Hello, lovely Eurogamer readers! I’m writing to you today as Eurogamer’s new editor-in-chief. I know everybody says this, but it’s a genuine honour – and I must admit a sentence I’ve been hoping to write for a very long time.
In fact it’s something I’ve wanted to write, truly, since I joined Eurogamer just a little under 10 years ago, after interviewing to be a guides writer with Oli Welsh and Matt Reynolds, perched very nervously on the slightly tatty sofa in the corner room of our old office.
That sofa, long gone now of course, was a little corner of Eurogamer itself back then, in a small square space that was both the video room and the all-purpose games room. The room where Aoife, Johnny, Ian, and Chris Bratt (who?) used to record their let’s plays and late to the parties. And a podcast room. An occasional lunch room. The room where I always, always beat Wes at each year’s FIFA (ignore that distant shouting you can hear it’s nothing) and, more often than we’d have liked before our old office got its shiny refurb, a really quite cramped meeting room as well.
A lot has changed since then here at Eurogamer. We’ve had multiple new owners, multiple talented editors and editors-in-chief and editorial directors. We’ve moved on from that old office, and many of the extraordinary writers, editors, and video makers of this site have moved on too, as they tend to do when a decade goes by. But a lot of equally extraordinary people have joined us in that time also, coming through under that old guard but likewise, importantly, bringing with them fresh ideas and talents of their own.
We now have Dom Peppiatt, for instance, formerly the head of VG247, to offer ebullient criticism and commentary, plus expert editing while continuing as the site’s deputy. Dom and I worked very closely with Tom Orry, Eurogamer’s brilliant previous boss. Much of what I’d love for us to do is a continuation of the work laid down before.
We also have Connor Makar’s boundless enthusiasm for original reporting (and fighting games, I suppose – someone has to like them). We have Victoria Phillips-Kennedy’s uncanny knack for a deeply personal interview, and Matt Wales’ forensic criticism and unwavering editorial standards (except when Leon Kennedy’s involved).
We have the tireless, peerless guides team of Lottie, Kelsey and Marie, with their vast expertise and gallows humour and coolness on a tight deadline. And we have Bertie – I reckon we’ll get through a lot more sofas before we get rid of Bertie – who’s been here some 20-plus years and counting now, and who tells a weird, wonderful human story like no-one else.
In other words: change happens, but with change comes an opportunity for something new, or for a little freshening up, or for a renewed commitment to old vows. For me, in this case it’s a little of each of those things. And so now I should probably get to telling you what I think about Eurogamer itself.
I love this website. I love its idiosyncrasies and in-jokes (did you know our strapline puns shouldn’t repeat a key word from the headline? That we don’t put an apostrophe in front of decades like the 90s? That because of some quirk of the Eurogamer CMS, our writers have to manually remove all the smart quotes from any body copy, less one stray curly one sneaks in and makes everything just look off?). I love its loyal-to-a-fault readers, even during moments of, ahem, rigorous debate in the comments. (No really I do.)
I love the way Eurogamer can flitter, somehow, from deadly serious to childishly silly and back again. I love What We’ve Been Playing and really should contribute to it more – mark that down as my first promise for the site’s future. I love that nobody can really, accurately nail a description of what Eurogamer’s about – I have actually asked a lot of people exactly that question and none of them agreed. That everyone has something specific to them that they take from it. And I really love that for some reason, somehow, you can just kind of tell it was founded in Brighton.
At this point I think the love is unconditional – but also, loving something means being awake to all of it, not just the highlights. I’m paid to say this but I think, sincerely, that Eurogamer is the best video games website out there. I also think we can get better. The best way we can do that, and obviously I would say this, is to be even more Eurogamer.
For me, and I suspect also for you, Eurogamer’s magic has been its plurality. I’ve been lucky to work across just about every part of it now, moving from a guides writer to a staff writer, to looking after reviews, then at various points adding on features, previews, opinions, some occasional reporting and many, many spreadsheets behind the scenes. That also means I’ve picked up some pretty strong feelings about what each part of this site should be.
Eurogamer’s news, for instance, should be comprehensive, but it should also be detailed, authoritative, led by expertise. Where possible it should be driven by original reporting – a vaguely technical journo term for what a normal person would just call Proper Journalism, where we find stories, verify facts, and do the legwork to surface them for you ourselves.
Our reviews should be incisive, enlightening, entertaining, the beginning of a conversation rather than the end of one. They should come from a place of wanting this industry to be at its best. From an unshakable belief that video games are an essential part of modern culture and that their developers are capable of the extraordinary and the profound (and the very, very fun, which is itself extraordinary and profound too).
Our guides should be the best you’ll read on a subject, the most helpful, most comprehensive, most accurate and most trustworthy, in a time where real, human legwork is devalued just when it’s become more essential than ever.
Our features, which alongside reviews have been my home for a little while now, should be brilliant, expansive reads, that surface great new games or tell great stories about the ones you know. And our opinions should fight for the cause of everyday players, consumers, developers, artists, technicians and enthusiasts, the people who make games what they are rather than those who merely profit from them. (Sometimes, and this is a bit sad, I go back and read Tom Bramwell’s brilliantly pugilistic DRM takedown in the wake of E3 2013, just to remind me what it’s all about.)
That’s all very lofty, obviously. But I do believe it. And I believe we’ve been doing plenty of it. I’m proud to be saying hello today at the same time that we publish Connor’s extensive original report on Amazon Games Studios, and the timely, yet time-old story of one of its teams in particular. I’m proud that we’ve published great writing, reporting, and criticism across the team even in recent weeks and months, including from our pool of brilliant freelancers who continue to help make the site what it is – from Alexis Ong on ZA/UM’s next thing, to Lewis Gordon on Lionhead’s foundational impact on AI. Rick Lane on just about any shooter worth its salt. Christian Donlan, of course, on the pure and scattered beauty of Zelda as it turned 40, and Vikki Blake’s diligent reporting each weekend.
You can probably distil all this loftiness down to something a lot punchier, in fairness (if my old editor Martin Robinson was reading this he’d have told me to cut 500 words). So in much briefer, less pretentious terms: it is our job to give you something great to read about video games, every day. Websites today, and really always, live and die by their ability to do so – and crucially also by their ability to do it their own way, like nowhere else.
Saying all these things is one thing, actually doing them of course is another. I’ve no doubt we’ll find it hugely challenging at times – the world is stacked against old ideas like ‘quality’ and ‘editorial standards’ in 2026. We’ll be hard pushed to hit every one of those standards at every moment, to keep reporting originally amongst the waves of daily news, to cover every brilliant game we find. I need to give you the disclaimer, explicitly, that we’ll only be able to do so much, and we will make the occasional mistake. We’re only human, and there are only so many of us.
The one promise I will make, however, is that in this role I will do everything I possibly can to ensure we’re aiming for those standards every day. It’s my job to continue the industry-leading work of the many great editors who came before me. I will do my best to try. And I couldn’t be more excited to get started.
A huge thank you from all of us, as always, for reading – we really do appreciate it.
