Welcome to Inside Baseball Week, a week of stories about the lesser-known parts of game development, the ins and outs of games journalism, and a peek behind the curtain at Aftermath.
Aftermath’s been around for a little over four months, which feels both like an eternity and like no time at all. Since launch, we’ve noticed how much readers enjoyed stories like our interview with concept artists and our discussion of why games site headlines can be so weird. These are the kinds of stories Aftermath’s independence makes us uniquely situated to tell, so we decided to lean into it and give you a whole week of them.
You’ll read about the inner workings of games journalism, what the people who work on your favorite games actually do and what it’s been like starting this site. We’ve been interviewing and researching and reflecting, and we’ve got a ton of great stories planned. You’ll be able to find all of them here.
("Inside baseball," if you've never heard the phrase before, refers to a focus on the hyper-specific details of something, looking at things only professionals or hardcore fans would care about. Apparently it was also actually a style of baseball.)
Starting Aftermath has let us write the kinds of stories we’ve always wanted to, for the kind of audience we’ve always dreamed of. We’re constantly in awe of how great our community is; we love the conversations in our Discord, how much fun it is to read the comments, and our lively weekly stream chat. We want to do this forever, and we also want to do so much more: publish freelance pieces, offer pay-it-forward subscriptions, bring on additional staff, and more. We knew we were taking a gamble starting our own site, especially these days, and we’re so happy with how things are going.
But we have big dreams, so alongside Inside Baseball Week, we’re launching a subscriber drive. As an entirely reader-funded site, every new subscriber makes a difference, not just to the nitty-gritty math that keeps Aftermath existing, but to the quality of our awesome community. You can read more about our goals here.
If you’re not a subscriber yet, please consider signing up. We have different tiers that give you access to comments, our Discord, and more. We’d love to have you join us. If a recurring subscription is out of reach for you right now (we get it!), we also have a tip jar.
If you’re already a subscriber, first of all, THANK YOU, we quite literally couldn’t do this without you, and we don’t take your support for granted. If you’d like to upgrade your subscription, or buy one for a friend, you can do that here, but we’d also be grateful if you’d take this week to share our stories, engage in our comments and Discord, and help us get the word out about Aftermath. (Or, if you know someone who would like to give us thousands of dollars, we wouldn’t say no to an introduction.)
We want to use Inside Baseball Week not just to publish cool stories, but to reflect on how far we’ve come, where we’re at, and where we’d like to go. Since launch, we’ve seen even more of the layoffs and site closures that inspired us to start Aftermath, and we’re more thankful than ever to have our little site. We’re excited to be part of a growing movement of worker-owned sites that’s helping shape a future for journalism that doesn’t feel totally bleak. We’re getting there every day, and we want to use this week to celebrate what you’re helping make possible.
