Reports Of Offworld's Death (Sorta?) Exaggerated
Not even a year since after site was launched, Offworld, BoingBoing's consistently interesting alternative/indie gaming blog, was declared dead by many of its fans. Well, on Twitter at least.
With BoingBoing's redesign introduced earlier this week, the mega blog announced that Offworld's editor (and Gamasutra alum) Brandon Boyer would henceforth post columns and game reviews on the main BoingBoing site, leaving many to conclude that Offworld's daily posts and media bits were sent to that big blogosphere in the sky to rest with other recently shuttered game sites like Insert Credit and Nerve's 61 Frames Per Second.
The fact that Offworld's front page had only seen one brief update in the past few days didn't help dismiss suspicions that the niche site was axed. However, a new The Beatles: Rock Band post appeared on both Offworld and BoingBoing this morning, the first of Brandon's planned articles -- which will be a lot more seldom than the original Offworld posting schedule.
On his personal blog last night, Brandon reassured friends and fans that he plans to continue publishing much less regular rounds-ups, galleries, and features of indie/iPhone/retail games, but those posts will be geared towards a "more generalized readership" on BoingBoing's higher trafficked front page. He also has hopes to create a successor:
"A site like Offworld needs to exist, and I’d always approached it since its launch last November as the site I’ve been waiting ages for someone to do, so there should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that I’m cooking up Something New basically like as I write this, and that there are a lot of exciting things that will go hand-in-hand with it.Whether it’ll still be called Offworld or something new is irrelevant, I think: the site itself has been subsumed by the network and community of wildly intelligent, passionate game makers and game lovers that have grown around it and congregated through it. ... I’m not worried that we’ll find each other again quickly wherever we land."
So, while it seems that the Offworld domain won't receive the same daily servings of bite-sized indie/alternative gaming news posts, Brandon hopes to eventually set up a similar site that will do just that. Best of luck to him.
Comments
When I first saw the exploding shuttle at the top of Offworld a week or two ago I thought it was a code for "Offworld's dead," since they hadn't updated in a while. Guess I was half-right.
Posted by: concrete_d | October 8, 2009 9:07 PM
Brandon said explicitly, "I will no longer be working on Offworld." He's writing occasional posts on Boing Boing, which will be cross-posted to Offworld.
If Offworld isn't dead, it's on life support.
Posted by: Andy Baio | October 8, 2009 11:37 PM
I guess im just moving over to tiny cartridge.
Posted by: peter | October 9, 2009 8:11 AM
Andy, I softened the 'not dead' thing in the headline a bit more cos I agree, it's gloriously ambiguous, but pretty zombified overall.
Posted by: simonc | October 9, 2009 9:03 AM
Too bad to see offworld go. I really enjoyed it while it lasted.
You can follow brandon's Boingboing posts here:
http://dynamic.boingboing.net/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=feed&_type=actions&blog_id=1&id=78047
Posted by: Sal Cangeloso | October 19, 2009 6:58 AM