It is a little interesting that both Gamesindustry.biz and MCV have recently released traffic details. Gamesindustry.biz at over 340K monthly uniques, MCV at over 240K monthly uniques. Now both these sites publish multiple articles every day written by multiple professional journalists. So my whimsical opinion pieces can hardly be expected to compete.

Here are the numbers that analytics are telling me for the last month of Bruceongames: Visitors 100,869, Uniques 91,014, Page views 185,954.

Imagine what they would be if I had a bit more content and a marketing budget!

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2. Evony and Bruceongames
3. Killing off World of Warcraft

I am going away on a big holiday to strange and exotic lands.
A lot of time I will be travelling, a lot of time I will be where there is no easy interweb access and a lot of time I will be enjoying my holiday.
So I will have little, if any, time to look after Bruceongames. Which means comments may stack up for a while before being approved, but please still make them. Normal service should resume after 14 September.

To keep you happy I have written a whole pile of articles which should auto publish themselves to a schedule whilst I am away.

• 28 August: Some free advice for Michael Grade
• 31 August: About good management
• 2 September: Gran Turismo 5 (GT5) Vs Forza Motorsport 3 (FM3)
• 4 September: What do game publishers do and is there any need for them?
• 7 September: Will video gaming become the main form of human exercise?
• 9 September: How to manage fansites
• 11 September: The Great Flu
• 14 September: Microdigital in Liverpool

Obviously none of these can be news related. They are more industry background pieces. I hope you enjoy them.

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The site is copied and mirrored in lots of places and people use RSS feeds, so most article are seen far more times elsewhere.

However here are some facts and figures for the site itself:

• 639 posts.
• Over 2,700 comments on those posts.
• Just coming up to half a million visits. Over 400,000 absolute unique visitors.
• Over 49,000 visitors in the last month.
• Busiest day Feb 18th 2008, 13,426 visitors.
• Top 4 articles. How to pirate Microsoft Xbox 360 games 30,296, Don’t play Evony 27,734, Fanboys 27,169, Is the GPU holding the PS3 back? 21,177.
• Visitor nationality. USA 212,046, UK 96,567, Canada 36,099, Australia 16,563.
• 62% of traffic comes from links, 25% from search engines, 13% direct.
• Traffic came from 2,522 sources.
• 7,155 internet links to Bruceongames.com

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1. How popular is Bruceongames?
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MCV are inviting nominations/votes for their annual media awards. One of the awards is for games blog and Bruceongames is precisely that. So if you think this site is worth a mention please email MCV at gma@intentmedia.co.uk

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Evony is a new, free, browser MMO. And their marketing consists of spamming up the internet like crazy. This blog is receiving a huge number of spam “comments” from them. Fortunately Akismet anti spam puts them automatically into the bin. Here are some of the email addresses they are using for this spam:

tsenseless.evony.com/bx8s07@naplesnews.net

tsenseless.evony.com/4cdtyg0fv@hotmail.com

tsenseless.evony.com/m36fqptkw2@naplesnews.net

tsenseless.evony.com/sfhwrv@live.com

tsenseless.evony.com/fhgpzdbk80@naplesnews.net

tsenseless.evony.com/w85@darkhorsefan.net

tsenseless.evony.com/xycw5vd@student.com

tsenseless.evony.com/ndh4pr1@bolt.com

tsenseless.evony.com/f3ypkg6@postmark.net

tsenseless.evony.com/ftcs@usa.com

tsenseless.evony.com/6n8ck@naplesnews.net

tsenseless.evony.com/rjd@email.com

And so on. They are doing this from the IP address 63.223.110.211

Whois Record

OrgName:    Beyond The Network America, Inc.
OrgID:      BNA-42
Address:    450 Springpark PL
Address:    Suite 100
City:       Herdon
StateProv:  VA
PostalCode: 20170
Country:    US

NetRange:   63.216.0.0 - 63.223.255.255
CIDR:       63.216.0.0/13
NetName:    BTN-CIDR5
NetHandle:  NET-63-216-0-0-1
Parent:     NET-63-0-0-0-0
NetType:    Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS.CAIS.COM
NameServer: NS2.CAIS.COM
Comment:    ADDRESSES WITHIN THIS BLOCK ARE NON-PORTABLE
RegDate:    1999-12-09
Updated:    2004-11-12

OrgAbuseHandle: PAD13-ARIN
OrgAbuseName:   PCCW AUP Department
OrgAbusePhone:  +1-703-621-1637
OrgAbuseEmail:  

Edit: I have written a second Evony article giving an overview and background.

Is Evony Malware?

Evony advert ridiculed by PopCap.

Queen of Evony competition.

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For a long time now I have been bringing you a quick analysis of eight current news stories every week. This is  stopping because I feel that the analysis is not getting the attention it deserves. Instead I will post single item news “shorts” as and when they crop up. This should keep the site content fresher and better reflect the news flow.

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Well as these have become all the rage I thought that I would tell you mine: http://twitter.com/Bruciebabe

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I am taking a week off to revisit one of the greatest cities on earth, Istanbul. It was the capital of the world under the Romans and again under the Ottomans. The layers of history, heritage and culture make many other great cities seem like villages in comparison.

So I am giving you all a week off from reading my diatribes. Normal service could well resume in about ten days.

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Bruceongames is now a respectable body of work with over 460 articles, some of which have become “standards” and are now read by people every day. The blog has achieved everything I set out to do. I have expressed my views on a range of topics, proven that I can think and write and even become a little more well known. Some of my predictions have come true, others haven’t, but I am not unhappy with the success rate.

However creating this stuff takes a lot of time and I don’t get paid for it, the Google ads at the side literally only bring in pennies. So I have decided that there are better things I can be doing in my life than 5 articles a week on here. However I don’t want to lose the platform. So starting now I am going to try to generate just two articles a week. One in the first part of the week will be a proper article and the second one, later in the week will be an overview of bits of news that support my world view. It may pan out that there is more, or less. We will see.

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I am taking a little rest from writing these articles. Normal service should resume around the middle of January.

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