The Newsletter is Evolving!

The GamesIndustry.biz Newsletter has been one of this website's key pillar's for a long time - certainly since before I joined in 2007. Unfortunately, while the site itself has changed quite a bit in that time, the newsletter itself hasn't - so in roughly a month we'll be updating it!

As a basic means of communication the newsletter will still feature those things you'd expect it to - principally, the day's main news and feature content. But because email clients have become more complex - and less friendly to regular mail-outs - we've decided to streamline the design a fair amount to make it easier to read, regardless of how or where you receive it.

However - simply changing what we send you isn't the whole story, as historically the mailer we've used doesn't work hand-in-hand with our Network profiles. What that means is that while you can set your receipt preferences on your account profile, the system doesn't necessarily recognise that just yet...

There are also a lot of people who have signed up to the newsletter but aren't registered with us - or people that are registered but signed up with a different email address. To make everything easier, we're bringing everything in under one new in-house mailer that's driven only by Network account preferences - which means that when we make the switch, anybody not registered will no longer receive the newsletter.

Obviously, if you're reading this, that's not going to affect you - and if you'd rather not receive the newsletter to your work email account, you'll still be able to set up an alternative address to send to. But if you have set your profile to receive the newsletter, and you're wondering why you're not... then the problem should be resolved in early September.

Around that time we'll also be adding a new opt-out for additional news alerts - these will be restricted to pieces of content which we feel are particularly important and relevant to certain sectors, and that we'd like to let you know about over and above the regular newsletter email.

For example, we might have an interview with the CEO of a top retail chain, with content that we feel would be specifically of interest to the publishing sector - so we'd send anybody with an industry account that works in publishing an email to highlight that content.

We're not going to do it very often, and we'll make sure it's kept targeted to avoid spam - but of course, if you don't want to receive those alerts all you'll need to do once the changes take effect is opt-out on your profile. We'll also send a message to everybody via the Network when the changes are made, so we won't suddenly change it by stealth!

Those are just a couple of changes happening with the site in the next month or so - as ever, we're always keen to hear feedback, so you can either leave a comment here, or message me directly.