Noisy Pixel 6th Anniversary: How a Bunch of Nerds Launched a Website

In 2013, at the age of 24, I began volunteering at Operation Rainfall. After being away from gaming for several years, I stumbled upon the Neptunia and Atelier series, which reignited my passion for the hobby. Searching online for others who had discovered these niche games, I remember my first visits to Siliconera and Gematsu—sites covering games I never knew existed. These were titles you wouldn’t find on GameStop posters or on the pages of Game Informer, and I felt a strong desire to discuss them. This eventually led me to volunteer at Operation Rainfall with one goal: to change the gaming industry.

I don’t expect you to read this entire article unless you really want to know how Noisy Pixel started, but please consider supporting us on Patreon. We want to survive. We don’t want to do more; we just want to do what we currently are to the best of our ability, but we’re going to need your help. Now, back to the post.

My heroes were Greg Miller, Colin Moriarty, and Ryan Clements. They each brought a unique voice to the industry, but I realized that if I wanted to find my place, it wouldn’t be in an area already dominated by these larger personalities. At Operation Rainfall, I delved deeper into niche gaming communities. After attending my first E3 in 2015, I began making connections with publishers to build not only Operation Rainfall’s brand but also my own. This led me to join DualShockers—a move that didn’t change my volunteer status but did ensure that people were actually reading my articles.

Here’s the thing about these editorial-only enthusiast websites: they are home to some of the best gamers in the industry. These people wake up, go to their day jobs, and come home to write about the day’s news or work on a review. It’s entirely fueled by passion. They don’t get paid and likely don’t even ask for compensation outside of a free game code or airfare to an event. This was me. Based in California, I was one of the few West Coast writers willing to pay my own way to events. Since I didn’t have a car, I would take a two-hour train ride to San Francisco or Los Angeles to participate in preview events. I would share hostel rooms with strangers to save money at events like GDC and E3, and I was having fun.

Sadly, “fun” doesn’t pay the bills, and I quickly racked up upwards of $30,000 in debt while writing in the games industry for five years. I was in college then, but after graduating, I landed a job at a PR agency in Oakland. It was 2017, and I didn’t have a place to live there, but I had purchased my first car earlier that year and decided to live in it. I lived in that car for almost a year, paying off the debt I had accumulated and telling myself that I wouldn’t be uncomfortable for too long. Shortly after finding a room to rent, I was fired from the agency—it wasn’t a good fit. However, during that time, as I spent hours playing old Game Boy Advance games in cafes until bedtime, I felt the urge to write about games again.

The name “Noisy Pixel” has no real significance to me from a definitional standpoint. When I was 22, I lived in the basement of my friend’s house. It was full of band members and emo kids—some of my best friends lived there. One day, after I mentioned wanting to start a podcast about video games, my roommate Colby suggested “Noisy Pixel.” If I remember correctly, it was because he liked the name but had no plans to do anything with it. So, I started the Noisy Pixel Podcast shortly after, which I think still exists on the internet somewhere. When deciding on a name for my blog, Noisy Pixel was all I could think of.

Around this time, I connected with a DualShockers colleague, Jordan Boyd, who expressed interest in starting an enthusiast gaming site with a video angle named “The Potion Shop,” which I remember not liking as much as Noisy Pixel. He introduced me to Mark DiMattei, and the idea that this could be a real thing started to make sense to me. Mark eventually came up with a logo that we all liked. I never gave him any direction other than “we need a logo,” and that’s what he came up with. As co-owners, I believe we work well together in that aspect. I’m terrible at explaining Point A to Point B and typically only mention Point B when asking for something—a horrible habit I try to avoid. But Mark’s independent nature meshed well with mine from day one. Our work ethic on the website could be described as militant. We had a clear goal about what we wanted, and we knew the only way to achieve it was to sit at our computers for hours and figure it out.

Brad Crespo became our first Editor-in-Chief. Brad discovered Noisy Pixel shortly after our launch and reached out with excitement about it. Like Mark, Brad understood the sacrifices he’d have to make to grow this website. Having Brad as Editor-in-Chief was essential to the growth of Noisy Pixel. I could only describe him as a much better version of me. We have the same work ethic, but he’s so much sweeter. Brad solidified Noisy Pixel as a place that covered press releases in a way others weren’t. His voice and energy became the foundation of the attitude and personality that Noisy Pixel still has today, and I don’t think we would have survived our first year if it weren’t for him.

The next goal I had for Noisy Pixel was to get on Metacritic. Years prior, I was able to get DualShockers on Metacritic, so I knew the process. But Noisy Pixel—getting maybe 1,000 visitors a month at the time—had a lot of work to do. Here’s what we did: Metacritic requires four game reviews to calculate an average. However, many indie games sometimes don’t get that many reviews, which hurts Metacritic’s reach in some cases. Noisy Pixel launched with the idea that we’d review anything we wanted. I stopped playing my preferred genre and became surface-level good at everything if only to form proper reviews for lesser-known games. It was this tactic that gave us an edge with the review aggregator.

Before we got on Metacritic—before I even reached out to them—I might have fluffed our impact on the gaming community to publishers and PR teams. Our first year was important, and I wanted everyone to believe that Noisy Pixel was as great as I knew we were. The last thing I wanted these people to know was that I was up until 3 a.m. every day editing videos that got less than 100 views. I truly manifested this goal and believed in our success. A year after launch, we were on Metacritic, and a few months after that, we were monetized on YouTube.

