Entries Tagged 'Housekeeping' ↓

Increasingly I am finding press releases in my inbox. Which is very nice as it keeps me informed. It also shows that some marketing departments have twigged that articles on here are  reaching many thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of people. In fact readership here over a month compares with a lot of print magazines. And it is steadily increasing.

So all you marketeers, keep on sending your messages. And if you want you can send me games and consoles too. And invite me to press events at exotic tropical locations with lots of free booze.

• This blog is my bat and ball, and I get to decide who plays.
• Comments that bring something to the table are most welcome. Those that do not may be deleted.
• Personal attacks and insults will be deleted. You’re welcome to disagree with me or anyone else by presenting a counter argument, but don’t expect to see your post appear here if you’re overly sarcastic, rude or aggressive.

It is a complete mystery to me how some articles have legs and are seen by tens of thousands of people whilst others, often more erudite (in my opinion!) and containing much more work and thought just disappear into oblivion. It is all down to aggregators like N4G and Reddit and also to which articles are picked up on by journalists elsewhere to comment on.

Obviously most articles get their most views when they are on the front page and I have no accurate measure of how this readership is split up. What is in this list is the article permalinks that have had the most views. So this is mainly people coming to this site specifically to read that one article. Which is a pity as they mostly never get to see all the other wonderful stuff on here.

1. Fanboys is about that army of gamers whose enthusiasm for one brand goes too far. To the point of emotional attachment. The article is tongue in cheek but does contain some home truths.
2. Is Blu-ray a Microsoft victory? Very unexpected that this brief piece did so well. At a time when people were trumpeting Blu-ray as a Sony victory over Microsoft I thought that a bit of perspective was in order.
3. A big Microsoft mistake?  From quite early in the life of this blog, this article looks at whether stopping production of the original Xbox so early was the best idea.
4. Piracy, Imagine Software and the Megagames. This was a sleeper for a month before it exploded on to the world’s radar screens. It is an anecdote of what actually happened at Imagine when I was on the board of directors. Schoolboy pirates from that time who never went near the company disagree with me.
5. The next console generation, #1 Home consoles. A bit of fun this, trying to second guess what the three big platform holders are going to do. And, perhaps more importantly, when.
6. Surfer Girl and Skater Boy. The game industry’s two most notorious rumour mongers. Sometimes they are right, sometimes they aren’t.
7. The Bible Vs video games. People complain about the sex and violence in video games. The bible is worse. And it doesn’t even have an age rating!
8. How big will Super Smash Bros. Brawl be? There was a lot of hysteria about this game so I wrote an article to put it into context.
9. PS3 is a waste of everyone’s time. Gabe Newell of Valve’s unique view on the current platform generation. It certainly is an attention getting headline.
10. Some great game development blogs. In a way I am very surprised that this is not more popular. These blogs are solid gold, their content gives an inside view of games that every enthusiast would surely rave over.

So, out of more than 250 articles, these have risen to the top in the popularity stakes. The challenge now is to write articles that become even more popular.

If I don’t blow my own trumpet nobody is going to blow it for me, so here are some of the articles on here that predicted real world events.

Everybody knows now that the iPod/iPhone is going to be a huge gaming success. Apple are putting massive resources into making it so and there are lots of developers working on bringing games to it. There were a couple of articles on here at the end of last summer that predicted this months before any announcements.

There has been a lot of publisher consolidation activity in recent months, this was predicted in advance. Also the role of the film industry in this was explained long before a whole raft of events.

The game industry is riddled with bad management and this article was timed to explain this well before the clean out of the board of directors at SCI/EIDOS.

Then in December, at the height of the Christmas rush there was this article explaining that Microsoft were going to reduce the price of the Xbox 360 and why they were going to do this.

And finally there were a couple of articles about the subsidies that game companies receive in Canada, how these were probably illegal under WTO rules and how the British government should do something about it. Which now, belatedly, they have.

So if you want to know what is going to happen in the game industry there is no need for expensive analysts when you can read the articles here for free!

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.