figured I might as well boost that tho I'm sure everyone has seen it already
unfortunately for me I was absolutely the target audience for that era of waypoint and I was screaming to the rooftops how incredible they were doing when that guantanamo stuff etc came out. I genuinely don't know how we'd ever get there again (and as austin points out, it was only sustainable bc of the other articles they had) but man that was like, I was truly Living during that era, I was getting into fights with other indie devs who were dismissive of the point of journalism, etc
the things I miss the most
- the 2011-12 period when indie games coverage was wide-spanning, vibrant, and included tons of previously unplatformed voices - even much of modern independent journalism treats indie as mostly an afterthought
- the 2012-2014 era when mobile gaming coverage was big enough that multiple sites had their own integrated tablet/phone apps and posted fascinating shit like coverage of the exodus of Gaming(Gambling) industry designers into mobile games, bringing with them tactics used in videoslot and the like
even putting aside other things like crit - which were in fascinating and weird places during that period - the sense that there was truly coverage for anything you could be interested in was so exciting and it really felt like for the first time in my life we were successfully expanding the public audience for games culture, as opposed to just playing games. We came out the other side of that and now everyone plays games but people don't read about games in the way I think anyone was hoping. Games Culture is now your friends watching a Direct in a discord together, insulated from the wider burning train wreck that is games culture. I miss the promise of that optimism, I guess.
