GamesIndustry International launches

Those of you who follow the Eurogamer gang on Twitter may have noticed us rambling into the early hours yesterday evening - and not just those of us out at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Yep, even the home fires were burning this weekend as we put the finishing touches on GamesIndustry International, the new home of our sister sites GamesIndustry.biz and IndustryGamers.com.

Founded in 2002, GamesIndustry.biz is our trade website. Whereas Eurogamer.net serves people who play games and care about why they're interesting (and people who want to see Camaros in Battlefield), GamesIndustry.biz is a place where people who work in the games business and associated industries can read about things from that perspective. Last year we brought US site IndustryGamers.com into the same family - what GamesIndustry.biz did for the European games trade, IndustryGamers.com was also doing for a massive US audience.

Given their shared remit, it made sense to unite the two under one banner, and that's what we've done today. The new site is edited by Matt Martin in Europe and James Brightman in the US and is updated by full-time teams in the UK, New York and San Francisco, allowing the guys to stay on top of trade issues around the clock.

Whereas GamesIndustry.biz access was restricted to people who work in the trade, GamesIndustry International is open to everyone, although if you do work in the games industry then you can register to join in the industry-only discussions, use networking tools and look up contacts in the massive company directory.

The site is also host to a revamped global jobs board. GamesIndustry.biz and IndustryGamers.com both had massive regional jobs boards and the united one is a good place for employers and individuals to shop around for new faces or new horizons. (For those of you who used it before, we've made some changes that should make it easier to use.)

And like Eurogamer, the new GamesIndustry International site autodetects your device when you visit, so it should format itself nicely to your desktop or mobile device.

If you're looking for a reason to head over there, there's an interesting podcast featuring Paulina Bozek, Mark Sorrell and Will Luton on the subject of Kickstarter campaigns and the industry's gender imbalance, and there's an intriguing look at the Indian games business in the site's Emerging Markets series.

Regardless, a lot of people worked very hard to put it together, so I know the team would appreciate it if you popped over to take a look. And given that I was one of the people taping my eyelids open in the office until 1am, I would be with them on that one! Thank you in advance if you can take the time.