If you've been online this week, you've probably seen the buzz around CONTINUE, a new Australian gaming magazine that hit its Kickstarter funding target in seven hours. By the next morning, it had smashed past AU$44,000. What started as a crowdfunding campaign quickly became a statement: Australian readers are starving for real games journalism.
Here's what nobody's talking about: despite Australia's gaming industry being worth $4.4 billion, the country now has almost no professional, specialised games coverage. Kotaku Australia is gone. Hyper magazine shut down. Game Informer Australia packed up. Good Game vanished. Even ScreenPLAY, once a fixture of Australian gaming media, is a memory.
This collapse matters because games are everywhere now. They're not niche entertainment; they're culture. They shape how millions of Australians socialise, compete, create and spend money. Yet the outlets that once covered the industry with depth and personality have been systematically dismantled, replaced by AI-generated slop on sites that used to matter.
Enter CONTINUE. It's being created by Mark Serrels, who once ran Kotaku Australia before Nine Entertainment shuttered it along with Gizmodo and VICE, and Jackson Ryan, a journalist who has written for Kotaku, the Official Nintendo Magazine, CNET and The New York Times. They're not going it alone either. The first issue includes contributions from Alanah Pearce, Ruby Innes, Ally McLean, James O'Connor, Jini Maxwell, Ben Armstrong, Dan Golding and Dan Van Boom. That's serious firepower.
The magazine launches in print in August, with a deliberate strategy: focus on the art, culture and criticism that digital media abandoned. No clickbait. No algorithmic nonsense. Just long-form writing about games and why they matter.
The speed with which CONTINUE funded isn't just about reader appetite. It's a referendum on the state of Australian media. The country's gaming industry is booming, yet the coverage has contracted to almost nothing. When mainstream publications cut games coverage, it's because they don't see the value. But readers clearly do.
Whether CONTINUE succeeds long-term depends on whether crowdfunding can sustain serious games journalism. The early answer is: plenty of people think it can. The question now is whether they're right.