The purpose of this post was to highlight Noisy Pixel’s first year. Watching its success is fun, but my efforts to change the industry are often put on hold as I check emails from journalists who have just lost their jobs. I feel Noisy Pixel isn’t a place for these brilliant writers. Since launch, our staff has been composed of gamers who aren’t technically writers. Each time they pick a game to review, they’re excited about it, and I’m excited they get to participate and see this side of the industry. Some of my favorite moments are seeing a writer react to their first preview event or interview, but at this point, this isn’t something we can live off of.

As the dark days of Google’s algorithm update closed in, I believe our current Editor-in-Chief, Orpheus Joshua (Bailey Seemangal), ultimately allowed us to keep the doors open on our editorial side. His love of games and knowledge of specific game details resonated with our audience in a way that no one else had. He created editorials about his interests and slowly built a community around that. Bailey’s self-motivation matched Mark’s and mine, and we saw a path forward through editorial, regardless of whether some of the games we cover don’t always get significant traffic.

Here’s where Noisy Pixel differs. While huge companies are tracking search algorithms to decide what they’ll ask their writers to cover daily, we are free to cover it all. If I had it my way, our home page news feed would have a new batch of articles every time you checked in throughout the day. I understand what gaming can mean to someone. I’m sorry, but I doubt the CEOs of Gamurs or Ziff Davis are genuinely in touch with what gamers want. And it’s hardly a secret. Gamers want to hang out with other gamers and talk about games they love or learn about new games they didn’t know existed. It’s the same thing I did in 2013 between college classes: refreshing the pages of IGN, waiting for Naomi Kyle and Jessica Chobot to tell me all about the mainstream news of the day on the Daily Fix.

These companies don’t have the option to just ride the wave to profits. Shareholders and other interest groups likely force them to innovate, drive new trends, and monopolize the most profitable thing we all have: time. However, in 2024, time isn’t necessarily enough. Traffic alone isn’t enough to pay the website staff and owners. This is when subscription models, sponsorships, and other forms of marketing are developed to generate the extra income needed—until even that isn’t enough, and we see some of our favorite websites shut down as a result.

I’ve never taken a business loan for Noisy Pixel. This entire website is self-funded by the many hours that Mark, Bailey, Colin, Michael, Pyre, Jahanzeb, Ivanir, Semy, Yuna, Camille, Arthur, Cool Victor, and every writer who has come through here has put into its success. Mark and I have never taken a payment from the funds generated by ads, and many of our writers are still volunteers. When Google’s HCU hit us, I was forced to tell my paid staff that I could no longer pay them, and it broke me. Noisy Pixel went from getting 1.9 million unique hits a month to 100k—all happening across four months. When it was good, though, it was good. We were finally making money after four years of putting everything into this; we were able to pay off most of the debt we had accrued over the previous four years. So, in January of 2024, when we were at our lowest, I didn’t have to shut down the entire site. Around then, we decided to go all in one more time with our current redesign.

Ten months later, Noisy Pixel is getting to a better place, but it’s not over yet. Mark, Bailey, and I each have other jobs that we work to stay alive on top of running Noisy Pixel. It’s hard, but we see so much potential in this community and brand that we can easily snap back to the mindset of our second year, where the validation that we put out a good piece was all we needed. Unlike some websites, we never designed Noisy Pixel around a Patreon or subscription model. We put all of our time into making Noisy Pixel what it is. To this day, I edit videos Sunday through Tuesday, and Mark edits Wednesday through Friday while I handle the audio. The video arm of Noisy Pixel has always been my pride, joy, and nightmare. Do you wonder why a lot of websites don’t do it? Because it’s freaking hard.

It’s sad to say, but eventually, we will need your help. Outside of probably me, our staff isn’t super loud online. While we didn’t all roll a natural 20 in charisma like some of our other colleagues, what I can tell you is that with your support, you can rest assured you’re supporting a group of nerds like yourself. Don’t get me wrong, though—we are very good at what we do, which is covering the most fantastic video games, producing excellent features and interviews, and doing way too many reviews, but we’re doing it as gamers.

Please check out our Patreon, where you can access our Unqualified Game Chat weekly podcast early. The more support we get there, the more we can dedicate to growing our Patreon offerings with some of the ideas for which we wish we could quit our day jobs.

Thank you for reading this far. Noisy Pixel is a place for gamers to discover video games. We cover all the big releases, but our goal has always been to introduce new games to gamers. Sure, Roblox and Fortnite coverage gets clicks, but I don’t see myself or anyone on staff writing about those games. There’s hope for the future, whether through Patreon—which you should subscribe to—or sponsorships of games that we would have likely covered anyway. Navigating the future is going to be difficult.

The industry is changing, and I expect all parts of it to adjust along with it. Developers, publishers, PR teams, and writers must all figure out how to navigate the future of games coverage. That said, I’ve never been good at waiting, so Noisy Pixel will continue to raise the bar for independent games coverage, excelling in both editorial and video content where, I’ll say, we are unmatched by our competitors. We will continue to work with our community and refine the way we cover games to stand out in this industry. Thank you for everything.

Here’s to another year, nerds.