’m hoping for two things.
The first is to give readers an easy place to go to, to find awesome articles to read, and new writers to follow.
Then as the readership grows, that should in turn increase visibility of our industry’s writers and enable them to pursue their goals.
Whether their goal is to get more paying subscribers to keep the bills paid or to get more visibility on their work to hopefully turn it into a career someday,I hope Reconnect can help writers reach those goals.
So, please, bookmark the site, visit as regularly as you want and share it with your circles.
Thank you so much for reading this far and if you want to see more of my work or my inane comments on social media, visit my linktree.
Cheers Alex
This feels pulled righr out of my own thoughts. Excited to read more!