Welcome back to Thumbsticks. Things have changed a bit round here, but hopefully you’ll all appreciate what we’ve done.
Welcome back to Thumbsticks. Things have changed a bit round here, but hopefully you’ll all appreciate what we’ve done.
The reasons behind the changes are detailed at length in this post, but if you don’t have time to read that, here are the salient details:
If you’re reading this, it means we’ve just hit the button on the new and improved Thumbsticks dot com. (Or one of us has cocked up. Hopefully that’s not it.)
In many ways, the “new” site is a lot like Thumbsticks used to be. The focus is back on long-form content, on features, interviews, and criticism, and to support that, we’ve also done a massive redesign of the site, and changed our operating model.
We want to deserve the site’s Interesting Articles About Video Games strapline again, and here’s how we plan to do it.
The biggest change to Thumbsticks – and we think the biggest benefit, for us writing it and you lot reading it – is the shift back to long-form, magazine-style content. That’s not to say there isn’t value in stuff like news and guides, and god knows, it traffics well, but we were trying to compete with sites much larger and better-resourced, and we were never going to win.
We’re not wiping out thousands upon thousands of articles, though, as we believe digital preservation is really important. We’ve actually shifted them to an Archive section of the site so they’re all still available – through the Archive and the site’s search function, but also, from search engines and incoming links – but it will allow us to put the focus back onto long-form articles.
And what’s that content going to look like? There will be a marked increase in the number of features, interviews, essays, and long reads, for starters. That’s where we want to direct our energy and where we think Thumbsticks will shine once more.
But we’re aware that not every single piece can be a New Yorker essay, so there’ll also be a return of regular features, columns, and opinion pieces. We’ll be doing reviews and criticism when the mood strikes us, but don’t expect us to be chasing traffic on embargo day. And, finally, we’ll be sprucing up and republishing some old features, because there’s already so much brilliant writing on Thumbsticks, and it deserves to get a new lease of life.
Taking away the time pressure of writing news and guides will free up the permanent Thumbsticks editorial team to write more of what we want to write, but we’d also like to get back to where we once were in terms of freelance contributors. We used to be inundated with freelance pitches and Thumbsticks was often a foot in the door for new writers. Sadly, we lost a lot of brilliant writers over the years with that shift to news and guides, but now we’re back to exclusively commissioning features and criticism, we’d like to build up the team of contributors once more.
