GameDaily

» see gamedaily.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

GameDaily was written for people who worked in games, and i was a person who played them. That is a real distance and it does not close just because you can read English. The industry press of the 2000s ran on American release calendars and American retail numbers, and in Turkey the release calendar was whatever the shop had that week.

The name began on the trade side, as a daily email of industry news going out to professionals, in the lineage of the old GameWeek digest. On 4 May 2004 Gigex, a San Francisco company that had spent the previous decade in the business of distributing game demos, bought GameDAILY together with a fan site called Gamerfeed and merged them under the one name. Mark Friedler ran Gigex and wanted a mainstream games destination rather than another enthusiast site.

It worked faster than it should have. By March 2005 the network sat at the top of comScore's games information category, ahead of names with far more history, mostly because a demo distributor knows exactly how to convert a download into a page view. The split personality stayed: a consumer site at gamedaily.com, and GameDaily BIZ as a separate newsletter that the trade actually read.

AOL bought the whole thing in August 2006 for an undisclosed price. Ralph Rivera, who ran AOL Games at the time, described the appeal without much decoration: game sites were where advertisers went to reach young men. AOL had already bought Joystiq the year before as part of Weblogs, Inc., which meant it now owned two games publications aimed at overlapping audiences.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what replaced it ~

GameDaily was supposed to be the flagship. AOL merged its existing AOL Video Games content into it and said so publicly. What happened instead is the ordinary fate of an acquired site inside a portal: the consumer end drifted toward slideshows and list posts because those paid, and the trade end got quieter. GameDaily BIZ closed in 2009, which removed the only part of the operation that was hard to replace.

In 2011 AOL retired the brand outright and moved the staff and the archive into Joystiq. The flagship had lasted five years under its new owner and lost to the blog AOL had bought first. Joystiq then ran until 3 February 2015, when AOL closed it in a cull of properties it had decided were underperforming, and pointed the domain at Engadget.

~ the funny part ~

The name came back. In 2018 a group of games journalists with no connection to AOL launched GameDaily.biz, taking the old trade-newsletter half of the identity rather than the consumer half. It published for a few years. The newest thing on it now dates from November 2023, so the revival has gone as quiet as the thing it was named after.

gamedaily.com no longer answers. The consumer site that once beat everyone in comScore and the revival that later took the name back both stopped, seven years apart, which is most of the history of games media compressed into a single name.

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