Blog 2008 in review

This isn't a post about games, at least not directly. I'll not review the games of 2008, and I'll sure not make any predictions for 2009. We live in a difficult economic period, and while there are some interesting games in the pipeline, there might well be delays and cancellations out of purely financial reasons. So in this post I'll just talk about the development of this blog in 2008. So as that probably doesn't interest you, you can stop reading at this point.

This was an extremely interesting year for me as blogger. I got 1 million visits, resulting in 1.3 million page views; as all the new content is on the main page, few people read more than that. The number of site visitors was pretty much constant over the year, but I gained in RSS feed readers. Besides the 3,000 daily visitors, I get over 2,000 RSS feed readers. There is probably some overlap, but as you can read the complete content on the feed, lots of people prefer to read my blog via their newsreader and only visit the site if they want to leave a comment. For a blog about a relatively narrow subject, that is quite a lot of traffic, although of course commercial gaming sites get a lot more.

So as result of that traffic, the major change in 2008 was that I got a lot more official recognition of my work. And that makes me very proud. Which is important, because this blog runs on vanity, and isn't creating any sort of income for me. At least that business model is pretty much recession proof. The official recognition allowed me to interview people like Blizzard's J. Allen Brack or Mythic's Paul Barnett. I even got interviewed myself on WoWInsider. And it got me various goodies, like a press pass to the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational 2008, and free subscriptions to Warhammer Online and Puzzle Pirates. The only downside of this was that sometimes I had to fight to get people to realize that this is still just a personal blog, and not a professional site.

So for me and the blog it was a very good year. And it wouldn't have been possible without *your* support: your visits, your comments, and the high level of maturity and intelligence you've been keeping up in the discussions. I want to thank you for all this, and wish you a happy new year, and a glorious 2009.