Like many people working in and around entertainment industry, I’m apprehensive going into 2009. Videogames are a product of affluence and, while they do fulfill a common need in all of us, escapism, there are cheaper ways to escape a recession.

Studio closures and downsizing, however removed from the world of the consumer press they might appear, have discernible knock-on effects and, at very least, are indicative of a shrinking of the market. At the end of 2008 I lost a regular freelance contract with Yahoo. The site’s recent losses hit those of us at the end of the food chain first and so my last piece of (regular) writing about videogames for them goes live this week.

It’s not all doom and gloom though as Eurogamer has asked me to be put on a retainer this year, along with some other freelancers, writing around one piece a week for them. This new arrangement will slightly reduce the quantity of writing I’ll need to do each month but, because of the audience, will hopefully increase its fidelity.

In other news, this month I’ve freelanced for Official Xbox 360 Magazine for the first time. Working through my first review for the magazine has reminded me of just how much extra page content you have to put together for mainstream consumer mags compared to websites. Box outs, uppers/ downers, ‘Did you know’ call outs, standfirsts and so on and so on make the process of writing a 600-word review far more time consuming than it would be for an equivalent website.

But I do enjoy the tight word count restrictions that print journalism imposes. It demand succinctness, forcing you to distill your thoughts, a process that inevitably makes you a better writer, building muscles that online journalism rarely touches.

I continue to write pretty much every month for Edge (the magazine, not the website) which I still love even though there are no bylines and I’m not allowed to mention what I’ve written to anybody. I began reading the magazine while I was in school and started writing for it almost as soon as I left university, something I’ve continued with only a couple of short breaks since. As such the magazine’s become something of a comforting constant in my life, an institution that’s had as much influence on my development as school or the BBC, as ridiculous as that might seem to say of a magazine about videogames. Edge has contributed to me much more than I’ve contributed to it, and long may that continue.

My fortnightly column for GameSetWatch will continue into 2009 for as long as I can keep coming up with things to say. I kind of wish I’d picked a tighter brief when I first started. Being free to write about anything and everything has been fun, and has allowed me to take some risks I would never otherwise have taken, but a framework can help a lot when you’re groping blind for an idea.

Because I still do a lot of game reviewing and critiquing I like to use the column as a place to concentrate on the stories that spring out of and surround games, rather than get into heavy discussion of the medium. As I get older I’m interested in the things that happen because of games at least as much as what happens within them and I’d like to keep exploring that through the column. That said, I’m thinking of writing some overreaching fan fiction for my next one, so pretty much ignore everything I just wrote.

And of course, beyond writing about videogames there’s my work at Littleloud, producing Flash games for various clients. We have solid work up until March, creating content for the Danish Tourist Board, the Science Museum, and the new Watchmen movie as well as our first self-funded iPhone title. The BAFTA we won for Bow Street Runner was a big confidence boost for what is a very small studio and the hope is that this success will lead to a follow up project with Channel 4, building upon the systems and ideas we laid out in the first game. However, the broadcaster’s in no small amount of turmoil at the moment, so whether a project will materialise this year or not remains to be seen.

But while I’m apprehensive about the New Year I’m also thankful for everything that’s going on. I can pay my mortgage each month and feed my family and I have a copy of Rock Band in the cupboard so life, for now, is good. This year I’ll turn thirty, a transition that demands introspection, but I’ll try to keep that soul-searching as separate from this website as I can. 2008 was an excellent year for Chewing Pixels, readership at the end of the year almost four times as much as it was at the start. So I’ll keep trying to update as regularly as I can and hopefully you’ll keep reading and we’ll see where we get to this time next year. Ok, let’s go.