Hello there!
It’s been six months since we’ve launched The Game Business, and (I like to think) we’ve come a long way.
We’ve produced 56 editions, featuring game legends such as Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, Sega president Shuji Utsumi, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, analyst supreme Matthew Ball, plus leaders of Netflix, Atari, Jagex, Ubisoft, Wizards of the Coast, Zynga, IO Interactive, Twitch, Blizzard, Remedy and so many others.
We’ve had editions bring in more than 100,000 listeners/readers/viewers, and on average we’re reaching more than 14,000 people with each new episode/newsletter.
We’ve hosted events, including our own conference in LA in June, a special panel at Gamescom in August, and we’re doing a live on-stage interview at Comic-Con in London next month, too.
We were always planning to have a subscription tier. We’ve had some amazing support from the likes of PlayStation, Keywords Studios and Green Man Gaming, but we know we can’t rely on advertising to see us through. We need help from our readers.
However, we wanted to avoid putting our current output behind a paywall. So we’re not going to. The editions of The Game Business that come out every Tuesday and Thursday will remain completely free.
Instead, we are introducing a new edition: The Game Business Micro. This comes out every Monday morning and is a podcast/video and newsletter where we provide you with an essential digest (including some brief analysis and additional context) of the biggest stories currently going on in the video game business. The newsletter will be concise, and the podcast under 15 minutes long, and will provide you with everything you need to sound informed in that Monday morning meeting.
In addition, paid subscribers will also receive regular bonus newsletters and extended editions of our Shows. This includes a special extended version of tomorrow’s episode celebrating 30 years of PlayStation’s European launch (featuring PlayStation luminaries Chris Deering and Jim Ryan).
And for those who like to come to our live events, we will have early access and discounted tickets so you can come meet us in person.
Finally, for companies looking to get their news stories on The Game Business, we are introducing a new ‘Headlines from our Partners’ section of our Thursday Newsletter/Show. Paid subscribers to our Premium Tier can submit four stories over the course of the year for inclusion in the Show. More details on that can be found here.
I hope that sounds interesting. The idea behind The Game Business is to provide an honest, supportive and reasonable voice for the global video game industry. And with your help we can continue to do that and, ideally, go even further and do even more.
But whether you can support us financially or not, I hope you’ve enjoyed what you’ve been reading so far. And I look forward to doing even more in the days and weeks ahead.
Chris