From the EiC: Welcome to Game Developer!

This launch has been a long time coming, but it still feels like it happened so fast.

We've been tossing around the dream of a meaningful website refresh for probably as long as most of us have been with the site, and anyone who has happened upon Gamasutra in the last decade or so will understand why. Gamasutra has an impressive legacy and has been an invaluable tool for so many, but the web experience started to diminish that legacy long ago.

To paraphrase a Reddit comment on a Gamasutra story from earlier this year, "this article is way better than the website would make you think."

We know the Gamasutra website has been defined for many of you by a dated web design at best and by frustrating, experience killing errors at worst. The site's archives are packed with incredible, informative stories and reference material, but the site experience is the last thing that should stand between game developers and that knowledge.

Those of you that are regular Gamasutra browsers or bloggers: thank you for sticking with us through the long load times, strange errors, and the myriad other site quirks that have sprung up over the years. We're very excited to show you what we've got in store.

It's always been our mission to be a resource that empowers and inspires game makers. On the most basic level, we want to write compelling, informative stories and be a platform for game developers to share knowledge with one another.

While we're leaving the Gamasutra name behind for this next chapter, those same principles will carry forward into everything we do as Game Developer.

Welcome to Game Developer!

We obviously have some new things to show you on the site, but let's first let's talk about what you can expect from Game Developer. We spent a lot of time workshopping a new mission statement in conversations that eventually boiled down to us lobbing buzzwords back and forth, only to ultimately arrive back where we started. With Gamasutra, bolded words at the top of our admin page stood to remind us that our work should always inform, empower, and inspire our game developer readership.

Those goals haven't changed going into Game Developer.

We want our articles to keep readers up to date with the news that concerns them, give game developers a platform to tell their stories, dig into the innovations within all manner of games, and continue to provide content that helps our audience make even better games.

Something thing you'll notice right away is that we're leaning more into our namesake, Game Developer magazine, with an increased focus on in-depth content like postmortems, deep dives, and articles that give developers a space to share their own accomplishments and techniques with the wider community. You'll see the first of these on the site today, and we promise there's much more to come in the weeks that follow.

One of the most important things to us going into this relaunch was that our nearly 25 years of content didn't get left behind. As of today, we've brought the vast majority of those articles and community blogs forward into the new site, and are working to make sure that everything eventually makes the jump. However, if you spot something that went missing or went weird during the transition: let us know!

But let's talk about the site itself. We've simplified our website in favor of a sleeker design that puts the content front and center and gives the editorial team more control over how we showcase articles on the page. Sections at the top help readers narrow down content by discipline, platform, or format.

One particularly revolutionary update we're excited about is the addition of category filters in the site's built-in search. Category filters! In search!

Blogs are one particular section you'll see evolve over the coming months. Currently, your blogs will publish to the new Game Developer website, but for now we're still using the legacy blogging tool for submitting that content. Eventually, that process will transfer entirely to Game Developer, complete with a new blogging interface. We see our blogging platform as one of our strongest community tools, we plan to lean into that focus with future updates down the line that help foster meaningful and informative conversations and discussions between peers. We'll have more updates on that in the future.

There's plenty more to discover on the new website, and we want to stress that we will continue to evolve the platform based on experiences and feedback. In that same spirit, pardon the mess while we get everything up and running fully. You may spot the odd missized image or hanging HTML tags while we work to adapt thousands of articles to a brand new platform. We'll be working to clean things up as we go, but if you run into issues in the meantime please reach out and let us know.

On a personal note, I'm beyond thrilled for our future as Game Developer and honored to be part of the team helping to steer the site's future.