Issues on Hold

Issues on Hold

A few words on upcoming changes.

Image is from the lovely Kairo, which has nothing to do at all with what I’m about to tell you. That would be Spelunky.

After Friday’s wordfest, I’m going to keep this short, but I still owe you an update on some things we’ll be doing differently in 2014. We’ve done a lot of neat things here over the past year, personal highlights include going to GDC Europe and being so amazed by everything that I never wrote a single word about the experience, getting people on the yet unfinished Games Journalism Prize shortlist and getting to work with the lovely people running (the eternally misspelt) Video Game Tourism, Critical Distance, Superlevel and WASD. What we didn’t do a very good job of was keeping to self-set deadlines.

The minor delays on issues in the first half of the year – 12 days, on time, 9 days, two days – barely feel worth mentioning compared to our recent streak of one month, one and a half months and cancelled. Part of that is on me, as I’ve regularly broken the internal deadline we had for me finalizing content to allow Andrew a full two weeks of design time. But as I’ve mentioned earlier, Andrew has also since taken on a new job and returned to University for a Master’s degree. We meant to address that by just reducing his workload by moving columns, but that didn’t work out, and with my schedule looking the way it is, I can’t really commit to longer design periods either. Both of us are a little busy, and a little tardy. Between the two of us, it adds up.

Since it’s clear we’re not getting back on schedule, I’ve decided to put issues on hold for the time being, meaning we’ll focus on articles for the site from now on. I say “on hold” because it’s not yet clear what will become of the format: Andrew is oddly resistant to the idea of being removed from his unpaid, ungrateful position, and it would be a shame to not see more covers done by our new artist friends Dom and Nina, so maybe we’ll do the occasional .pdf when a couple of articles go in a similar direction, and are timeless enough to not be rendered irrelevant by sitting in the design pile for a few months. Maybe we’ll bring back thematic focus through theme weeks, like Unwinnable does. Maybe a third option. Who knows? Oh, the suspense!

Anyway, by the time you read this, I should have gone over the site and removed all mentions of being bi-monthly, as well as doing general updates. We’ve rebooted our borked column schedule with the new year, and if all goes well I’ll add the occasional piece here and there. For everything else, start pitching.