So long, 2020, and thanks for all the fish food | Creature Comforts

We're off until the new year, but figured our readers could use one more gallery of developer pet pictures before we go

Feature by Brendan Sinclair Managing Editor

Published on Dec. 24, 2020

Welp, this is it. Unless big news breaks, this should be the last article that GamesIndustry.biz publishes in 2020, and we can think of no better way to wrap it up than with a Creature Comforts column.

But before we get to the pet pictures, lets dig into the data. Here's a chart pulled from our 2020 Year in Numbers feature showing the breakdown of pet pictures from the first five Creature Comforts columns:

Yes, GamesIndustry.biz is a respected and credible journalism outlet, why do you ask?

There are some caveats here. First, we're dealing with a small sample size of just 457 pets, so there's only so much confidence we can have in our takeaways. Second, we recognize that the avenues we are soliciting pet pictures through -- asking for submissions on Twitter and in these columns, asking PR people to compile pics from their clients/employers -- may be biasing the results. Frankly, we suspect a much larger contingent of you has resorted to putting googly eyes on household appliances and treating them as pets, but our outreach efforts have simply missed this cohort thus far.

I mean, we can't even make a "This industry has gone to the dogs" joke with any authority, given that this sixth Creature Comforts column features 100 pets, more than half of which are cats. Clearly, more data is needed before we can draw firm conclusions.

Unfortunately, what we can say a bit more authoritatively is that we have gone through our backlog of games industry pet pictures. If you've submitted a pet pic and haven't seen it despite a thorough search of the Creature Comforts archives, there are a few reasons we might not have run it. It may have been too small or low-resolution. We might not have had all the information we needed to attribute it. We might have just messed up and misplaced it.

Or you might have submitted dozens and dozens of pictures of the same pet, which was very much appreciated and made our days nicer, but we felt we could really only run one picture per pet in the interest of fairness. (If this applies to you, please don't feel called out here; you had lots of company.)

Regardless, our supply of Creature Comforts pictures is low, but we think demand for them will remain high well into 2021. If you're able to help, please send your pet pictures -- along with the pets' names and your name and title -- to news@gamesindustry.biz.

Thank you for your help, take care, and best wishes for 2021 from the GamesIndustry.biz team.