RPS Game Club will return again in January 2024

We'd love to hear your feedback on this year's game picks, too

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun

News by Katharine Castle Editor-in-chief

Published on Nov. 6, 2023

Hello folks. A small bit of RPS Game Club news today. Since it's starting to get toward end of the year season, Game Club will be taking a short break for the next two months. That means we won't be running it this month (November), or next month (December). We will, however, be returning with a fresh set of monthly game selections in 2024, so you can look forward to more group play-a-longs and liveblog chats early next year.

In the meantime, though, we hope you've enjoyed this first year's outing of the RPS Game Club, and we'd love to get some feedback on it for how we can improve next year. Regardless of whether you're a regular Game Clubber or have only ever watched it from afar, please come and join in the discussion below to help us make it even better.

What kind of games would you like to see in Game Club next year?

When I first outlined RPS Game Club at the start of the year, I said we were going to focus primarily on free or cheap games in order to make it as accessible to people as possible. We mostly stuck to that initial rule, but we also ended up picking a lot of stuff that was on Game Pass as well. A lot of us on the team have Game Pass subscriptions, and even a month of PC Game Pass is often cheaper than picking a game that's, say, £15 as a one-off purchase.

Here's the full line-up of everything we played this year:

Would you like us to focus on more Game Pass games next year, to give you an excuse to finally get round to playing some of them? Or would you rather we stick to standalone games on Steam - and if so, what would you say is "too expensive" for you to consider joining in?

Obviously, cheaper games tend to go hand in hand with older games, rather than shiny new releases. Our mix this year still ended up being quite recent games (ranging from 2019 to present day), but would you like to see us go further back in time? And would you prefer for us to publish a schedule in advance so you can keep an eye out for games in sales etc, rather than them being announced on the first of every month? All feedback and comments on a comment postcard below!

Did you enjoy the extra articles we wrote about our Game Club picks?

It can be hard to make a community-focused project like Game Club stand out when you've got cascades of other posts going up every day, but to help foster that feeling of 'playing a game with everyone over the course of a month', we wrote a handful of extra features on our pick each month to help keep the discussion going, and also give you some extra things to think about between the announcement post at the start of the month and the liveblog discussion at the end of it. This varied between 2-4 articles each month, as that was about as much as we could manage between all of our other responsibilities, and my question to you is: would you like us to continue with this next year?

If you didn't like the features but would still like something to feel like we're all playing a game together, we could always shift our focus away from big long reads, for example, and create more question/debate-focused discussion posts for you to chat with other readers about that month's pick. As another example (and I'm just spit-balling here), we could do special editions of Ask RPS where we answer your specific questions about each month's pick, say. Equally, we could also strip it right back and just have a liveblog chat at the end of the month. Tell us what you'd like to see from Game Club during the rest of the month and we'll do our best to accommodate!

What would make our liveblogs better for you?

Some of you have said recently that the timings of our liveblogs often don't work for you, or are always at inconvenient times - which I'd like to fix if we can! Alas, we are somewhat bound by our UK working hours, which will naturally make most liveblog times quite early on in the day for those joining us from the US. Still, I will ask the question anyway: what would make you more likely to join in our monthly liveblog discussions?

(And yes, I know the recent design change to portion off your comments into a separate tab from the rest of the liveblog isn't ideal, and I'm going to email our tech team about it very soon to try and get them back to being on the same page as what we're writing - worry not!).

Equally: do you enjoy the liveblog as just a basic format/concept? Would you like to know what questions we'll be discussing in advance so you can have a think about things ahead of time? Or do you enjoy the slightly ad hoc nature of it all? I'd also be keen to know if you'd like to see more memebers of the RPS Treehouse stop by for a chat, as I believe it's usually just been the month's host and one other member of staff most times this year. I can't promise we'll be able to get lots of folks all in the same figurative room together, but again, we can try!

Any other thoughts/feedback are welcome!

I can obviously only speak for myself here, but I've really quite enjoyed getting Game Club off the ground this year, and I hope it's been fun for you as well, whether you're a liveblog regular or have just enjoyed seeing the additional articles we've written each month. But it's always good to know what else you've liked/loved/hated/mildly enjoyed/couldn't care less about. So if you have any other thoughts or feelings about Game Club as a whole, I'd love to hear about them.

Game Club will return in 2024!