The Five Year Post

2010 has started with a ****load of work, and so the usual set of predictions I'd write at the beginning of the year has had to wait. At the same time though, I noticed that the fifth anniversary of my blog has come up. I thought it was worth taking a few minutes to ponder what's happened in that time.

Personally, a lot has happened. The twins went from cute little one year olds to thriving, brilliant little kindergartners (and gamers!). We had a smaller auxiliary backup child. I moved from Intel to Microsoft and back to Intel again (which brought a move from PDX to SEA and back to PDX). I went from running an engineering team to doing business development to doing long-term business planning. Hard-core games to casual games and back again. I edited GPG5, and of course, wrote a 1301 of blog posts. 1302 if you count this one.

To quote JK Simmons in Burn After Reading, "So... what have we learned?"

I'm certainly posting a lot less, from almost 400 posts in my first year, down a bit in 2006, sharply dropping off 2007,2008, and levelling off in 2009 with almost 150 posts. Part of this is attributable to things like Facebook, where more trivial short subjects and links might get posted as a FB status update rather than a blog post. Mostly though, it's concentration of my effort on the blog toward matters that I think will provide interesting food for thought and spur conversation in the blogosphere. In contrast, I do less linking to other people's stuff (I really should get my del.icio.us links working in an automated fashion, as it would make doing that far easier)

I did a couple experiments in generating revenue. I never thought these would amount to much, but want to experiment a bit just to understand the mechanics of it:

• I tried advertising with Google, later switching to TextLinkAds. the latter pays WAY more, generating a steady $30/40 month (google was much less). Hey, its beer money.
• Amazon associates, for my level of traffic, is hardly worth the effort, generating maybe $10/year for me. The new relationship with Google should make the link building/posting easier, but otherwise its not worth the bother.
• There was a period a couple years back when bloggers/social media frequented the news. A bunch of people sent me copies of products in hopes that getting blogs to write about them was the new path to success. That seems to have tapered off, which I believe indicates less indiscriminate shot-gunning of product.

It's no secret that traffic can spike depending who links to you and why. The most popular posts (as judged by linkage, comments, etc) fall into a couple categories:

• Post-mortems of conference sessions that people couldn't attend, like this one trashing Google's Casual Connect session on AdSense for games, or this one on Stumptown Game Machine's iphone post-mortem.
• Opinion pieces on games business models/economics/marketing, like this one on used games, or this one on Indie games marketing.
• Anything controversial, like my post in defense of Chris after his Wii rant.

In thinking about it though, the popularity of the blog (what little it has) is of little import. The entire effort has been highly positive, and the value has come mainly from two things:

First, the blog provides a place for me to post my thoughts, and this in turn requires me to organize them. When I post something on a technology or business models or whatever, I'm forced to structure my thoughts into an argument, look to the other side, etc. This leads to a better understanding on the topic.

Bigger than this though, is what the blog has done to start new friendships or reinforce existing ones. It's through the blog that I've become (or become better) friends like Mark, Robin, Alice, Darius, Raph, David, and many many others.

For these two reasons alone I would highly recommend blogging as an activity for building relations, structuring ideas, and getting feedback. From this respect its been a huge return for the time invested.

Lets hope it continues to be for the next five years!

Edge's "hot 100" list

Edge published their list of the 100 most important people in game development. While it was nice to see some friends make the list, there were also some weird entries and folks missing that should have made the list. Anyhow, congrats to Robin, Trent, John, Clint and everyone else on the list.

Shippin' stuff

Man, People are *shippin* stuff!

Dave's book is done. Congrats Dave. I remember finishing GPG5 and handing off the huge printed stack. Fun.

Robin (and a cast of others) shipped Boom Blox, and it's rockin' 85 on metacritic. I guess I'll finally have to buy that Wii.

Justin & Merci (who's game has been in beta for a while), shipped PMOG, the Passively Multiplayer Online Game.

Mary Jo shipped Iron Man. Congrats to her to, even though she's since left to do consulting. (BTW, the story's cuter coming from her S.O.)

Meanwhile, work on Industry's worst-kept secret will have me not shipping stuff for.... a while :-)

Rockin' Robin

...tweet, tweet.

Robin's got a rockin' review of EA's Rock Band with a bunch of shots of the character creation system. I hadn't heard much about that side of teh game, with most of the early write-ups focusing on either the song list, the peripheral pedantry, or the competition with Rock Band.

She really does make it sound fantastic. Now that I'm hitting my ceiling on GH-III (I aspire to 5-star medium, but alas, that's my limit), this may have to be the next purchase.

Bizzy

As you may have guessed, I've been fairly busy past few weeks, thus the lack of activity on the blog. Well, ok, slight stretching of the truth there, as I've been fairly busy but have also logged a lot of guitar hero action :-). Priorities and all that.

Last weekend I got down to Portland to see some friends and former co-workers from Intel. A couple of them are involved in the "larabee" project that just got announced (vaguely) at IDF. Got to have some interesting conversations about how life in The Empire differs from life with The Borg. (One of those former co-workers was having his side-project shown in a local fashion show the evening we were leaving. Not exactly what you expect for an Intel engineer, no?)

This past week I got down to San Francisco for one night. Mostly work and little social, but did manage to hook up with Robin for crepes and some interesting discussion comparing life at two different big games industry companies.

Hoping life gets back to normal a bit so I can post a little more frequently. Well, that and I'm almost done the all-songs-on-medium-at-five-stars achievment.

...but we make it up in volume!

Robin points us to the "Develop 100", an interesting attempt by Evolving Media to build a list of "The World's Most Successful Game Studios" by (according to their site):

Develop 100 ranks the world's games development studios based on the revenues their products made at UK retail in 2006.

While and interesting idea, it falls short of the mark for a couple reasons:

- UK only. Meh.
- Retail only. ('We rated the most powerful transportation vehicles by the amount of hay they consume in a day!'). 'nuff said.

And of course the biggest issue (and granted, hard to put THIS list together) is that I'd much rather see the list ranked by contribution margin rather than just revenue. To borrow Raph's metaphor, (which is also his business plan, I guess) I think you'd see a lot of small mammals ranked higher among the dinosaurs.

And as Robin points out, it'd be interesting to see this ranked by a number of factors. QoL, GameRankings average, etc, etc.

Robin's Sims

Robin's game project, MySims, has been announced, and it looks totally sweet. Like syrupy sweet. It looks like everything is made of candy!

I know a game like this has a huge number of people on it, all contributing, but I have to say that I've never seen a game that just oozed one person's personality as much as this one does. Coincidence? Perhaps.

Either way I'm super happy for her and her team and am looking forward to playing it (might have to buy that Wii or DS after all. Have been holding out so far)