I had a job interview today. I feel like I should talk about that a bit, but then I’ve not been mentioning it much on social media — largely due to superstition about “jinxing” it — and so I won’t talk about it in detail for now. (I hear whether I have another interview next week; I may say something more then.)

What I do want to talk about is the fact that said job isn’t involved in the games press, or indeed anywhere in the games industry. It is in something completely unrelated that just happens to use my skills at using content management systems for editing digital content in a productive manner. It’s for a large company and would involve me working at the site for said company rather than at home, so all around it will be a fairly significant change to how my life and career have been unfolding for the past four or five years.

So why am I leaving the games press behind, when those of you who know me well will know it’s something I wanted to do for most of my life? Well, the chief reason is that the games press of 2014 is not the same as the games press I initially gazed at with admiration back in the ’80s and ’90s. The industry has moved almost entirely to the Internet, for one thing — a few magazines do still exist, but their relevance is declining — and, as such, so has the way of working.

The rise of the Internet has led to an explosion of games press outlets. Because it’s so easy to get a website up and running, pretty much anyone can open a games site if they want to; whether or not it will become successful is another matter entirely, but the sheer volume of people writing about games on the Internet is ridiculous.

And yet I don’t feel like there’s anything near the diversity of character that the old magazines had. When I think back to the edgy humour of Atari ST magazine Zero; the informative multi-format coverage of Advanced Computer Entertainment; the distinctly “British-feeling” PC Zone, I don’t feel like we have anything quite like that in the modern games press. There are individual personalities who people like to follow around the Internet, for sure, but when was the last time you read something like Charlie Brooker’s contributions to PC Zone, one notable example of which was an entire preview written in third-person perspective Franglais? (Fade to Black, as I recall.) When was the last time you read a boxout on a site about the fact they don’t have Teletext in America? (Found on an Alpha Centauri preview, if I remember correctly.) If Half-Life 3 came out tomorrow, how many sites would devote a few words to a boxout listing “other famous Gordons” as PC Zone did with its review of the original?

I feel a lot of that character has been lost. The modern games press is probably more “professional” (for want of a better word) but it’s also become a whole lot more boring and predictable. The big sites, these days, are all but interchangeable in terms of what games get covered when; thanks to press embargoes on previews and reviews, everyone publishes their thoughts on particular games at the same time, meaning there’s often relatively little reason to look at more than one place, whereas seeing different magazines’ approaches to games coverage used to be a real joy.

The chief reason I’m in no hurry to go back, though, is the volatility of the industry. Over the course of the past four years, I’ve worked for a number of different outlets, some of which you may have heard of, some of which you might not have — Kombo, Daily Joypad, Good Old Games, IGN, GamePro, Inside Network and, most recently, USgamer. In each of those positions there wasn’t a whole lot of progression or advancement opportunities; games press positions are like gold dust, so a lot of people tend to stay where they are for as long as possible unless a significantly better offer comes along, which leads to a lot of positions stagnating somewhat. On top of all that, the aforementioned volatility of the industry meant that sometimes you come downstairs to start work only to discover an email announcing that the site you’ve been working on is to close, and that you’ll be out of a job — or that you’re surplus to requirements and no longer needed. (Yes, I am speaking from personal experience on both counts.)

This has happened several times throughout my career, each time through no fault of my own — and I really mean that; I’m a hard, dedicated worker, and any of my past employers would happily back me up on that. Every time it’s happened it’s meant that I’ve effectively had to start again from scratch — because I held one position for some time at the previous post, that’s what I’d end up doing at the next, and so the whole lack of progression thing perpetuated itself somewhat, because by the time I thought I should be advancing — and probably would have been advancing in a “normal” (i.e. stable) job — I was, instead, scouring the Help Wanted ads for where I’d be going next.

I’ve been speaking selfishly so far, but I’m far from the only one affected by this sort of thing. Just today, for example, the day after E3 — the biggest event in the games industry calendar — GameTrailers, one of the biggest video game video sites in the world, laid off a whole bunch of staff. How is that happening in an industry that, in money terms, is taking on movies and winning? How is it that one of the biggest creative mediums in the world right now can’t provide job security for anyone involved in it — whether you’re a member of the press, a developer, an artist or anyone else?

I’m tired of it, to be perfectly blunt. I’ve bought a house with Andie, and I want to be able to live my life without having to worry about whether I’ll still have a pay packet at the end of each month. I want to be able to have a job that I can build into a career; a position where I can learn new things, advance, take on new responsibilities and, most importantly, come home at the end of the day and forget all about until I go back the next day. Video games, as much as I love them and as big a part of my life as they will always be, are not providing that right now, so it is time for me to look elsewhere.

I worry that these feelings are coming too late. At 33 years of age, I’m no longer a fresh-out-of-university graduate, and I worry that prospective employers will see my fragmented work history and wonder what I’ve been playing at for the past 10+ years. Still, you can’t turn back the clock, so all I can do is try my best and see where life takes me next.