Just in case you’ve somehow managed to avoid getting beaten over the head with this fact these past few days – perhaps you’re very good at dodging – Aftermath is now one year old! Like proud parents, we won’t shut up about it, so we decided to indulge ourselves a bit more on the latest episode of Aftermath Hours.
We begin the episode by discussing the lessons we’ve learned in our first year at the school of hard knocks that is small business ownership. Then we segue briefly into some news – specifically, our own feature about how freelancers are propping up games journalism (and getting paid dogshit for it) and Zenimax workers’ recent strike against Microsoft’s restrictive return-to-office policies – before talking about games we’ve been playing, including Star Wars Outlaws (surprisingly great), Metaphor: ReFantazio (expectedly great), and Dragon Age: The Veilguard (well…).
After that, at the behest of listeners, it’s back to anniversary stuff, like our favorite moments from this year and games we were playing when the site launched that we still haven’t wrapped up. Also, we design an Aftermath-themed Sonic The Hedgehog OC – and give him a gun.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that by the time our second anniversary rolls around, we can bring our Sonic The Hedgehog OC to life (or pay ourselves a livable full-time wage).
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:
Luke: There was a point where we ran Inside Baseball Week, and we got a big spike in subscribers. Up until then, it had been not touch and go, but it had been like “Is this gonna work or not? Do people actually want this or not?” It wasn’t quite nailed down yet. But after Thursday or Friday of that week, it was like “We’re doing this! This has worked. People are into this. We’ve done work we’re proud of. This is actually coming together.”
We came to this conclusion at a staff meeting that week. It wasn’t me just having an isolated thought. We all kind of talked about this. It was really cool. We were like “Man, it’s working. That’s amazing.” So that’s my fondest memory. It was really stressing me out for almost a year between setting the site up and seeing that happen. So it was good to have my fears removed and replaced with good feelings.
Chris: It didn’t feel bad before then; it just didn’t feel as certain.
Luke: We just had no idea what we were doing. That seemed to also crystalize. We all had to sit down, plan a week, and write appropriate content for the week. It kind of helped sharpen our focus for the site. Because we’d just been flailing around until then, like “Oh, let’s just do a blog! And a review!” Everything was sloppy. Individual pieces weren’t sloppy, but our strategy for it – how we packaged it and put it on the website and spaced our posts out and stuff was a mess. After Inside Baseball Week, we felt like we were a lot sharper with that kind of stuff. We’ve obviously still got a long way to go and a lot to learn. The website is far from perfect, but that was the week where it stopped being chaos and started actually feeling like a website we could work at and do really good stuff at for a long time to come.
Chris: For me, I will say that is probably my [favorite], but my second is that there’s a couple of times where I published something that I didn’t know if people were going to like or care about, and then a lot of people cared about it. This is personal instead of the aggregate, but that helped me. I try to write about things that people would like to know about, and in the case of the James Cameron piece, that felt fairly nice. It was just like, a whole bunch of people here really want to know about this shit. Finding your beat and figuring out what an Aftermath piece is – even with you guys, figuring out what your quintessential Aftermath tone is – has always felt really good.
Nathan: This is recency bias talking, but mine was… so, you know, I collected all those quotes for our post that we published yesterday, Cool People Like Website Despite Its Many Flaws, and it’s basically a bunch of nice people saying things about our website that are very, very kind. Receiving a message from Ed Zitron for that piece [is my favorite moment]. His blurb for that piece is so insanely kind and really heartfelt and beautiful.
I’m not gonna lie: When I first read his response to my little prompt, it brought tears to my eyes. I wept as a result of Ed saying nice things that were both personal and professional and that really resonated with me. Being appreciated – having the website feel so seen for what it is, which is a combination of our various passions and us being people who seek to on one hand do good work, but on the other hand be vulnerable and empathetic, trying to do this work in a way that centers human beings – and having someone crystalize it on that level meant a lot. It made me feel like we’ve really done this right.
Chris: I think part of it is that it’s something we needed at Kotaku but never really had. It’s something we needed for a sense of self, that we’re getting now. And I think part of that is just how the site is structured – that we’re able to talk about these things, the freedoms that we have. You get a chance to do things right this time in ways that fulfills your soul.
Luke: To flesh that out, just so people understand, working at Kotaku from the mid-2010s onward, the only time you would hear from people was to receive constant, daily, quite vitriolic and threatening abuse – to the point where I had to make my phone silent, I had to remove all my family members from Facebook, I had to keep my address a secret. You would receive death threats. You would receive threats of physical violence, and people going after you on YouTube and Reddit and stuff constantly.
You would spend years and years internalizing abuse. That was the only thing you would receive publicly. And then your best work on the site would just go down as “Oh yeah, that’s another good Kotaku post. I read Kotaku every day. Next.” You don’t realize how much that fucks you up until you step away from it and go to a job like this, and people say nice things about you. You don’t know how to process it, in a way. It’s like “What do you mean someone’s saying something nice about me?”
Chris: It’s like being a shelter dog.
Luke: It really is. It’s those before-and-after TikTok videos. We used to be the snarling street dog that only got hit with newspapers. Now someone’s taken us into their home and actually fed us and brushed us, and we’re really happy. It’s cool to be the happy dog.
