David Tanaka

David Tanaka is the Editorial Lead at HKQS Games, where he is responsible for everything the company publishes in words — the blog, game guides, brand voice, SEO strategy, and the community channels where players talk back. He brings more than a decade of experience in games journalism, having written and edited for several well-known gaming outlets before moving into a content-strategy role on the publisher side of the industry.

David's editorial philosophy can be summed up in a line he repeats often in story meetings: respect the reader's attention and they will give you their trust. He believes that games writing has been devalued by a flood of low-effort, SEO-chasing content farms, and that the only durable strategy is to publish pieces that are genuinely useful, honestly reported, and a pleasure to read. Every article that ships under his byline or his editors' has to clear that bar.

From News Desks to Brand Editorial

David started his career on a fast-moving games news desk, where he learned to write clean copy under deadline pressure and to tell the difference between a story that mattered and a story that merely trended. He covered console launches, indie breakouts, esports tournaments, and the slow-moving policy stories that shape how games are made and sold. Over the years he moved from staff writer to section editor to managing editor, gradually trading the adrenaline of breaking news for the longer arc of building an editorial voice and mentoring writers.

Before joining HKQS Games, David led content strategy at a gaming media company where he rebuilt an aging publication around a clearer audience thesis, introduced editorial standards that pulled the team out of a race-to-the-bottom content volume game, and grew organic search traffic by focusing on evergreen, genuinely useful pieces rather than disposable news churn. He has hired and developed dozens of writers and editors, several of whom have gone on to lead publications of their own — a track record he is prouder of than any individual byline.

Content Strategy & SEO, Done Honestly

David is unapologetic about caring deeply about SEO — he sees it as a way to make sure good writing actually reaches the people looking for it. But he is equally adamant that SEO should never dictate the writing. His approach starts with a genuine question a player might have, then builds an article that answers it completely and honestly, structured so that search engines can understand it without the prose ever feeling like it was written for a crawler. He has no patience for keyword-stuffed intros, artificially padded word counts, or headlines that overpromise and underdeliver.

At HKQS Games he has built an editorial calendar that balances timely pieces — coverage of new game launches, industry trends, and seasonal player interests — with a foundation of evergreen guides and explainers that earn traffic month after month. He runs a lightweight but disciplined editorial process: every piece gets a brief, a draft, a fact-check, and a line edit before it ships, and every published piece is reviewed periodically to keep it accurate as games and platforms change.

Community & the Reader Relationship

David treats the comments section, the social channels, and the inbox as part of the editorial product, not an afterthought. He believes a publication earns its relationship with readers one interaction at a time — by replying thoughtfully to a correction, by following up on a question a reader posed, by being honest when a piece could have been better. Under his leadership, the HKQS Games editorial team treats reader feedback as a first-class input into the content calendar, and he has built lightweight workflows to make sure good suggestions actually turn into published pieces.

He is also a vocal advocate for community management as a distinct discipline from marketing. A community manager's job, in his view, is not to amplify the brand but to listen to it — to surface the friction, the feature requests, and the moments of delight that the rest of the company would otherwise miss. He works closely with HKQS Games' product and design teams to close the loop between what players say and what the team ships.

Mentorship & Editorial Standards

As a manager, David is known for investing seriously in the craft of the writers he works with. He keeps a living style guide, runs weekly story-pitch sessions that are as much teaching moments as they are planning meetings, and gives edits that explain the why behind every change — not just the what. He has helped engineers-turned-writers find their voice, coached junior editors into confident decision-makers, and built an editorial culture where asking for a second read is a sign of professionalism rather than weakness.

He writes regularly himself, too, because he believes an editor who stops writing loses touch with the craft. His own pieces tend toward the analytical — why a genre is rising, what a trend really means, how a design choice ripples out into player behavior. You can read two of his recent pieces in the articles below, and follow him on social media for running commentary on the games industry and the occasional unrequested opinion about Oxford commas.

What He's Editing Next

Currently, David is expanding the HKQS Games blog into a fuller resource library — deeper game guides, player-onboarding explainers, and a series of long-form pieces on the casual gaming landscape. He is also piloting a reader-panel program that gives a small group of players an early look at upcoming articles in exchange for honest feedback, an experiment in bringing the community closer to the editorial process without compromising editorial independence.

Off the clock, David is a chronic re-reader of long-form magazine archives, an inconsistent but enthusiastic tabletop game master, and the owner of a to-be-read pile that has long since stopped being a single pile. Reach him through the articles below or on social media — he reads his mentions, even if he does not always reply.