TouchArcade Needs Our Help
TouchArcade is crowdfunding donations to keep the site going in its current form. If you haven't read their piece yet, do so now – I'm not going to summarize it here, but suffice it to say ads aren't paying what they used to, and this is the best way to keep their site going without making it crappier.
Many developers and gamers have added their own stories to the litany of reasons why TouchArcade is worth supporting. Here's mine.
My first opportunity to do anything as a game journalist came because of my membership in the TouchArcade Forums. The now-defunct game developer ngmoco saw my posts on the TouchArcade forums, and invited me to visit their headquarters in San Francisco to preview their FPS game Eliminate as part of a "community day" event with other, actual games journalists.
This was a different era in iOS gaming – ngmoco was trying to be the EA of iPhone gaming (their words), and they spared no expense. I was a Bay Area local, but everyone else was flown out to San Francisco for this event and given accommodations at a luxury hotel in the city. We were invited to ngmoco's expensive waterfront headquarters, given brand new iPod Touches engraved with our names, and played their upcoming game Eliminate – one of the best iOS shooters ever made to this day – for hours.
The fact is, I didn't belong there. I wasn't a writer – honestly I'm not much of a writer today, but I'm trying to improve. I was lucky enough to be invited because of my membership on TouchArcade, because they wanted an impartial gamer from the forums to write about their game.
Everyone else who attended was a real game journalist. They'd been given this treatment before – they'd had the goodie bags full of swag, to exclusive interviews, the hotels… It was a sort of club, a community, and I got my first look at it thanks to TouchArcade.
This era in iOS gaming would rapidly come to an end. It didn't take long for ngmoco to realize that iOS didn't generate "fly people to SF and give them iPods" money, and they sold to a Japanese freemium gaming company.
Today's iOS gaming landscape is very different. The swag bags are smaller. There are no free iPods. There are no luxury hotels. When I decided to start AfterPad and return to the world of iOS game writing, I saw a very different ecosystem than the one I left 5 years ago. I have no idea what happened to the other iOS game journalists who attended the event – I haven't seen their names or publications in years. But one things remans the same: TouchArcade is here.
TouchArcade covers iOS gaming because they love iOS gaming. The problem is, what it means to cover iOS gaming has changed dramatically. Forget luxury hotels – sites like TouchArcade are fighting to keep the lights on with the limited revenue they get from ads.
Mobile gaming may be bigger than ever, but the financials for writing about the industry are grim. Most iOS gaming sites have been reduced to aggregating content from other sites, posting "native content" articles that are actually written by the companies the site is supposed to be covering, or writing 4-sentence articles and calling them "reviews" of games (this actually happens on a certain UK site). Or they're niche sites, like AfterPad itself, that cover only a subsection of iOS gaming and don't have a stable of paid writers with actual talent.
Without TouchArcade, AfterPad wouldn’t exist. But more importantly, without TouchArcade, actual iOS game journalism wouldn’t exist.
I don't think TouchArcade is perfect. They go a bit heavy on the freemium coverage for my tastes, there is an off-putting combative tone some writers have with the readers, and I find their advertising unpleasant. But they are far and away – without contest – the best site for mobile gaming.
TouchArcade is the only site that writes frequent, long-form, in-depth articles about iOS gaming. They're the only site that lives and breathes this market. Forget about everything else, and ask yourself: is that worth supporting? And if so, support it.
