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Nicholas Lovell
Home   >   Sandbox   >   GAMESbrief: from blog to must-have resource

GAMESbrief: from blog to must-have resource

By on January 29, 2013

GAMESbrief is changing.

If you are reading this on the website, you already know that. If you are reading (as about half of you do) on RSS or email, you might want to check out www.gamesbrief.com to see what I am talking about.

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The GAMESbrief team sat down last year to work out what we thought the heart of GAMESbrief is. Of course it includes my analysis of what is happening to the business of games, but it is becoming much more than that. It is a resource. It has stats and data. It provides free tools like the free-to-play spreadsheet. I sells books and masterclasses. It was time for a change.

We ran through an exercise to decide what was important to us about GAMESbrief. This is what we are came up with:

  • Must-have
  • Free-to-play (although we also believe in paymium)
  • Authoritative and expert
  • Will help our readers and customers
  • Is approachable
  • Is a place where you can learn

The website redesign is all about our transition from being a blog to being a place packed full with stuff you need to know about the F2P game design. In fact, we tried to come up with a better word than Stuff You Need to Know and gave up, so that’s what you can see on the menu. We’ve made the free stuff more visible (and we will also improve the store over time as we create more products). We intend to add video to our content as well as the written words that so many of you enjoy. We’ve created a footer so that those of you who arrive from deeplinks will be able to find more of the material that you need.

Our measure of success is whether you spend more time reading the site (measured by page views). Not because we split articles to artificially increase the count. We want GAMESbrief to become a must-have a resource. The sort of website that reminds you of a well-thumbed reference book, a place that you return to again and again for data, for advice or for analysis.

We would love to hear what you think of the site, and also what you want to find on GAMESbrief in the future.

And I’d like to finish with congratulations to Elizabeth, Jay, Zoya and Rob for all the work on the redesign. Thank you very much.

About Nicholas Lovell

Nicholas is the founder of Gamesbrief, a blog dedicated to the business of games. It aims to be informative, authoritative and above all helpful to developers grappling with business strategy. He is the author of a growing list of books about making money in the games industry and other digital media, including How to Publish a Game and Design Rules for Free-to-Play Games, and Penguin-published title The Curve: thecurveonline.com