All good things must come to an end...
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,
After two-and-a-half years of hard work and wonderful memories, it is our sad, sad duty to inform you all that Doublejump’s journey has come to a close. Although we have loved covering the video game industry over the past 30 months and wish that we could have continued doing so until Doublejump became a household name, fatigue, financial issues and personal circumstances have arisen and we have realised that it would be very difficult to keep this website running at the level that it is today.
We founded Doublejump alongside our friend Luke Larobina as a passion project in 2012, with no capital, no experience, no prior knowledge, no way to get any of it aside from just going ahead, and that’s exactly what we did; building and preparing ourselves to run the site over the next ten months before officially launching Version One on November 9, 2012 (the linked archive is from a month later) - the day before Jake’s final exam that year.
Since that day, we’ve had countless meetings that have started out as work and devolved (or evolved, whichever way you look at it) into conversations, debates and full-on arguments about the industry we cover, late meals, late nights and early mornings, stayed up all night on Skype telling increasingly-stupid jokes to try and keep one another awake so that we could cover E3 live, and so many other memories; those memories might have been gruelling and hellish to create, but they’re memories that neither of us would trade for anything - except, maybe, a helper robot that runs websites for you!
Of course, we knew that there would be challenges and difficulties, and we knew that we would have to do a lot of learning and research into the video games industry itself while we were running Doublejump (between us, we quite literally learned something new every day), but we sure as hell didn’t expect the phenomenal level of support that we’ve received from our families, friends and readers. As we write this message, Doublejump reaches just over 5,000 unique users per month (that was actually one of our “reach this by June” goals, so yay!) and its community totals over 1,500 accounts across social media and the forum that we love so much.
All of that from absolutely nothing, raised by little other than word-of-mouth. It’s crazy.
With that being said, all of those numbers and all of those memories aren’t just ours. We’ve had a fantastic group of people walk in and out of Doublejump’s revolving door over the past 30 months, contributing development assistance, news and feature articles, reviews and their presences in the community without asking for a single, solitary cent in return. Although naming them all would have us here for hours, we would like to highlight those who have stuck around and been there for us until the end and whose contributions have made this site a much, much better place:
Alex O’Neill, who joined our staff late last year, skyrocketed through our ranks to become a Senior Writer, and has always been up for not only a challenge, but the opportunity to help us out when we’ve needed it the most.
Contributors Cavan Gallagher and Scott Battye, two phenomenal writers who have contributed a number of high-quality features and reviews to our cause, giving us some awesome platforms for discussion with our community and those around it.
Chris Borg, who has been our sole Patron over on Patreon and whose funding has helped us stay on top of our hosting and domain costs.
Our Developer, Lucas Psarogiannis, who we met when we had to rush back into Jake’s workplace during a meeting because he forgot to grab the caramel macaron that his co-worker was adamant that he’d enjoy (he did, and now he wants another one) and without whose incredible web development skills Doublejump would not look as damn spiffy as it does right now.
Our Street Team (Joseph Castle, Patrick Javier, Rhys Antonio and Trevor Zyla), a group of close friends and former staff members that we formed just last month and have supported the ever-living crap out of this website since that point. Without you guys, our community wouldn’t have started to grow as it did over the past couple of months, and we can’t thank you enough for that unbridled support.
We would also like to say a massive thank you to those who have supported Doublejump over the past couple of years, be it by liking or sharing one post or one hundred, buying merchandise or simply telling friends about the website and getting them behind it. There are far too many of you to name right here, but every notification we’ve received that you’ve read and liked our content has put a smile on our faces and reinforced that our effort was worth it. We must especially mention our families, who have put up with our stress and work schedules just so that we could make this website the best thing that it could be (Jake’s parents, Diane and Tony, even went against their long-standing hatred of Facebook and made accounts just to like every post).
The website will remain live until next June, when we will have archived it, saved our documents, constructed our portfolios and prepared to move onto the next chapters in our lives. Merchandise, however, will remain available for the rest of time, as it costs us nothing to keep available and it’s really friggin’ comfortable.
There isn’t much else to say, really, other than that we are incredibly proud of what Doublejump has achieved over the past few years, and that we have absolutely zero regrets aside from the fact that we have had to bring the journey to an end so very abruptly. We wish that we could have stuck around and seen where this thing would take us, but life unfortunately has a way of putting lemons into the most resistant hands and we’ve got to deal with that.
Whether you’ve been a part of our community for days, weeks, months or years, we thank you all endlessly for the love, care and support that you’ve given us, and we hope to see you around to thank you in person.
Abir Chowdhury and Jake Colosimo
Founders, Managers and Editors
Doublejump
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