Entries Tagged 'Housekeeping' ↓

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.

This site is less than three months old and features daily articles, so it is heading towards an archive of 100 articles. So far we have had over 10,000 unique visitors.

If you have an opinion on any of the articles then please add your comment to the site. If you like the articles please tell others about them. And you can use the RSS feed to deliver the articles to your desktop each day.

There are a few background articles on just how well we are doing and how much better this industry will get. We are still at the beginning of the industry, This is the golden time and $47 billion .

Then there is analysis of the platform holders. What is Sony? What is Microsoft? and What is Nintendo?

Press release tips #0, #1, #2 and #3.

Anecdotes: Increasing market share by putting prices UP, Death of a brand , The Megagames and Platform generation transition .

There are articles on contentious issues. Fu**ing censorship, Computer games are better than books, Games are art , The big problem, Paper games magazines are dead, Games will be education, Those silly Germans and The Church of England .

Platforms: Sony are wasting their time with the PSP, The future portable device, iPod=gaming platform, PS3 is a waste of everyone’s time and Is Wii a bubble?

And my personal favourites: Web 2.0 and the games industry ostriches, Are games funny enough? When the gaming generation come to power, Will the major film studios own the games industry? Are social networking and MMORPGs the same thing? and The future, it is all a gesture .

This is about a third of the articles so if you wander back through the archives you will find much more. Please enjoy.

Here is some site information for anyone who is interested.

Currently there are 74 articles and 180 comments.

Up to now we have received 11,009 visits from 9,426 unique visitors. But 5,016 of these came on one day, 25 September, because of a mention in N4G of the article A big Microsoft mistake. Our visitors have come from 121 countries, about half (5,286) from the USA. We have had 15 from Columbia and 33 from Poland. 8 from Brunei and 7 from Barbados.

Traffic has come from 161 sources and mediums, a web presence that is reflected in a Google search for Bruceongames giving 3,120 results. However on Technorati we still rank just 383,299th with an authority of 17. Other than Bruceongames the most popular search term that brought traffic was Colin McRae Helmet, which related to this article.

Our nicest critic is The Weekend Gamer who said “One of my absolute favorite sites for gaming has got to be Bruceongames” and “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.”

So after 2 months we are still a little baby but there are signs of life. If you like what you see here and think a friend would like it too then please tell them. Word of mouth is the most powerful marketing tool. If you have a blog then obviously a mention would be highly appreciated. There are links from here to a lot of other blogs. And if you are a journalist I hope that there is something here that you can tell your public about.

As always, if you would like to comment, please do.

I couldn’t believe my ears. Last night there was a piece on BBC Radio 4 (national, upmarket talk radio) about gaming demographics and pensioners playing Wii games. They had two industry pundits in the studio and one of them quoted almost verbatim from this article on here. Without giving any credit. So he gets paid by the BBC for quoting my ideas. It could be a major coincidence of great minds thinking alike. But I doubt it.

Now I really don’t mind who uses the content from here or how they use it. Just, please, say where you got it from. I want to be famous too.