Hello everyone. It's me... and I bring news!
First it was The Listener and Womans Day that kicked the bucket in lockdown. Now, I'm afraid, Gameplanet is going the same way.
While the current economic situation is not helping, Gameplanet has - as you may have observed - been on life-support for some time now. We've held out and sustained the financial losses for as long as we could, but there is, sadly, no realistic prospect of the business recovering, and so the decision has now been made to turn off the machine and put it to rest. The website will be shut down in the next few days.
The good news though, is that this isn't the end of the road for GP Forums. I am working with Tapatalk to migrate GP Forums onto the Tapatalk Groups platform, which will allow this extraordinary community (that's you, internet weirdos) to live on in a non-commercial capacity. This will be a return to our roots as a non-profit community run by gamers, for gamers.
GP Forums will be locked tonight, while all the data is migrated across. Tomorrow morning, the forums will look a little different, but (hopefully) everything will still be here.
Gameplanet has had an amazing 20 year journey filled with many great highlights, and I thank you all for being part of it with me. I particularly want to thank the seven fine gentlemen who had the honour of holding the title "Editor in Chief" at Gameplanet over those two decades: Tom Mahoney, Gary Wright, Martin Caie, Dan Cheer, James Cullinane, Matt Maguire, and Dan Grayson. They were responsible for achieving most of Gameplanet's successes, and none of its failures (those mostly belong to me).
Special thanks also goes to my co-founder Simon Barton and his other business, Mighty Ape, which has invested heavily in keeping the lights on at Gameplanet while our revenues plummeted - an investment from which they will unfortunately now receive no return.
On a final note: Around the world, all corners of the media business have been squeezed over the last 5-10 years as online advertising has, for various reasons, largely ceased to be a viable way to fund content - but for niche players like us this has been especially acute. While the loss of our small games media publication won't really matter in the scheme of things, the implications of a weakened journalism sector, with its critical role as the "fourth estate", are quite dire for the health of democratic societies. So I urge you all, if you can afford to do so, to pick a news media organisation you respect and pay for a subscription if they give you the option!
Speaking of which - Power Up memberships won't be carried over to Tapatalk, and subscriptions have been cancelled. Huge thanks to those of you who supported us with this. The handful of you with active memberships may PM me to request a refund of any unused time.
See you all on the other side. :ninja: