Board game reviewer site, Dicebreaker closing down.

One of the many sites which I use to provide news information for BoardGameNews, DiceBreaker is closing down operations.

DiceBreaker covered not only board games, but all sorts of role-playing and other tabletop related stuff. It has been running for years as a steady supplier of information and reviews, as well as having a pretty decent Youtube Channel.

To quote from Board Game Wire's news article...

Board game news website Dicebreaker has made its editor-in-chief Matt Jarvis and senior staff writer Alex Meehan redundant, following three weeks of silence on the website in the wake of its parent company’s takeover by IGN.

Jarvis, who has been EIC almost since the site’s inception in 2019, emailed contributors today to announce that his last day will be Friday, and apologised for his unavailability during his redundancy process – saying he has been “as frustrated as you with the silence”.

Meehan took to Twitter today in the wake of Jarvis’ announcement to confirm she had also been made redundant after almost five years at Dicebreaker.

Dicebreaker has posted just a single sponsored article to the site since its parent company Gamer Network was bought by video games website giant IGN on May 21.

The site’s YouTube channel, which has 108,000 subscribers, has also received no new uploads in the past three weeks.

It would seem that the big players are intent on consolidating their positions as games manufacturers try to come to terms with the changing landscape of how games are created and played. Small independent companies are trying to make their own way in the world. The ability to get games to market has vastly changed over the past few years as they now have newer ways to market, such as KickStarter, without the backing of the old incumbents who used to take a cut of their income.

Obviously there are challenges as some small manufacturers now need to take on more tasks and some even find this increased workload too much of a challenge and have closed down operations.

What this effect has on the Gaming world still needs to be figured out. But people need to support their local small independent games makers. Either buy their games, or go to game meetups to play them.