Half-Life: On Turning 35 And Leaving RPS (original) (raw)

Today I hit half my biblically allotted time on Earth. I'm also leaving RPS' full-time staff. That's my last regular commitment as a “real” games journalist. These fifteen years have been a pleasure.

For a little more of what it means for the pirate-ship that is RPS, read on.

In short: Don't worry too much.

This hasn't been a sudden thing. “Kieron Leaves On September 30th” has been on the RPS Calender for most of the year. As such, we've had plenty of time to bring Quinns in as the new regular writer. You'll all have seen by now exactly how lightning-in-a-bottle he is and what he brings to the site. I can't wait to see what he'll do next.

Equally, while I'm not on the regular staff I'll remain a Director of RPS, so be involved in shaping the site's future. More importantly, I remain a gamer whose main response the medium is going on big rants. When I decide I want to write ten thousand words on an indie strategy game no-one else gives a toss about, there's not a power in the world that can stop me. Unfortunately. My dilettante ass will be showing up whenever I have something worthwhile to say. In other words, I'll basically be filling the position Quinns was before he came on full time.

Take-away message number 1: Quinns is the new me. I'm the new Quinns.

Those who follow my career may be wondering whether this actually has anything to do with me signing an exclusive contract with Marvel. Well... yes and no. Yes, it affected the timing. Not because it has anything to do with whether I can write games journalism or not, but because with the contract signed I felt it important to give my full, undivided and primary attention to the comic-writing.

However, no, it didn't affect whether I was leaving or not. I'd be leaving around now anyway. When Jim floated the idea for RPS back in 2007, I wasn't sure whether I wanted to offer my oar for the Viking longship. I knew it'll be a long haul to get it to a position to actually make money. I also knew that I was kind of half out the door anyway. If I was going to do a load of work for no money, I'd be much better off doing indie comics for no cash. That would feed into where I wanted to be heading.

On the other hand: how could I say no?

It was a site which needed to exist. Number one on my list of unfulfilled games journalist desires was “I'd like to launch a mag”. It took me a while to actually realise that's what RPS was, but a chance to build something on our own terms, embodying what the four of us believed about writing was pretty much irresistible. If I was going to leave games journalism, I'd like to leave something like RPS behind.

The point being: to leave it behind. I knew that as soon as the site was commercially valid, I'd probably be out the door.

We had Eurogamer take over our ads early this year. You'll have noticed that we've started having a more commercial class of adverts. While we're resolutely anti-pop-up and multiple-pages and all that, some of you may have been a little annoyed by it. You'll also hopefully have noticed the greater amount of content, from multiple feature posts per day to just a general amount of news churn. Soon, you'll see improvements to the site infrastructure – starting with the comments threads. And there's other special things which we've got lined up for the near future. The ads money has made all that possible.

The ads money and the readership, because ads without anyone to read them are worthless. Pulling up the stats for the last 30 days, and we had 770,959 unique visitors and 4,871,919 page impressions. These are not small figures. We're the largest generalist PC games site in the anglophone sphere.

Readership + Ads = Money = A sustainable site.

Thank you for reading. Assuming you aren't running adblock, just by doing so you're helping to pay for us to make the site better. And, as always, a special shout out to the people who are paying us directly – the RPS subscribers.

Take-away message number 2: I'm not leaving RPS because it's failed. I'm leaving RPS because it's successful, and so no longer needs me.

But I am, in a real way, leaving RPS.

I won't be sitting in the chat-room, posting sexy renders of the latest guns and making terrible puns based around bad pop music – and if you want the one real change from me leaving, it'd be a downturn in references to mid-nineties zine-kid glitterpop.

Of course, I'm sentimental – sentimental enough to fire off a last round from the games-journalism-journalism gun elsewhere. I've been a professional games journo for the last fifteen years. I've been doing this for longer than some of you have been alive. However, I'm aware of how lucky I've been. When I left PC Gamer back in 2003 to go freelance, I assumed that I'd basically done the big body of work which I felt which would have been my highpoint. Those five, drunken years on the mag would be basically as good as my games journalist experience would get. And despite some of the stuff I got up to after I left – don't mention the war - all of that rested on those five years. And part of me was a little sad that it was as good as it got. I never really got to have my own Amiga Power.

Which is why I'm lucky. Against all expectations, when I thought I'd seen and done everything I could do in the field, the last three years have confounded those lessons. It could be better. It could be anything. RPS broke my heart and patched it back together on a daily basis. I consider it the absolute highpoint of my career. I'm very lucky.

Time to die.