It has been a year since Big Boss Battle had gotten started up, a year since two people with a deep passion for games decided to oar up and start a blog. It’s only been a year, and we have so much more planned.
Big Boss Battle was born from the love and passion for video games, both big and small. It was built to support developers, it was created to entertain visitors, and it was designed to build a community of gamers. A year ago today marks when Dann and myself decided to spend many hours, and days, and late nights towards building the website you see today. While our website didn’t officially launch until the 16th of May 2016, we had been working hard on the backend, gathering our old reviews from previous ventures, building up the design elements, and getting admin duties fulfilled.
Previously, Dann had experience with the games industry, with him being well connected with various PR firms, and game developers from his previous job and blog based efforts before B3. I on the other hand was just a content creator – I was a let’s player, and a writer. It was a two man website, and we had no idea how it was going to pick up the pace in the incredibly fast, and ever-changing gaming industry.
Shortly after we launched, we picked up a few writers, and these three jumped on board to help us out with covering titles that we were being offered by small indie developers, and boy, did they do it well. They not only allowed Dann and I to work a bit harder on fixing up areas of the site that needed attention, but they were smashing out content like there was no tomorrow. We had a steady flow of content that kept us a few days ahead of our schedule, and we were building stronger connections.
As the months went by, we gained more codes from developers, PR firms, and publishers, and we had also gained several new writers, some stayed around, some left because it wasn’t right for them. We ended up with our social media profiles picking up speed, and while we wanted an active community, we still didn’t have it. We had people viewing the content, then having a nose around the site a bit more, but then they left. No commenting, no replies to tweets, and no shares. Most of the readers were just following the RT or share from a game developer, and were going to read what our thoughts were, then bugger off. We wanted a stronger community, but we weren’t able to hold it because of busy times. Dann and myself were trying to hold down emails, and admin duties, as well as running in-depth reviews alongside our team.
Our team started to grow even bigger, and we had started to become international. The team all did some incredible work, some of them had gone from writing on their blogs to contributing to us, others came over to us with no experience. All of them have grown in experience though, and it has been incredible to work with them and watch them develop and grow, and if they choose to hang around even longer, then even better! We began running news towards the end of last year, and this has allowed us to maintain a steady flow of information on the website, and it also allows us to reach out to even more people, and spread the word about titles most could miss.
Now here we are. We used to sit looking at our content schedule and say, “We’ve got today and tomorrow filled, but then we have nothing after that”. Now we’re looking at our content schedule and we’re usually a week or two weeks ahead of ourselves, and with reviews due sooner than others we do a lot of rearranging, and a lot of doubling up now. It’s insane. We have writers from Spain, Australia, America, and even China right now (Until he pops on a plane and heads back to Scotland). We have email inboxes overflowing with Dann cradled underneath, trying to catch the ones flowing over the edges. I’m sat around with my phone vibrating with notifications after notifications from social media networks, we’re moving into tabletop. We got accepted as press to E3 2017.
We’re doing incredibly well considering we’ve only been running for a year, and we’re excited to carry on the journey, and we have a lot of plans ahead to build up a tight community of passionate gamers, perhaps a forum? Perhaps a stronger Discord? Secret things!
But really, our success comes down to our writers, our friends, families, and acquaintances. The people who have supported us and shared our work have been incredible. Thank you to every single one of you, and thank you, to you reading this right now.
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