We can build something better.

This isn’t the welcome post I intended to write. But maybe it’s the one I needed to. Skybox’s launch has been planned for May 1st for weeks. I was getting home from my day job at a local college when I saw the news about Polygon, which of course, joins today’s news that Fandom has essentially killed Giant Bomb. A lot of really talented people lost their jobs today because of corporate mismanagement and greed, and the future of games media is an open question. But this isn’t something that just affects those of us who write about games. The games industry is on fire, whether it’s in media or development. Maybe it’s time we all did something about it instead of watching things burn and hoping, somehow, it isn’t coming for us next.

When I pitched Skybox to co-founders Brian Barnett and Lucas White, the idea was simple: “what if we said fuck this noise, and went into business for ourselves?”

We called it Skybox because we want it to be a place for everything we could think of, all the stuff we couldn’t do elsewhere. A place where good work, whether that meant criticism, blogs, reporting, features, interviews, or whatever else, would find a home as long as there was good work to do and good people to do it. We kick-started this idea a year ago, after another round of layoffs hit another group of talented folks. You know the story. Things have only gotten worse since. Skybox is our way of pushing back, however we can. It’s the work of several full-time freelancers, and a few talented contributors. And it’s taken a long, long time to get here.

Maybe it fails. God knows we don’t have any money. There aren’t a lot of us. But we’ve got a lot of experience. We know how to do the work. We’re not going to sell out, and we’re not going to bullshit you. We’re going to write what we want to write, come hell or high water. Skybox’ll be the place for the weird, the stuff that doesn’t fit, the kinds of things nobody’ll pay for but we know people want to read. When you see something here, you’ll know it’s because somebody wanted to write it. If nothing else, at least we’ll be able to say we tried. And maybe we make things a little better along the way.

So stick around. Grab yourself a drink and fall into that old chair. We’ve got such delights to show you, from a variety of voices from all across the business. And we’re always looking for more folks to join the cause. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can build something better. I hope you’ll join us.

Will Borger – Co-founder, Lead Editor

Brian Barnett – Co-founder, Editor-at-Large

Lucas White – Co-founder, Reviews Editor