Hello, fellow travelers! Welcome back to Respawn Station. The start of this year marked our four-year anniversary and a lot has happened in that time. During the pandemic, we started this site as a way to write about video games. Since then, we’ve had the pleasure of working with numerous developers and publishers. Some of them were new and surprised us with games that we didn’t expect to fall in love with and some of them had been making games we’ve loved since we were kids.
Now this might seem like a doom and gloom post with a rather ominous title but I want to assure you that is not the case. However, we want to be transparent in what we do and, truth be told, things aren’t great either.
I won’t say this is entirely to blame, but last year, with the rollout of Google’s new AI summary tool Gemini, we saw a decline in readership. As a small indie games media site, we were already punching above our class against publications like IGN and GameSpot, but we were able to get a few first-page results that brought in a steady stream of readers. That is no longer the case. We still have a few hundred people visit our site every week but it’s a fraction of what we used to get on a daily basis. And that’s not even taking into account the influx of spam bots that hit our comments often with messages that we have to manually vet and remove.
I won’t go out and make generalizations about the state of games media but it’s no secret that in 2025, it’s a hard medium to break into.
However, through it all, one thing has not changed: how much we love video games. In March of 2024, we launched The Respawn Station Podcast and for 36 straight weeks, we kept up with it. We proved to ourselves that we could make a weekly show happen. In late 2024, we took a brief hiatus for personal reasons but we are back and excited to get back into the swing of things.
Our new, rebooted, podcast will be launching this month. It has the same two hosts, Sri Kandula and Nick Sivak, but it will have a new look and be uploaded to a new channel. The goal of Chumbag TV is to create weekly content that ranges from challenge videos and commentaries to podcasts. (All mostly centered around movies, video games, etc). By releasing our podcast to this new home we are both consolidating our channels (no one wants a bunch of channels clogging up their subscription page) and reaching a bigger audience than we’ve ever had before.
That brings us to the website. As we shift our focus to more video content, we do not want to abandon ship here. While we enjoy casual conversations about video games, we also can’t forget the power and impact of a carefully worded review or a well-thought-out opinion piece. However, our written content will undoubtedly change this year.
Our team does what it does because we enjoy doing it. Not for the money. (Not a single penny from this site has made it into any of our pockets.) We published over 100 articles last year and all the revenue we generated goes back into keeping the site up and crowdfunding cool indie games. Our goal is to keep doing that. We just hope you’re all willing to join us on the ride.
Like we stated at the top, this is not all bad news. In fact, as we step into this new chapter of Respawn Station, we are more excited than ever at the type of content we can create. Most of our team comes from a film/video background and, if anything, we’re just now getting into our comfort zone. To the developers, publishers, and PR teams who have partnered with us over the years and shared their incredible games with us, we are not out of the business and we look forward to working with you even more.
After all, we are Respawn Station. Every time we go down, it just means we’re coming back stronger!
