As we near the end of yet another year, it’s time to look back at Flash of Steel from December 9, 2007 to now.<\/p>\n
The state of the blog is strong. Traffic is slowly growing and there have been a few big hits over the year. The five top 2008 posts were my series on ancient games<\/a>, my opening thoughts on In Nomine<\/a>, my rebuttal to a Gamasutra post on the future of the RTS<\/a> (which was itself subsequently published on Gamasutra), last year’s end of the year awards<\/a> and my recent comments on Elliott’s review symposium idea.<\/a> (This isn’t counting the main page or my bio.)<\/p>\n As always, search terms reveal something about gamers. My old reviews of Pox Nora<\/a> and Punic Wars<\/a> are still big draws, evidence that consumers of this type of independent game seek out reviews. They can’t rely on Metacritic to give them a snapshot, after all. I think that a gaming site somewhere needs to find a way to serve these people, integrating them into the larger gaming environment and also exposing their current readers to a more varied diet. This is free traffic, people. You can’t cover everything, though, since this costs money. And I was in negotiation with one major site to cover wargames for them in a more sustained way before things started imploding over there, so there are sympathetic ears.<\/p>\n A lot of the search terms are for pretty basic information about games. How to play as a particular country in a specific game. Whether an RTS works in TCP\/IP. How to disable a particular feature in Civilization IV<\/em>. Civilization Revolution<\/em> tips. A surprising number of searches about playing Centurion: Defender of Rome<\/em>. General tips on how not to suck at real time strategy games. People seem to have a lot of trouble stopping scythed chariots in Rome: Total War<\/em>. And there are concerns about the minimum system requirements for Empire: Total War<\/em>.<\/p>\n Lots of homework searches. Five features of Civilization. What was the turning point of the Civil War? History of colonization. Summary of Guns, Germs and Steel<\/em>. Who did Kennedy beat in 1960?<\/p>\n A steep drop in perversion searches, though. Thank God. People do want to know how to assemble a magazine or why no one likes them. (I can help with the latter.)<\/p>\n In a year which saw me make more money than I usually do at this job (thanks John!<\/a>), I also spent a lot less time playing and writing about wargames, which is a reflection of both how many wargames there have been (and learning each one is a challenge) and of how no one will pay me to write about them. When you can make more money writing about books<\/a> than you can about war games, then that’s where your time goes. I hope to change that in 2009.<\/p>\n