Looking back at a year of Rogue

Holy moly, it’s been a whole year since we first started Rogue.

It’s been a rough year for the games industry; that goes without saying. Larger games outlets are being shuttered, slimmed down, and repurposed to generate as many clicks as possible. Game developers are being laid off in droves, while executives continue to collect their hefty paycheques. Microtransactions have become macrotransactions, gambling is more normalized than ever, and studios are laying off teams right before they release financially successful games.

And despite all that bullshit, we still love games.

I like to like things. That’s a central pillar of how I approach my writing. It doesn’t mean that we embrace blind positivity – you can want things to be good, and still recognize the decisions that bring them down. But critique should come from a place of appreciating the effort, of recognizing that most games are not created by a single auteur, but by a team of people working together, following the lead of a director or meeting the demands of a publisher. Some of my favorite games to talk about are the flawed ones, where developers made an ambitious swing. Even if they missed, it’s infinitely more interesting to talk about than a polished, glossy, perfect product.

But it’s harder to find these kinds of conversations about games now. Social media and the algorithm have warped game discovery and reception. You may have seen a creator who follows the same title as you, but regularly posts videos with bleak thumbnails saying IT’S OVER, IT JUST GOT WORSE, DESTROYED. You would think that if something is declared over, it would be over, but instead the algorithm rewards continuing to beat a dead horse.

Then, of course, there’s the scourge of generative AI, which makes all of these problems a million times worse.

That’s not to say that there aren’t brilliant creators out there, and independent media outlets holding nuanced conversations. But there are so many games coming out every day that no one can cover all of them. At Rogue, we’ve spent the last year covering a few big games: World of Warcraft, Helldivers 2, we’re inevitably going to end up talking about Grand Theft Auto 6.

But we’ve also dug into the massive field of indie games, talking about niche MMOs, weird little horror games, sapphic love stories in space, and trawling through Steam Next Fests. I’ve had the chance to tell some stories off the beaten path, like getting my ass beat by the Scrabble-heads at a local board game meetup, or uncovering the canon of one of the weirdest gaming webcomics on the web.

Rogue has changed over the last year. We’ve found a small but passionate reader base who are willing to support what we do, and that means the world to us. Even when things feel bleak, both in the industry and the world at large, games are still brilliant, beautiful, strange pieces of art that deserve to be celebrated and interrogated. We’re so glad we’ve found readers who agree. 

While Rogue doesn’t cover our bills, it has proven to be sustainable so far. No one gets into independent media to get rich, and it means the world to us that we have supporters. Whether you subscribe, read, share articles, or comment, I cannot stress enough how much that has meant to us over the past year.

We want to continue our mission over the next year. We’ll be finding the weird and funny stories that emerge from big games that you may have missed. We’ll keep playing indie games and digging through Steam sales to find whatever gems we can. We’ll keep approaching games from a place of curiosity and love.

Here’s to a year of Rogue, and another year to come. We hope you keep following us on this journey.