Develop

» see develop-online.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Trade papers are written for the people making the thing, not for the people who buy it, and that is why you have probably never held one. Develop was sold to the British games industry about itself. I was a computer engineering student in Ankara through most of its life and then an engineer working on other problems entirely, and a monthly about middleware licensing and studio headcounts in Guildford was not going to reach me. It reached the several thousand people it was for, every month, for twenty-one years.

The first issue came out in August 1996 and the magazine ran monthly from then on, published out of Hertfordshire by Intent Media, the house that also owned MCV. In December 2012 the American publisher NewBay Media bought Intent outright and took the whole British stable with it. The last editor was Jem Alexander. There had been an online portal since July 2007 carrying a digital edition of the print issue, which is early for a British trade title and is probably why it lasted as long as it did.

What it published was the unglamorous half of the industry. Post mortems on projects that had shipped, profiles of studios nobody outside the trade could name. There was a jobs section people genuinely read, and long coverage of engines and outsourcing, which is to say of the things that decide whether a game ever gets finished. All of it through the years when British development was losing its mid-size studios and everyone left was working out whether to go independent or get bought.

~ the dossier ~

~ what a trade paper is for ~

Two things it ran outlived the reading. The Develop 100 was an annual ranking of the world's game development studios, scored on sales data alongside critical performance and general standing, and it functioned as a scoreboard that studios genuinely cared about landing on. The Develop Industry Excellence Awards was the other one, a yearly ceremony for the people whose names do not appear on the box.

That is the actual job of a trade magazine, and it is easy to undervalue because none of it is written for the public. It maintains a record of who did what and it hands out the only recognition available to a programming team or an audio house. A consumer magazine tells you which game to buy. This one told an industry who was in it.

~ the merge ~

On 20 November 2017 NewBay Media announced that Develop and its sister title Esports Pro would both be absorbed into MCV, the company's other games trade paper, and that the combined magazine would go monthly. That was the end of it as a separate publication. The final print issue was number 189, dated December 2017, twenty-one years and four months after the first.

Nothing dramatic happened. No collapse and no advertiser walking out in protest. A publisher that owned two magazines aimed at overlapping readerships decided to run one, which is the ordinary way trade titles die and is why nobody outside the industry noticed at all.

~ the last day of posting ~

The website outlived the print run by a few weeks and then simply stopped, and the archive holds the exact moment. The last capture that serves a working homepage is 25 January 2018, and the stories on it are all dated the day before. Unity sponsoring the 2018 Global Game Jam, timestamped 12:06. A studio laying off most of its staff, timestamped 10:52. Three posts on 24 January 2018 and then nothing, ever.

By 10 February the address was returning a 404. For the next year it flipped between redirects and errors as somebody unpicked the DNS, and the sidebar on that last live page still listed the whole NewBay stable it belonged to, from MCV UK down to ToyNews and Music Week, most of them on the same road.

~ the name outlived the paper ~

Both of the things Develop actually ran are still going. The Develop:Brighton conference has been organized since 2006 by Tandem Events, a separate company, and it carried on without the magazine that shared its name. The awards went with it and are now the Develop:Star Awards. A developer flying into Brighton this summer is attending an event named after a magazine that has not existed since 2017.

And then the brand came home. When Biz Media took over what was left of NewBay's games titles, MCV was renamed MCV/Develop in 2019, which means the magazine that swallowed Develop ended up wearing its name. Not much more than a year in the ground and the word was back on a masthead. The archive of what it actually published is a different matter, and most of develop-online.net exists now only in the Wayback Machine.

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