Like it or not, 2024 is almost over, and Indieventure is closing out the year with a trilogy of episodes looking back on our recent experiences of the games industry. We're saving the more targeted analysis of the year in games and of course our big GOTY reveal for the two episodes due out in December, but today we're starting out with a more general question: how has working in games media impacted our experiences of gaming as a hobby?

What starts out as a light-hearted "day in the life of a games journalist" chat quickly turns into a group therapy session where we go into a fairly serious examination of the realities of working in games media in the 2020s, both good and bad. This is less a chat about specific games and more an overview of games media trends both visible and invisible to the audience, so if you've ever wanted to hear some inside baseball delivered from the Indieventure trio's perspective, here's your chance. We promise the mood gets lighter over the rest of the holiday season episodes, but we're glad we got all this off our chests!

This episode also includes our final pre-GOTY "what we've been playing" round-up, in which Rachel gives a spoiler-free overview of Rise of the Golden Idol; Rebecca catches up on the long-awaited full release of Phoenix Springs; and despite spending much of the past month on another continent, Liam has somehow put another 10 hours into Factorio following the launch of the Space Age expansion.

Last but not least, our hyperfixations for this episode see Liam geeking out over the Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Documentary, Rebecca enjoying "Somewhere Beyond the Sea" by TJ Klune (the sequel to a Season Zero hyperfixation, "The House in the Cerulean Sea"), and Rachel discovering an amazing TV channel called Mech+ which appears to only show reruns of Robot Wars and it turns out we're all very here for that.

Our music was written and performed by Ollie Newbury! Find him on Instagram at @newbsmusic. Meanwhile, you can find us at indieventurepodcast.co.uk or wherever you listen to podcasts, and don't forget that you can now join our dedicated Discord too!