I have just started a gaming blog and would love to hear what your favorite games are. I'm trying to make sure I post content on the games that are popular now. Please post your favorites. Thanks in advance for the info.
Just a little tip, perhaps go to Amazon.com and see the best sellers in the PC Games section. That will tell you what is hot right now. Granted, you probably need to actually play the games before writing solid content around them.
Thanks. Good idea. I will be outsourcing the content to writers that are more familiar with the gaming world than I am. Amazon is a good place to start so that I can see which games to feature.
http://store.steampowered.com/ <- Great place to get started with finding out what is coming up and what is currently selling well. Steam is PC only and doesn't have every title out there, but you can supplement it with other big gaming sites. Just a friendly hint from someone who has a couple gaming sites already: Facebook games have a huge draw right now, have lots of first time gamers who are just starting to get into PC gaming, and are very easy to build a social marketing campaign around. I took a 2 week old site, threw up an 800 word Castleville article with 2 images, and it hit the first page of Google results for 4 Castleville related terms with no linking done and is just collecting lots of traffic for the cost of an 800 word article.
Wow! Thanks so much for being so generous with your information! I was not familiar with this source at all. I have over 100 sites in just about every niche you can think of. I have avoided the gaming niche simply because I do not have a clue about it, but this niche has too much potential to ignore. I know how to get my sites ranked, but as we all know, if your content does not convert, the ranking does not matter. Thanks again for the info and the case study. I love seeing what other marketers are doing to make money.
You're welcome. Steam is a huge provider of PC games and you can see it with their online stats listed right on their front page, 4.4 million gamers online using their platform as I am looking at it now. Like I said, they don't sell every game out there, but they pick up a lot of big titles. On the page I linked, when you go down a bit and get the vertical list of games, the default is New Releases. You can use the tab for Top Sellers to see what is selling well right now for them. Very handy for targeting what is "hot" right now. One more tab over is Coming Soon, which should help you get a jump on the upcoming stuff. Don't stick with just Steam though. Some titles don't end up on there, especially from some of the companies like EA and Blizzard. Joystiq is a pretty big site for gaming, http://massively.joystiq.com/ being their section dedicated to MMO's. The MMO is a type of game that is still a newer thing for Steam and not likely an area of gaming that they will ever get a large amount of titles for because of the nature of it. Facebook games are also something Steam doesn't do and I doubt they ever will get into it just because the nature of Facebook games would be prohibitive for them. http://www.giantbomb.com/ is another big gaming site that, like Joystiq, covers just about everything and isn't exclusive to PC (plenty of console coverage).
Well gamespot is another good source, you can look at there which game is popular and write details about it in your site.
I kind of agree with Yasir but I also want to say that gamespot caters to the hardcore gamers, I believe. People that are new to gaming might be interested in the reviews whereas gaming verterans are interested in the news. Just my 2 cents.
Some people like news, others reviews, and most like a bit of both. There is a reason that the bigger gaming sites have a mix. Ultimately though, the reason that you see the bigger sites succeed is because of the branding they do for their staff, and the likability of those staff when they discuss news or give a review for a game. People like checking out MMOHut because watching Omer (think I got his name right) trying out a game is entertaining. GiantBomb has seen big success in part because of the QuickLook videos they do. The guys that do the videos are just fun to listen to and even make a Farming Simulator game video fun to watch (for those of us who would fall asleep without the commentary). The folks over at Destructoid like Jim Sterling bring in thousands of readers daily because they write in an interesting way and let their personalities shine through.