For well over a decade, a sizable percentage of our marketing resources has been allocated to the publishing of high-level strategy and tournament-related content. However, in recent years, the overall effectiveness of our publishing such content has decreased substantially due to a lack of in-person events, Wizards of the Coast (WotC) significantly reducing their investments in both competitive Magic: The Gathering play and the concept of the professional Magic player, and a variety of other situations that our content creators, editorial team and Company simply have no control over.
During this time, we tried to stick with a slightly modified version of our same content publishing model, but doing so resulted in our content publishing division losing a substantial amount of money in each of the last two years. Sticking with that same plan for a third year wasn’t an option, and in order to address the issue, I realized that we were going to have to make some significant changes to our content publishing model. Unfortunately, I also realized that doing so would require making some incredibly difficult choices.
And while I 100% support Cedric Phillips’ desire to pursue his personal passions and do what he believes will make him happy, his informing me of his intention to move on from his Content Coordinator position in order to do so around this same time further complicated what was already an extremely complex puzzle.
Discussions were had, decisions were made, and a number of our content creators were recently informed that we would no longer be able to continue publishing their content after the end of February.
Out of respect for our relationships with the affected content creators, I chose the end of February in order to try and provide each with as much notice of the forthcoming change as possible, a reasonable amount of time to prepare farewell content if they wish to do so, and as much time as possible to find another home(s) for their content… which we continue to think very highly of, and hope to be able to publish again someday. I also opted not to include their names in this announcement, but let each know that they are welcome to communicate the news to their fans themselves if they wish to do so.
Around that same time, we will be debuting some new article series covering a variety of non-strategy/tournament-related topics, and updating our content publishing model to one in which all article content published on our Star City Games website is once again free to read, and no longer published behind a paywall. This will create a temporary situation in which our Premium Membership benefits “only” include a 5% discount on Magic: The Gathering sealed products, 10% discount on all card singles, and 15% discount on all supplies, but we will soon be adding some new Premium membership benefits that we believe will be incredibly popular. Stay tuned, as more details will be announced shortly.
Thank you for your continued support of both Star City Games, and all of the incredibly talented content creators that we’ve had the pleasure of working with over the years.