Game Fan - Relaunch

Relaunch

After the bankruptcy of Fusion Publishing and the closure of Play, Dave Halverson immediately began work on his latest magazine, a relaunch of GameFan. The magazine returned to newsstands on April 2010, headed by Halverson and a few key staffers from Play with Rob Duenas serving as the new art director. It is available in print, being sold at newsstands across the United States. A digital version of the magazine is also available for sale directly through GameFan's online shop. As of Issue 5, no subscription information is available.

For the first two issues, GameFan featured a section titled MovieFan which covered movies, anime, and comics. The first 2/3s of the magazine were devoted to GameFan, then readers needed to turn the magazine upside down in order to read the MovieFan magazine. As of Issue 3, the MovieFan portion of the magazine was discontinued, but later issues would still feature anime and comic reviews similar to Play. In its second and final issue, MovieFan conducted one of the last known interviews with late filmmaker, Satoshi Kon.

Up until issue 5, the magazine had been on a somewhat consistent release schedule, however the magazine had issues with advertising revenue which caused the sixth issue to be released on August 2011, over six months later. Issue 7 was released on December 2011 with graphic designer Rob Duenas resigning after it was completed. The reason for his departure was due to an overwhelming workload stating that he works "20 hours a day for two weeks straight and I'm still short cover art". Despite the stressful working conditions, Duenas harbors no ill will towards Dave or the magazine, stating that he would still be willing to contribute with cover illustrations or providing some assistance with layouts.

A press release was issued on April 18, 2012, highlighting the future of the GameFan and Girls of Gaming brands. Paper Planet plans on increasing their online presence through app development for mobile devices as well as a new GameFan TV online channel. Wesley Ruscher, formerly at Destructoid, was named the magazine's new editor-in-chief. As work began once again on issue 8 of the magazine, a series of surveys were posted on GameFan's Facebook page. The first being about the handling of editorials, the second being about the size and quality of the magazine, and the final one being on the timeliness of review content.

Issue 8 was released on June 2012, and while the digital version is available for purchase on GameFan's shop, the physical copies never arrived at any newsstand despite supposedly shipping. Since the release of issue 8, Wesley Ruscher, who had been appointed editor-in-chief of the magazine, resigned stating that it "lacked the necessities to keep food in my belly and a roof over my head." After nearly two months of inactivity, and rumors of the magazine's closure, Dave Halverson posted on GameFan's official Facebook and Twitter pages that a new issue is on its way in time for the holidays. Since then, their online presence has been absent once again with their most recent post nearly a month old.