GameDevelopers.ie is now offline

gamedevelopers.ie went live in March 2003 and was launched in April 2003 in the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin.

It was prompted by the findings of a postdoctoral research project funded by the Irish Resaerch Council for Humanities and Social Sciences and conducted by Dr. Aphra Kerr in DCU (2001-2002).

The website was initially funded by Nokia and O2 and two multimedia students from DCU – Paul May and John Lynch – designed and developed the site.

Later Demonware supported the website and associated activities. Along the way lots of other local organisations and companies supported events, awards and helped to pay for the day to day expenses.

It was always a volunteer run site. And it was the users and volunteers who made gamedevelopers.ie what it was. For a while it was an active online space to find jobs, network and support local game developers in Ireland.

With the development of social media we moved to a wordpress site and linked social media including twitter. But things have moved on again.

There is now an active local membership organisation – Imirt – that provides support and up to date information to local game developers.

There are also many small groups, gamejams and other meet ups in cities around the country using various communication platforms such as Discord. On Slack you will find IrishGameDev if you have a pro account.

As a result, the site has been closed. As the site has been such a long-standing website, it is heavily archived in the Wayback Machine where you will be able to browse through the content on the site. We have taken a full backup of the wordpress site, so should somoene in the future want to bring the site online, we'll retain the capability to do so.

We are archiving gamedevelopers.ie as part of a larger European project on the history and culture of creative media. The GRADE project is networking with groups around Europe and we will run some events to explore how the Irish history of creative computing sits with histories in other European countries.

Thank you for all your support over the years, and a special thank you to the people who administered the site, fixed the technical bugs, fought the bots and made our shindigs a friendly place to meet others.

For anyone who is looking to contact Dr. Aphra Kerr, you can email her at aphra [dot] kerr [at] ucd [dot] ie or if you have any interest in the #IrishGameDev Timeline or #IrishGameDev map, reach out to Jamie McCormick on LinkedIn

Thanks to everyone who made GameDevelopers.ie the heart of the community since 2003, and the admin team is delighted to have played a part in fostering the Irish Games Industry that has evolved over the past two decades.