It has been a fairly busy year for gaming, we’ve seen companies shut down, and new companies rise up. We’ve seen anticipated games fall to their knees, and we’ve seen some fantastic deals in the humble bundles.
In addition to this post, Dann has been running a daily round up of all the months this year, looking at some of the events that have unfolded this year. You can find Dann’s amazing monthly round ups here
January | February | March | April | May | June | July | August | September | October | November | December
Now, dear reader,
On May 19th 2016, Big Boss Battle was launched. We launched the website with various reviews and editorials that we had created previous to starting the website, and from that point on, we did nothing but improve.
Dann and myself worked tirelessly for a month before Craig, Kate, and Brian joined us in June and started writing. Before them, it was just Dann and myself trying to create content every day just so that we could push out one review, or preview every five days of every week on top of managing the backend of the website, social media accounts, and scheduling. We wanted to look consistent, and we succeeded. When Craig, Kate, and Brian came along, they helped us maintain that image perfectly.
We began working on a system for our video content. The idea was originally to try and get people making videos to go up on our official B3 YouTube Channel, but then we thought about another option. We ended up getting in touch with Simon Jones, GameGazm, and RemovableSanity. The system we put in place was that these creators continue making their videos as they are for their channel. We grab the embed code from their videos and pop the video as a post on our website and then share it out on our socials. The viewers will visit the website through the link, and leave a view for us, and a view for the video that they watch. In short, we get a view, and so does the creator on their channel. It’s a system I think is great. It allows us to support other creators whilst populating our website with content that our visitors would like to see.
While we were figuring out systems, we were also pulling in new faces, people who had expressed interest to write with us, and people who either stuck around, or felt it wasn’t for them and left after a couple of pieces. The additional faces that stayed ended up bringing in fantastic content and allowed Dann and myself to slowly start spending more time working on additional website elements.
September came and we were just starting to hit some view counts that we were happy with, but we still needed more writers. I ended up visited a local college where I stood before over one hundred students in a lecture theatre talking to them about the state of the gaming industry, explaining to them about game mechanics, and then finally, inviting them to join the website and try their hand at writing, or creating videos with us. The reception we had was great, and while many got in touch and didn’t follow up, the ones that stuck around have done a good job, and hopefully we’ll see more of them around when they find a balance between the website and college.
People ask us why we cover so many indie games, and our response is simply, because we want to. Some indie game devs might indeed have a secret, underlying passion to generate money, get noticed, and run a huge studio; but the majority of these developers are doing it because they just want to make a game. They enjoy it, and so they do it. Similarly, we enjoy covering games, so we do it. Indie games are making a very big mark on the gaming industry, and more and more publishers and developers, and even gamers are noticing the impact they’re having. They’re powerful, creative, innovative, and unique.
While we have covered a fair few blockbuster games, it has been out of our own pocket. We make no money from this website at this moment in time. If we reach a point where we are getting codes from big name developers and publishers for blockbuster games, then while we would gladly cover them, we still want to maintain our indie focus.
We made a move into news a few months ago, and we have been getting some fantastic figures coming in from just news alone. We are now an official Google news source, and we are seeing a wonderful growth take place..
When we increase our writer and video creator team, then we will be able to cover even more news as well as a deeper variety of games.
We have grown incredibly as a website and as a team. I’m incredibly proud of everyone who has helped grow the website from what it was back in May to what it is now. We started off as a two man team and have now ended the year as an eighteen strong team, with both team members and partnerships.
That’s it for this post, and I really hope that you all have a fantastic New Year, and let’s hope that 2017 is a better year than this year has been for…well…anything! I also hope that you stay with us and join us on our journey to growing even bigger, and better in 2017. We have some very exciting things in store.
Happy New Year, and thank you everyone.
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