USgamer

» see usgamer.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

USgamer opened during E3 week in June 2013 and closed seven and a half years later with four people on staff. It was Gamer Network's American site, built after the British company renamed itself out of Eurogamer Network that March to signal it was going international. Jaz Rignall had been building it since that March. Kat Bailey ran it as editor in chief for most of its working life.

The end arrived in two rounds. In September 2020 ReedPop, which had bought Gamer Network in February 2018, cut staff across its sites, and Joel Franey's last day at USgamer was the 18th. Then on 16 November five more announced their own departures on social media inside a single afternoon, Bailey among them. Neither ReedPop nor Gamer Network issued a statement. The staff announced their own layoffs, and the headcount said the rest: nine at the start of the year, four at the end of it.

In 2013 the place I read about games was a Turkish forum rather than an American masthead. Donanimhaber and frmtr threads did the job USgamer did for its readers, with no editor in chief to lose and no budget for anyone to cut. The American games press reached me one link at a time, and this particular masthead never turned into a habit.

~ the case file ~

~ the four who were left ~

The four who stayed through November shipped a year-end package anyway. USG's Top 20 Games of 2020 went up in December, and the staff picks ran under the headline "Kat, Mat, and Eric's Top 10 Games of 2020" with the subtitle "Our favorites of the year, from those who remain." That line sat on the front page for the rest of the site's life.

~ what was on the front page ~

The homepage froze on 31 December 2020 and the Internet Archive holds it. The lead story is "Press Start to Continue," summarized as a look back on what we tried to accomplish at USgamer, and the work still to be done. Under it sat two farewells, Eric Van Allen's "Off to Find a New Challenger" and Mathew Olson's "The Truth Has Not Vanished Into Darkness," whose subhead reads "This isn't the real ending, is it? Can't be." A fourth post gathered everyone who had ever worked there under the two-word summary "End of an era."

The newsletter signup box was still live, and so was the promo for the Axe of the Blood God podcast. Below the goodbyes, the news column carried on about Cyberpunk 2077 being pulled from the PlayStation Store and Stardew Valley adding beaches, exactly as if there were somebody left to write the follow-ups.

~ the archive, then no archive ~

The site stayed in that state for almost two years. Gamer Network kept the archive online, nothing moved, and any old link landed you on the December 2020 front page. Then on 12 December 2022 it stopped. The Internet Archive crawled the homepage at 10:55 UTC that morning and got the usual 32 KB. At 11:31 the same URL returned a 404, and it kept returning one on every crawl for the next two and a half years. Today usgamer.net answers with a 503.

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