#oneaday Day 681.5: RIP GamePro

[Apologies for the interruption to the ongoing story — it will end tomorrow. This needed to be said today, though.]

Today, an era came to an end, as the announcement came that GamePro in its current form would be no more as of December 5, 2011. Both the website and the new quarterly magazine have been shuttered, and all of us on staff suddenly find ourselves without a job. The GamePro brand itself will be folded into PC World, where it will most likely die a quiet death, unnoticed.

This is, of course, suckitude of the highest magnitude, but it wasn’t entirely unexpected. It is tough times in the super-competitive publishing industry, particularly in the overcrowded video games market. I shan’t pretend to understand the business reasons behind the closure of GamePro when we were enjoying viewing figures the likes of which the site had never seen — but it seems to be something of a sad truth in today’s games journalism industry that nothing lasts forever. If you want job security, it ain’t the sector you should get yourself into.

What has been touching is the amount of support people have shown for GamePro on Twitter and various other social networks today. The magazine and site was a lot more widely-known than I thought — at times I’d wondered if UK journos and industry types were even aware of it — and everyone, it seems, was sorry to see the back of what had, after all, been a fixture in gamer culture for many, many years, particularly in the U.S.

GamePro, of course, has personal meaning to me, too. My brother spent ten months giving both the magazine and its web presence a much-needed shakeup (see his blog post today for more) and made it something that was interesting and relevant to the modern gamer. And once he left and I had the opportunity to jump in on news reporting duties, I know my contributions played a part in the site’s growing success — growth that has been sadly cut short by today’s news.

While I’d never met many of the GamePro team face to face, it was a close-knit bunch of people who got on well together, from what I could make out, anyway! I felt like a valuable member of the team despite being halfway across the world, and I always felt like my hard work was appreciated — which is why I continued to work so hard and contribute as much quality content as I could to the site. I made a distinct effort to not cover the same stories that all the big news blogs did — that’s counter-productive. Rather, I took inspiration from sources such as GameSetWatch (which, coincidentally, also died today), Kill/Screen and numerous others to dig up interesting nuggets of information on fascinating indie titles, peculiar happenings in gamer culture and opportunities for discussion and debate. I was happy with the approach; I feel it gave GamePro a unique take on the news which wasn’t just a case of rewriting press releases and rewording stories from other sites. And on the occasions where I did write stories based on press releases, I made a conscious effort to actually write a story rather than just reword the press release. I’d read up on the background of the companies involved, find out precedents for interesting events and throw in some interesting trivia if I had some to hand.

And now it’s all over. I’m sorry to see GamePro go, but I’m hopeful that the staff will be able to find themselves suitably awesome positions to move on to. As for me? I couldn’t say. Working for an American site has been a great deal of fun but it’s had the side-effect that I’m known more in the States than I am in my own country. While I’d hope my experience and output would speak for itself regardless of the geographical location of the site on which it was published, I do wonder which side of the pond any future writing gigs might come from.

With that, then, ladies and gentlemen, please raise your glasses and toast the late GamePro. You’ll be missed.