Thank you all for the kind words related to our announcement that GamesBeat is going independent as we spin out of VentureBeat. We can’t think of a better way to spend our time than serving this industry with our journalistic flair and our community-oriented events.
It was wonderful and heartwarming to see our story go wide. My own Twitter saw more than 160,000 impressions over a couple of days as Variety covered our move as if Gina Joseph and I were celebrities. On LinkedIn and Facebook, I was heartened to see thousands more expressions of congratulations. Our hope is that we can use this love to take advantage of what we see as great opportunities before us.
I felt a bit like Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life, realizing we had friends. After all, this business of game journalism is kind of a lonely road. So many of the people who were my peers when I was younger have dropped out of the trade and moved on to something more rewarding.
The GamesBeat crew at E3 2012.
But I feel blessed to have stayed in this game long enough to see the less earthly rewards. One of those rewards is to see so many people go through a life cycle of a humble start and wind up in an incredible position — like Jensen Huang, Jason Citron, Phil Spencer, Sarah Bond, Reggie Fils-Aime, Shawn Layden, Mark Cerny, John Carmack, Henk Rogers, Shu Yoshida, Will Wright, Neil Druckmann, Tim Sweeney, Owen Mahoney, Mitch Lasky, Jenova Chen, Amy Hennig, Mark Pincus, Danny Bilson, John Romero, Frank Azor, Brenda Romero, Brian Fargo, Mike Morhaime, Johanna Faries, Geoff Keighley, Robert Kirkman, Perrin Kaplan — and on and on.
There are also so many new creators from the Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft generation. We’ve benefited from having a number of industry veterans continuously help us with our events. I better stop dropping names, as I’ll feel guilty for leaving folks out. The point is: telling their stories over generations has been a joy.
We serve you. I’ve written more than 26,000 stories for GamesBeat and VentureBeat over 17 years, and I’ve been dedicated to covering the game industry as a business and creative art for 27 years on a daily basis. I’ve covered the tech industry longer and enjoy seeing the seams between the industries. I often say that …