In December of last year, I lost my apartment. It would have happened much, much sooner were it not for the help of people who read GJAIF, who came to my aid when I needed it. You guys bought me an extra 16 months of time, and it helped - at the end of January this year I landed a job. A perfect job. You guys have no fucking idea how much I love this job, and how excited I am to go into work every day. I couldn’t have done it without you. Thank you.

I can never begin to repay the number of you who helped us last year, but I can follow the advice many of you gave when you donated money - pay it forward. I’m going to be doing a lot of that this year. I can’t possibly hope to pay it forward on as grand a scale as I received, but I can do it in small ways. Every chance I get to pay it forward, if it’s within my means, I will do so. Because for every person on Twitter who sent me abuse, who made up shit about me, who decried me as a moron for even having this blog in the first place, there were five others who helped me keep my head above water not just in a financial sense, but in morale.

This blog, this exercise in negativity, has ended up being one of the most positive experiences in my life. I’ll never forget that.

Thank You.

I learnt a lot of things about the games industry last year. I learnt that publishers don’t actually give a flying fuck about gamers. They don’t. They see gamers as anthropomorphic coin purses, jingle-jangling towards stores and walking out with $60 discs that become $15 disappointments the moment they leave the store. They see those gamers who can’t afford the $60 and so instead opt to pay $40 for a used copy as vermin, eating away at their bottom line.

I learnt that marketing departments will say and do anything, anything, to get people to buy their game short of doing anything that might allow them to make an informed decision, such as showing them gameplay footage or releasing a playable demo.

I learnt that gamers themselves will bitch, whine, moan and stamp their fat little feet over things like draconian DRM and over-priced downloadable content, and still fork over their hard-earned dollarpounds again, and again, and again.

Perhaps most importantly, I learnt that I already knew all of this, and I’ve decided that I’m not going to put up with this bullshit anymore.

As of now, I will not be buying nor accepting complimentary copies of any game that costs more than $30, and doesn’t feature actual gameplay footage in any of its trailers or commercials.

This probably means I’ll be missing out on some truly brilliant games this year. I don’t doubt that. It means that I won’t be buying or playing Mass Effect 3 for quite some time.

This also means that the majority of my game purchases for the foreseeable future will be iPhone games, Xbox Live Arcade titles, and games developed by indie developers who know that if you have the time to write, storyboard, block, render and release a two-minute trailer featuring absolutely zero content from the game itself, then you have a few hours to plug your console into a video capture card, play the game for a while, and edit together a trailer made up of the most tantalizing moments of the game.

I love games. I love playing them. I love talking about them, sharing stories and memories. I love sitting on my own to solve a mystery, or getting together with friends to take down a killer boss. But as of right now, I have zero respect for the games industry. I have zero respect for the people who work in it. I have less than zero respect for the people who write about it.

Chances are I’m the only one, and I doubt my decision to no longer engage publishers on their terms is going to hurt their bottom line. Chances are there are a bunch of people out there who think I’m full of hot air (which is hardly a new development, but there we are). That’s fine. I’m not doing this for the industry, and I sure as balls ain’t doing it for any of you. I’m doing it for myself, because I realized some time ago that I stopped making the decision about the games I got excited about, and I delegated that out to people who work in an industry that despises me and everybody else like me who just wants to sit down and play goddamn videogames.

I’m taking back that control, and I’m sending that message. Granted, that message will undoubtedly be drowned out by the fratboy who buys seven copies of Call of Duty: This Time They’re In Canada! for himself and his friends, but it’s not always about having your voice heard. Sometimes it’s just about excising your right to speak.

I’m tempted to call Tumblr’s offices and ask them why the Hell they’re so pissed off with Missing e. I had a conversation with a member of Tumblr’s support team who basically tried to convince me that Missing e was responsible for every glitch I’d ever experienced on Tumblr, is the reason Starburst stopped making bags of just the strawberry flavours, and caused my parents to get divorced when I was 10.

Basically, it’s getting to the point now where using Tumblr is more of a chore than anything else. I know this isn’t really much of an issue considering I wrapped up the blog about three weeks ago, but I’m still using Tumblr to browse other blogs I like, not to mention maeking personal poasts over on BenPaddon.tumblr.com, and I’d like to be able to use the service in a manner which is, y’know, usable.

I sincerely hope Tumblr pull their shit together.

Thanks for joining me as I’ve bitched and moaned about largely trivial bullshit.

If you want to see what else I’m up to, here are some handy-dandy links:

BenPaddon.net - my personal blog and hub of all the silly shit I’m doing. There’s a lot of stuff on the horizon, so if you’re eager to see what I’ll be doing after this shitfest then this is the place you’ll want to keep an eye on.

My personal Twitter - Wherein I talk about all kinds of madness, including videogames.

My personal Tumblr - Because, y’know, fuck it.

PortsCenter - the docu-webseries about interesting and unique ports of videogames. One of the reasons GJAIF has closed is so I can focus more time and energy on this endeavor. If you liked GJAIF but wish I’d spent more time talking about games instead, this might be the one for you. Watch the pilot here, assuming you didn’t watch it the other seventeen-thousand times I posted it.

The DamnLag - For some bizarre reason, Steve at The DamnLag seems to think people would like to read my thoughts on video games. I’ve no idea if writing a weekly op-ed means I’ve crossed over to the Dark Side, or whatever, but I’m doing it anyway. In fact I’ve been doing it for a couple of months already! Oh, what a world, what a world.

Well, as they always say, finish on a song.

I’ll say goodbye to love,
No one ever cared if I should life or die,
Time and time again the chance for love has passed me by… ♫