Entries Tagged 'Housekeeping' ↓

It looks like what it takes to be a successful blogger can be bad for your health, according to this New York Times article.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

My attitude to this blog is a lot more laid back. It is more fun than anything else.

Dreamhost is doing a big move around of hardware that will affect us. There’s a notice up about it:

http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2008/03/12/central-services-and-spunky-cluster-move/

We’re on ‘pico’. The net effect (!) is that we will be down for up to 12 hours next weekend, starting at about 5am Saturday morning (March 22) and running through to 5pm Saturday afternoon.

It is Codemasters disasters season. A series of articles analysing some of the things that went wrong at Codemasters and why. Useful postmortems for anyone in the industry. It is a lot cheaper and less painful to learn from other people’s mistakes.

This time I’m going to Spain, back in the office on 10th March. Articles have been written in advance (except for news). They are:

• 26.2 The next console generation #2 Handhelds
• 27.2 Some great development blogs
• 28.2 Eight news stories 28.2
• 29.2 Success factors in games marketing #1
• 03.3 A free marketing tip for Jagex
• 04.3 Wiihabilitation
• 05.3 Success factors in games marketing #2
• 06.3 Eight news stories 6.3  
• 07.3 Wikipedia is useless

We are gradually attracting more visitors, the record day is now 12,947 absolute unique visitors. Though obviously it is usually a fraction of this, we have had a fair number of days over 2,000. At the time of writing the Technorati authority is 121 and rank is 52,589, Google page ranking is 5. Not too bad for six months and proof that you can market on a very small budget. (Currently zero).

If you like what you read here then please tell others. This is still only reaching a very small fraction of it’s potential readership. And if you are new please look through some of the past articles, you may find them interesting.

Thank you very much for coming here and reading the blog.

In just six months this blog has gone from zero to being a Technorati top 100,000 blog (out of 112 million) with readership frequently topping 2,000 a day. From all over the world. Including many senior industry executives and game journalists.

It helps that there aren’t that many blogs written by people with real industry experience on the publishing side. This contrasts with the development side where there are a plethora of truly excellent blogs, many of which are listed on my blogroll. Having worked on the global launch of lots of games I hope that this blog can bring to you some of the joys and anguish that go with the job. Also I have been privileged to work with a lot of exceptional development talent who have created many number one games. Lessons they have taught me find their way onto the pages of this blog.

One of the aims of this blog is to help the reader engage their grey matter. Hence the presentation is often from “left field” with subjects treated differently than they are elsewhere. This is a considered and deliberate policy, as a marketing person I hate anything that is “me too”. It is far better to stand out from the crowd.

A special thanks to those who have contributed here with comments. The articles are often, by their very nature, the start of a debate. And it is the comments made by readers that carry the debate forward creating extra value for everyone. Please keep up the good work.

It is not easy finding a valid new topic to write about every day. Yet some days I have written three articles. It depends on the ebb and flow of both inspiration and news. Regular readers will know my hobby horses. Piracy, industry consolidation, stupid censorship, emerging platforms and the need to raise marketing and management standards. But these are important issues for this industry at this time so it is critical that they are addressed sufficiently.

Whilst this blog is not aimed at the legion of fanboys that are out there I am sure that some find their way here. Like everyone they are welcome, though I am sure that they disagree with a lot that is written here. It goes with the territory of being a fanboy.

So thanks once again, I hope you are enjoying this as much as I am. 

So this is it for the year. I am abroad on holiday and normal service will resume on January 3rd 2008. Between now and then I hope that everyone will have a fantastic holiday. At the pace our industry moves we deserve it.

A special thank you to all those who have contributed comments and so enriched the quality of the discussion here. I am sure that this input is appreciated by everyone. Less welcome are the fanboys, spammers and profane children who try and get on here. By personally filtering content I ensure that they now reside in the bottom of the spam bucket.

This blog has been going for a little over four months. So, at an article a day, there is plenty in the archives to read. In this short period we have had some great successes. Two articles have been selected from here to go into MCV, the premier computer games trade newspaper. And two financial websites Seeking Alpha and iStockAnalyst are reprinting my articles for the benefit of the financial community. So if you want a company’s shares to go up or down just ask and I will write the appropriate articles!!!! Also several article directories have asked if they can carry the content. I was invited on to the panel of Never Mind The Polygons, which was a great experience. And also interviewed by CJOB Radio in Winnipeg about the Wii phenomenon.

Regular readers will know that, by a combination of luck and good timing, several predictions that were made on here have come true. Let’s hope the luck holds up next year.

If you like what you read here please tell others about it. Give it a plug on your internal company forum! For it to be worth my while to put the time it takes, on a continuing basis, to keep this blog going, a good audience is essential. Currently approximately 200 people a day visit the site and approximately 100 take the RSS feed. Whilst this is good after such a short time it still falls a long way short of making the effort worthwhile. A bigger audience is essential.

Once again, have a great festive season.

Roger Ehrenberg has been an Investment Banker and Managing Director at Citibank and Managing Director and Co-head of Deutsche Bank’s Global Strategic Equity Transactions Group, he writes the influential blog Information Arbitrage. And he likes this site!

Some of the flattery is enough to make even me blush. He says “I discovered this gaming blogger Bruce - he’s really smart, cerebral and experienced. But most importantly, it seems that he and I are on the same wavelength as it relates to Sony’s PS2 strategy. And he really knows gaming.” and “Bruce is a lucid thinker and a good writer. ”

The Weekend Gamer has written about this site a few times: “The internet is littered with fanboys of every persuasion, doling out their myopic and inane arguments without much thought for intelligent discourse.  It’s because of the fact that you can hardly go anywhere without getting inundated with abusive fans of one console or the next that Bruceongames.com is so appealing to me.  The conversation has, so far in the short life of the site, maintained a high degree of intelligence that is refreshing.” and “One of my absolute favorite sites for gaming has got to be Bruceongames, a blog by Bruce Everiss–a british marketing expert who has worked for over twenty years in the video game business.  His articles are always thought provoking, and so I thought I’d highlight one that I read the other day and thoroughly enjoyed. ”

And The Gamer Gene says: “A pioneer still respected to this day, Bruce Everiss has been there since the beginning. He’s the man responsible for helping both Imagine and Codemasters get off the ground, allowing both to become among the most successful game publishers in the UK.”

We’ve also had good mentions on N4G, 1Up and GameSet Watch amongs many others.

All this is very gratifying indeed and makes all the work worthwhile. Thank you everyone.