Hi everyone, Jeremy here. You’ve probably seen my announcement at USgamer, but in case you find it all tl;dr for your liking, here’s the brief: I’m stepping down as editor-in-chief of USgamer and will be focusing on… well, a variety of different things, actually. But for starters, I’d like to try and turn Retronauts into a true and proper venture.
Retronauts was never meant to be just a podcast. As I mentioned in our recent 10th anniversary episode, the podcast was really just a lark; I was already writing a series called Retronauts for my personal blog and simply borrowed the name for a 1UP.com audio show I expected to flop immediately and die in ignominy. Obviously that didn’t happen, thanks to the support of both listeners (thank you!) and contributors alike, and we’re still going strong a decade later. Still, I always wanted Retronauts to be a full website with a wide variety of written and video material to supplement the audio content. I’ve broached the idea with management at every company I’ve worked under over the past 10 years, but it never quite made sense to them; everyone has always said game history is too niche a topic to be a self-sustaining venture within a corporate/network setting.
I’m grateful that Gamer Network continued letting me and Bob run Retronauts on the side and even let us post the show to USgamer each week, but it’s still been stuck as a weekends-only side project. And I get it. Maybe Retronauts wouldn’t work as part of a publishing network portfolio. But just possibly, I feel, it can work for some people working on their own. Let’s find out.
Beginning in the new year, I hope to see what happens when I make Retronauts my primary day-to-day concern. Our listeners (that’s you) have been incredibly generous for the past few years, supporting us through Patreon to make it possible for us to produce a professional-quality podcast in our free time. Now, I’d like to push for enough funding to make Retronauts a sustainable full-time venture — to go full-pro. I’m proud of what we do by simply moonlighting, but imagine how much more we could do if this were to become a daily concern. I don’t know if that’s actually possible, if enough people want us to explore video game history to enable us to make a proper go of it, but I’m wagering my livelihood that it can.
More here:
http://www.retronauts.com/?p=1541
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