Write for Gameroni
This is the paragraph where we'd love to be able to say writing for Gameroni is an honor, a privilege, and extremely lucrative. But the site is launching with a $0 budget. At least in the early days (and possibly until the end of time), the people involved will see little or no compensation. We're doing what we do to provide regular, high-quality content related to video games, and we welcome your participation. However, there are two types of candidate who might make the best fit:
- Veteran freelancers who want to keep writing about games in their spare time, just because they love playing and writing about games and they want to stay in practice
- Newcomers who are gifted writers and love games, with an interest in further developing their skills for use at Gameroni and elsewhere
There is absolutely no reason to expect that Gameroni will turn into the next Polygon or IGN. It would be nice to build an audience that large. Virtually anyone you see involved in the site would be over the moon if that were to occur. However, it's more likely to remain a passion project for two inescapable reasons: building an audience online is difficult, and the site is being developed with the reader experience in mind.
If you have freelanced at other game sites, or even served as staff, you've likely run into some major headaches. Here are a few of the big ones we wish to avoid repeating at Gameroni:
- You fell in love with a game and you were having fun writing new articles to impart the wisdom you have gained. Unfortunately, much of the online audience lost interest and your editor wants you to switch to covering the next shiny object.
- You're anxious to tell your readers how to clear a difficult area in a game, but a top-tier site has already written a guide on that same approximate area. Now your editor is afraid to even go there. Instead, you are looking at a list of possible topics on in-game hats that someone on the team saw on Reddit.
- You want to write a walkthrough on how to find a useful item, or clear a difficult stage, or take down a tough boss. But your editor wants a Top 10 Drinking Fountains list, because that's more evergreen.
- A niche game just hit and you think it will do well. However, your editor thinks it's too risky and wants you to write your one hundredth story about Destiny 2 instead.
- You are having fun writing about the topics readers want, but your editor noticed that you're not including the right number of in-bound and outbound links in each paragraph. Maybe you only used four subheadings when obviously you needed five.
If you've written enough online, you've run into such situations and you know how quickly they take you out of your zone. The bad news is that you probably won't earn much money writing for Gameroni, or even any money at all. The good news is that you'll have more freedom to write what you want to write (within reason) because there is still an audience for the stuff you love. It just might be the tiniest bit smaller than is ideal.
We'll still try to do the stuff that makes sense, like incorporating subtitles and links to other relevant content, and including illustrative screenshots. We still like evergreen articles that continue to float our boats when we hit stormy seas. And we'll do what we can to make sure our writer's aren't tripping over each other if two or more of us are covering the same game(s), which might mean you still don't get to write that walkthrough you had in mind. But with everything we do, we'll try to keep readers in mind. We'll also make fewer decisions that put SEO in the driver's seat. We'll spend more time with the games we really dig, so we have a chance to build a proper audience for everything we write about those games (and so we develop the reputation we deserve). We think that over time, readers will notice and appreciate that we're built just a little bit differently.
If you're ready to learn more about this process and start writing for Gameroni, make sure to get in touch. We hope to be quite selective about who we agree to work with (yes, even with no compensation immediately on offer), but we'd love to hear from you!