I have another post waiting for me to finish but this topic hit me tonight and felt I had to write about it. Last week there were three or four events in the gaming industry. Events like launch parties and hands on previews. This week there are a couple I know about and I’m sure more that I don’t. That’s right, we have hit holiday gaming season.

This is the time where we start working on our Holiday Guide at GamingAngels. We don’t just do a gaming guide, we do a board games, books, gadgets and stocking stuffers guide. Pretty large task for an independent group.

Around this time games start pouring into review as well. This is basically the time of year all of us gamers sit excitedly in anticipation. The games we saw at E3 will be coming out soon. If we’re lucky we’ll get a review copy. If we’re really lucky, we’ll get a review copy a few days early. So many games in so little time. Some games can be played through in shorter amounts of time and others seem impossible to finish on time or in a relevant time.

There is an overall feeling that within a week or two after a game is out, the review is no longer relevant. Unless you can provide a very unique perspective that your readers look out for, most will have read reviews on day 1 or when the embargo breaks. Thanks to services like Metacritic, same gamers just check out the scores and never read the review at all.

I like to think that GamingAngels readers come to our site to get our perspective on a game. We don’t do a number scale or an alpha grade. We rate based on if we would buy/rent or pass on the game. Our system is based on the fact of us answering if we would recommend spending money on that title.

The thing about holiday season is for a few weeks the games come fast and furious. It’s probably a difficult thing for even the larger, professional sites to handle. But as an indie site, where everyone has day jobs and school, it’s almost impossible. But we forge ahead and we try. We attempt to make hands on previews and we go to events that we can attend. We struggle, but we make it work.

I want to know what other indie communities do to make it work. How do you get through the holiday gaming surge? While these next months will be difficult, in the end the GA team is spending our time gaming which is exactly what we want to be doing.

<3
Trina

Wednesday, October 12th, 2011, 10:00 am   |   Building Community  |  RSS feed |  Respond  |  Trackback