New Year, New GD: Inside Game Developer's new design

It’s been a little over two years since we first relaunched the Game Developer website, and to say we’ve learned a lot in that period of time would be an understatement. A major tech update behind-the-scenes was a game changer for us, but it quickly became clear that the version of the site powering our original relaunch was only the beginning.

And so, welcome to the all-new GameDeveloper.com website! We’ve taken community feedback to heart with a comprehensive redesign of GD. Through this, we aim to address common pain points we saw creep up with our previous look and feel and, overall, give Game Developer’s quality industry interviews, news coverage, and developer-contributed blogs & articles space to shine. 

Improving readability, content discovery, and more

With this new version of Game Developer, we wanted to focus on improving the site experience for readers, and give our editors more tools to highlight the creative and technical prowess of the game industry. We’ve removed much of the friction that prevented the game development community from quickly pulling up both new and classic articles from Game Developer’s archives, with improvements to search, category landing pages, article layout, and more.

At the same time, we wanted to restore some of the personality that was lacking with the previous version of our site. Our new look has a bit more charm and just a dash of nostalgia powering its pages…in both the literal and figurative sense. Some changes, like more visible contributor bios, bring editor and developer expertise front-and-centre, while others like new back-end tools empower the GD editorial staff to create curated collections of historical and insight-rich articles for the wider development community.

What’s changed on GameDeveloper.com?

We’ve overhauled our entire site experience, with the goal of making things easier to navigate, read, and discover. I’m personally very excited to say that our pages now make much better use of space thanks to redesigned carousels and a two-column layout for our article pages. We’ve also done away with infinity scrolling in favour of page numbers on category and search result pages, significantly improved our on-site search experience, and much more. 

Here’re a few highlights:

Our front page has many of the same features you’re already familiar with and a few new ones to offer as well. The Featured Section, that nifty little carousel where you can find our daily lead features and breaking news, has received a visual update to pull recent news into its own ticker next to that day’s lead story. 

Below that, you’ll still find the usual feed of our latest articles and new featured blogs, as well as new rotating spotlights for GDC Vault Videos, in-depth dev-written content, upcoming game industry events, and more.

Our article pages have been completely redone to improve readability and highlight key points or further reading without interfering with the on-page experience. You’ll notice a new sidebar on Article pages and elsewhere throughout the site--where we’ll share recent news, curated article picks, and upcoming events or podcast launches.

A lot of these changes are geared at striking a better balance between on-page elements like text, headings, images, and ads. We’ve reshuffled some in-article ad units to prevent them from shifting article text around mid-read and resized our headings to sit more comfortably on the page.

In the interest of providing the development community with in-depth industry coverage, we’ve introduced new curated “Related” recommendations to help readers stay caught up with interviews and news articles that tie into the topic of their current read. Similarly, a new “At a Glance” section concisely highlights takeaways and key points on new and some existing articles, situated right at the top of the page.

Gone are the sparse, linear feeds that previously collected articles within category pages like Design or Mobile. Instead, we’ve launched new layouts for each and every category page that spotlight the latest-and-greatest articles for that topic and make much better use of on-screen space to show more updates at once. As noted before, we’ve sent infinity-scroll pages packing and brought page numbers back to category pages, making it much easier to spelunk into articles from years and years ago on a whim.

All new tools, collections, and projects

This new launch arms the Game Developer editorial team with plenty of new tools to better highlight coverage of ongoing events or trends, and resurface hidden gems published years before. 

Keyword Pages, a new feature, are a huge part of that. As we get settled in, you’ll see new pages pop up to capture articles into one nice, bookmarkable reading list. You’ll see new collections for things like individual company history, M&A activities or investment news, and development tech appear, as well as “reading lists” capturing our most popular interviews, blogs, and tutorials about specific facets of game development.

We have a lot more to come in 2024 using these tools, especially when it comes to preserving the 26 years of game industry news, articles, and development resources we maintain in our archive. Game Developer has been fortunate to host decades of excellent commentary and instruction from the game development community, and we’re excited for this chance to connect those quality reads with new audiences. But more to come on that soon.

What’s staying the same?

Game Developer’s core mission remains the same: we strive to inform, educate, and inspire the game industry and the passionate people driving it forward. Our content will continue to serve the wider game industry by documenting innovative development techniques, highlighting new voices and perspectives, and seeking out the stories that matter most to the individual people making games big and small.

This responsibility applies to our old articles as much as it does to our newer works. Nearly all previous Game Developer (and legacy Gamasutra) content should now be live on the site. 

Pardon any mess; it’s a big move and we’re still sorting through the last of the moving boxes. You may spot a blog hanging out in a section page, or a rogue HTML tag lurking around in a summary. Some articles may also have landed on the new site with some formatting errors, and we’re working hard to fix these as we discover them. Spot anything weird? Let us know.

While our URLs have changed just slightly, your bookmarks, reddit posts, and vintage forum links should redirect you right to the current home for any given article. 

A very very small subset of our older and less-frequently-read articles, mostly old news from the era of the N-Gage, may pop up with a 404 page; however, that content isn’t gone. We’ll be returning and fixing up those classic news articles in the coming months. We, as always, remain stubbornly committed to preserving the history of the game industry and the twists-and-turns that shape it.

Comments? Questions? Concerns? Reach out to our support line via email, or hit us on up on X (Twitter? You know the one.) @GameDevDotCom with your feedback. We have a lot of exciting things to come in 2024. Keep up with GD via Twitter, Cohost, or LinkedIn or subscribe to our Newsletter or Podcast to stay in the loop.