Bruceongames on Knol

http://knol.google.com/k/bruce-everiss/bruceongamescom/2l81m4yln1pbt/33#

It wasn't even my idea. One day I was explaining to my friend Mike Clark that my first blog, Scubabrucie, was going nowhere because of the limits of the subject matter, my limits to dive regularly enough and the limited size of the potential readership. Mike suggested doing a video games blog instead, to capitalise on my experience in the industry. It also, obviously, raises my profile in the industry which may do my career prospects either harm or good, depending on who reads it. I thought that I would run out of steam after a few weeks but Mike thought not, so we shopped for a suitable url and, quite frankly, Bruceongames.com does the job.

Actually writing the articles is a lot easier than I thought that it would be. The industry is still in it's infancy so there is always a lot of change as it slowly matures into something that will be a lot different to what it is today. Also I have a passion for marketing so write many of the aricles from this perspective. This often makes what I have to say unique when most gaming content on the web is written from the perspective of the gamer.

The bandwidth and sheer volume of gaming content on the internet is immense. Unfortunately it has a very high signal to noise ratio. There are a few good blogs written by professional developers but very little written by anyone from the publishing side of the industry. This means that Bruceongames has little competition for the space it occupies.

So that I reach the maximum audience with my articles I allow them to be copied by Seeking Alpha and iStockAnalyst so it is impossible to know the total audience size, except that it is in the thousands every day. This has helped the blog up to thirty three thousand and something on Technorati which is not too bad considering it only started in August 2007. I am often surprised by the people who do read it. Many a time senior industry executives and journalists have mentioned it to me.

Overall the idea is to make people think about the issues and as a result the blog attracts some excellent, thoughtful comments which contribute enormously to understanding the issues. Every Thursday is news roundup day, often with a left field slant put on an eclectic choice of current industry stories.

Here are some of the most popular articles:
Fanboys is about an interesting and important modern social phenomenon which is highly relevant to anyone working in the games industry.
Piracy, Imagine Software and the Megagames. This article cause some controversy because some people who were schoolboys at the time think they know more about the subject than the director of Imagine in charge of sales and marketing, which was myself.
Is the GPU holding the PS3 back? This article voiced what every developer for the machine knows. That the overall performance of the Sony Playstation PS3 as a system is limited by it's graphics processor. And that the Microsoft Xbox 360 has a more powerful graphics processor. The Sony fanboys certainly did not like seeing the facts.
Is Blu-ray a Microsoft victory At the time this was written the HD DVD format had just died. The very valid point here was that by not committing themselves to any new media format Microsoft were able to see their Xbox 360 console at a lower price whilst the Sony PS3, with Blu-ray, was languishing in third place in this console generation.
A big Microsoft mistake This is about Microsoft abandoning the original Xbox for business reasons when from a marketing point of view they would have been far better off keeping it as the cheaper console in a two model range. The business model the Sony successfully follow.
Did Sony screw up the video game market is about Sony marketing to a narrow demographic with their consoles which prevented the market growing as much as it could have. Something Nintendo have now proven.
The upcoming free Microsoft console is about the potential for games to run on big central servers which would then only require minimal electronics in the home. Thus enabling Microsoft to give home boxes away with service subscriptions.