Feels like a revolution.

It's funny... in the mid-00s, EVERYONE wanted to make a gaming news and review site. I contributed to so many. The software democratization felt like a revolution. It felt like independent games media’s time was here. In a sense, it was; but the true impacts would be very delayed.

Journalists scoffed. People laughed. The layman doesn't have the cred or the business acumen to run such a venture. Why would you even want to contribute to a site run by the people posting to it? The esteem of posting to a corporate-backed website was desirable, chased after. “Professional” websites were the next evolution of magazines, the closed-gate utopia where the “real writers” worked, and the rest of us should just stick to forums and game clans.

This was disheartening for many, but others chose to ignore the old ways. To keep making their own sites and finding ways to let them thrive. Often they became cherished pillars for niche communities, with their inevitable sudden shutdown being met with funeral processions in the relevant TeamSpeak servers, Skype group chats, or forums.

A small handful of these sites, went on to become “legit.” They got corporate backing, investment, or simply bought up and would actually go on to pay the salaries of its employees (and some pay for contractors). Those sites achieved “the dream.”

Along the way, traditional media cracked and crumbled. Gaming branches of websites got sold off or shuttered. Television outlets for gaming disappeared, with those investments shifting to YouTube efforts like Machinima and Fullscreen.

The goalpost moved, but the dream was still the same.

Anyone could make a YouTube channel, but you only earned a certain amount of respect if you weren’t contracted by one of the big names or just making videos as part of your job for another website.

Those, too, were inflated with layers of bad decisions and would eventually crumble. A new wave of websites would take their place, taking the hybrid approach of written posts and YouTube video, gathering ad revenue (along with affiliate links and whatever monetization practices applied) from multiple angles, building audiences that way, too.

But the more things changed, the more the independent spirit shone through, the less investors and corporate owners would actually care.

We’ve now come full-circle. Independent and employee-run gaming sites are suddenly becoming the standard. The preferred paradigm, even. Corporate ownership comes with more downsides than they’re worth and you want the people running the site to actually be invested in what the site is about.

It feels like a revolution. I just hope it is, this time.