The last time, I made a post like this was in February. Today I wanted to talk about Daily Blogging and things I’ve noticed. Currently, I’m on a 102-day posting streak, so it’s been nearly 50 posts since I last did an update on this challenge of myself. Overall, I’m really enjoying it. It’s fun to see the blog’s readership grow and to see that we’re already halfway to March’s numbers, despite it still being the beginning of April. I mean, not that it matters too much but it’s nice to see how well certain blog posts are received compared to others and how many impressions my Steam Curator page, for instance, is leaving on certain games. Very nice!
One thing I noticed is that I’m falling a bit behind on reviews as of late because university’s starting again and stuff’s getting busy and overall, I need more time for a review post compared to a post like this here with just my rambling and fewer screenshots and a lot less editing going on. I already have a review scheduled for next Tuesday, though, and I can’t post it now due to the embargo that the publisher set. Hence, I’m looking forward to preparing a blog post on that day for the next day and potentially bank up on blog posts. Having one in the can would be lovely, especially with how busy things will be starting next week… Not having to worry about a post every day could also probably help out a lot with my routines. I enjoy writing these up in the evening but if I had a fixed schedule with posts in the mornings for instance that I’ve written the evening before, I’d end up freeing myself a bit more. It’s basically like procrastination but backwards… Recrastination? Doing everything early? Well, not everything… but you know.
I mean, I really like publishing reviews on my blog and would love to do that more often but as it is right now, I’ll have to play a game for a longer time, write down notes, write up the post, edit the post, add screenshots and formatting, and then I need to handle social media for that post (aka the Steam Curator page, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Discord) – and despite the latter taking a lot less time than the other steps, it’s all a lot of “work” or rather “effort”, without any negative connotations. After all, I love this. I love sharing my thoughts. I love bringing attention to small games like that. My blog may not be the biggest in the world but I like having certain standards and upholding them…
…and that latter point is me throwing shade at some bigger outlets out there. When it comes to reviews, I tend to not care about the big magazines too much. Sure, I may read an article by some of the bigger outlets or read the title of a review but I tend to go for small bloggers I trust rather than a big outlet that is getting tons of keys every day and that basically only plays it for an hour or so before writing up that post. Games nowadays seem to have the fun parts front-loaded into the first few hours… and then the issues arise later on down the line, resulting in these big outlets getting these keys, playing them for an hour or so at most (presumably) and then writing raving reviews about it. My review on Per Aspera talked about issues that nobody seems to care about because they probably haven’t played the game that far. While I like the game, I wouldn’t recommend it because of those issues, yet a lot of bigger outlets’ reviews that I’ve checked out after writing mine seem to either just not care about the problems in the game or they just don’t know about them, which is an issue.
And I know that written review may be a bit outdated, too. With everything turning towards streaming and video creation, written reviews that take a while to read are becoming rarer and rarer. People want to rather listen to a podcast (working on that!) or YouTube videos (planning for that!) instead of reading a 1k-word long review about a game they never heard about from a guy they hardly know at all. So, it makes sense that bigger outlets end up trying to milk posts for reviews by publishing a lot of shorter ones with less effort or less playtime… There are exceptions to that rule, of course, and I didn’t really do too much research on everyone’s playtime, but I noticed indicators for a short playtime in a lot of posts, basically. People not talking about the problems in a game or frankly mentioning “negative stuff” from the early hours, for instance. Before I used to write about games, I’d read up on these titles on all sorts of sites, then I’d end up buying it and playing it for myself only to then notice that it’s actually not that good… but I was past the point of refunding it and regretted the purchase. Alas, I lost my trust in some of the bigger sites and don’t really give a damn about their opinions anymore. If I were to do the same to be able to ship out more reviews, I’d end up potentially betraying the trust of readers that actually trust my opinions and my taste in games, resulting in me losing those readers… and what’s worse, wasting their time and money, making them regret things potentially, and making them sad.
Maybe I’m just overthinking this a bit too much but what I’m trying to say is that I want to post more reviews but I’ll have to figure out a schedule for how to do things and when to write when to edit, and when to post these reviews. Maybe I’ll switch from “doing everything in one day” to “doing a little bit every day and working on a different post on different days”. I think I have a plan when it comes to that and how to do that… Obviously, I could also do more guest posts. Obviously, I could hire people to write for me or have other authors as well… or even a ghostwriter, haha… but I won’t do that. This is my personal gig and I like doing this. More guest posts would be great but I’m not planning on actually having a permanent team in place anytime soon or turning this into some bigger operation like that.
Let’s sum it up: I alluded to working on a podcast-type of thing as well as potential YouTube content, and I’ve been talking about my thoughts on big review sites and why I don’t want to do certain things aka my values when it comes to writing reviews as well as why that doesn’t work too well with posting reviews steadily.
Cheers!
This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!
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