1257: You Ess Gee

I’m really happy with the way USgamer is going.

Lest you’ve somehow missed me going on about it, USgamer is my new job. It is the American counterpart to the well-established European gaming site Eurogamer, but it is absolutely not a reskinned Eurogamer. It is its own beast, and the small team we have working on it are carving out a great little niche.

In order for a new gaming site to make sense in this crowded content marketplace, it needs to offer something different and interesting. There are already far too many sites doing the “daily news, occasional previews and reviews” thing, and after a while they become all but interchangeable. That’s not to say that there’s anything inherently wrong with that model, but there are already a whole bunch of well-established sites out there that do that, and so jumping head-first into the fray and hoping to compete is, frankly, lunacy.

Instead, what we’re doing with USgamer is a combination of original reporting and personal, opinionated editorial pieces. The news that has already been covered by other sites gets put into our front-page “feed”, allowing us to acknowledge that things have happened but not waste any time on rewriting things that have already been written five or six times over — and will be rewritten several hundred more times by the time the day is over. This frees us up to write interesting features, interviews, reviews, previews and opinion pieces, with a strong focus on us writing in our own personal “voices” in order to provoke discussion. It’s the kind of site I’d like to read if I weren’t actively writing for it; in fact, I still read the stuff my colleagues write and comment on it, and we’re building a very pleasant little community in the process.

This is the first time I’ve really been present at the birth of a website like this. I was around when my brother launched the now-defunct What They Play, but in a freelance capacity rather than as a regular staffer, so I didn’t really get to see in detail how the community built up and responded to things. With USgamer, however, it’s interesting to observe the new community members showing up, tentatively commenting, engaging in discussions and subsequently growing in confidence, becoming regular posters in the process.

It’s early days yet — our most commented-on piece has about 30 comments or so, which is a fraction of what a fairly throwaway story on Eurogamer attracts on a daily basis — but we’re setting a good groundwork. By having high-quality stuff on the site at this early stage and actively participating in discussions with the community, we’re setting high expectations both for ourselves and our readers, and I really think that’s going to pay off in the long term. We’re never going to be a Kotaku, but we’re not trying to be; Kotaku posts far too much stuff to keep up with in a single day anyway.

Basically, I’m having a blast with it so far, and I hope you like it too. On the off-chance you haven’t taken a peek just yet, get thee hence, even if you’re not an American. You might just like what you see.