Why I Started Life Is a Game Magazine | From Burnt Out Streamer to Editor in Chief
How Burning Out on Streaming Led to the Most Rewarding Thing I've Ever Built
EDITIORIALS
MattGhostie
7/1/20265 min read
Hi, everyone. I'm MattGhostie, Editor in Chief and owner of Life Is a Game Magazine. I've been interacting with you all for about a year and a half now, or it might be slightly longer, sometimes it’s hard to keep track. I just wanted to thank everyone real quick for all the support you've given us from day one until now. I honestly never thought we’d break a thousand followers or one hundred views but incredibly we’ve done that and more.
Thanks to you, we've had the opportunity to cover a bunch of games before they were released, both smaller and larger titles and we've found ourselves on the front page of Google for some of our articles and reviews. It's genuinely been a pleasure to bring you honest, complete, and thoughtful writing on video games that we all know and love.
How It All Started
So before this, I used to stream and create other content. It didn’t last long and by the end I just didn't enjoy it anymore. It took a lot of the love out of gaming for me and honestly nearly made me quit what has been my primary hobby for a good part of the last fifteen years.
I primarily streamed Call of Duty Warzone, which is a competitive multiplayer title, which even on a good day will suck the fun out of gaming if the lobbies aren’t going your way. The game itself also wasn't in a great state, and working on creating content for myself, trying to build my own personal brand around a game I wasn't even enjoying, was just draining. I spent a good six months doing this before one day I just had to stop.
So I stepped away. Not just from streaming, but essentially from gaming entirely for a couple months. I'd play off and on, but I was really cautious about what I was playing and how much time I was spending on video games.
From there, I started getting back into single player gaming I think starting with Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Since then, I've finished about seventy games somehow. That whole transformation from someone who primarily played games as a service titles to someone who played mostly single player games essentially started this e-magazine adventure.
The Realization
Spending time on the Internet, I started to realize something. It felt like there was a space where people missed talking to other people about games they actually played. Games that mattered to them in real ways not just to win gotchas on twitter or score the next viral vid on YouTube.
So I reached out to my best friend, VirgoXZ, and I told him, “hey, I think we should start this thing. I don't know if it's gonna go anywhere, but I believe that people miss that old school feeling. You know, hanging out with your buddies at school talking about the games you were playing. Going into GameStop and talking to the people there. Being genuinely excited about what you were playing without any of the performative stuff that comes with being online. No clickbait titles, no pandering reviews. Just talking about games that we played and how we experienced them.”
For some reason, he said ok. And now he’s stuck listening to my endless rants and ravings about not just games but also our lil publication.
Building Something Real
From there, we mainly started posting on Twitter. We also booted up Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, all for future plans we had. But honestly, we weren't posting a ton. If I’m being honest we posted about ten articles in the first six months, which isn't great, but we didn't really know what we had or where we wanted to go.
After that, I decided to start writing more often and really finish the games I'd started. Sadly, to that point, I was a serial gaming starter. I'd begin twenty games and maybe finish one and as a result of committing to this, I finished much more than that and was able to write about them too. Reviews, opinion pieces, whatever else. And that really helped me connect with this hobby and world more than I thought. I felt like a kid again experiencing Rome in Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood or shooting lighting from my fingertips across buildings in New Marais.
Fast forward maybe nine months into this thing, and we started to realize there were more things we wanted to do. It wasn't possible just between the two of us. So I asked Virgo's younger brother, and we also reached out to some people we'd made friends with online, asking if they wanted to write too. Thankfully, they said yes.
Right now, we're basically zero cash flow. But that's totally okay because I'm super proud of what we've been able to build. In those nine months since expanding, we've essentially put out three times the articles we put out as just two people. We've grown into posting more news content, covering more and more things. Now Life is a Game Magazine is something we can stand behind and it will continue to grow from there.
Building Community
I try my best to respond to all the comments we get, whether they're in Discord or on Twitter or Instagram, wherever else they might be. I want you to get that feeling of what it was like to actually talk to somebody who's playing games and I want you to know I appreciate every piece of interaction and every person who’s been a part of our community no matter how long.
These days I also post clips of the games I play and the writers we've brought on post clips of the games they're playing. The idea behind this was to give you a genuine understanding and feel for what we're playing and what we think about it. It's not just words on a page. You actually know that we are “gamer” whatever that might mean these days.
Hopefully that gives you a sense of belonging to a community that we've tried really hard to build.
What's Next
Thanks to all of you over the past two months, we've had our two best months ever. It doesn't look like it's going to slow down anytime soon. And I can't wait to see what's next.
Maybe someday we'll have the chance to cover and write about some even more really awesome stuff for you guys in the future.
