After the Philly Game Forge announced it was calling it quits, Philadelphia Game Lab’s Nathan Solomon took to his personal blog to reflect on his decision to not to open a shared work space for game developers.
“I would go so far as to say that it is impossible at this point to create a shared space in games in Philadelphia that would reliably benefit developers enough as to allow them to both pay $300 [in membership] and earn a living,” Solomon writes.
The relatively small size of the community, the tough process of finding an appropriate site and the lack of financial support from the city, argues Solomon, conspired against the creation of a physical space for game devs.
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Solomon also opens up about another factor of the equation: his struggle with a slow-moving form of lung cancer diagnosed in 2013.
“For a bunch of that time, I didn’t think I was likely to live to see much of the next year,” Solomon wrote. “I did, and am fine now, but it added to the stress of what had to be a January 2014 opening for Philadelphia Game Labs.”
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