What’s all this then?

Welcome to Hit Points, a newsletter about the videogame industry by me, Nathan Brown. You may know me from my decade working on Edge magazine, including three years as editor; from my keynote interviews at the Develop conference; or from Twitter, in which case I can only apologise. These days I’m a game consultant and freelance writer.

Hit Points tells you what’s happening in and around the game industry, why it’s happening, and why it matters. It is a spiritual successor to Big Picture Mode, the Edge column I wrote for five years that used print’s distance from the news cycle as an opportunity to step back, zoom out and consider the broader implications of the latest developments in games, and the business and culture that surround them. And maybe do some jokes while I’m at it.

It is also designed to fill a gap in today’s games-media landscape. I do not mean this as an attack on any publication or their staff, many of whom do brilliant work and I am proud to call colleagues and friends. But the system is structured such that it has become too difficult for writers to do good work, and too hard for readers to find it. The search algorithms and advertising systems that run the show put no value in good writing, smart analysis or bad jokes. It is harder than ever to find things I like, or am interested in. 

Hit Points is my attempt to redress the balance a bit: a regular digest of things that matter, unburdened by ads, SEO or corporate interference, delivered direct to the reader. Hit Points is free to subscribe to, with an optional monthly or annual subscription for those who want to support my work and see it continue. Paid subscribers receive at least one additional post per week, and also have access to the occasional interview series Max HP. For now, if you like this idea as much as I do, kindly sign up and share it around with anyone you think might be into it. Thank you so much for reading.

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