In Third Person

…that is the question.

I like to think to myself that I write this blog for me first. I turn to this blog whenever I have a gaming thought I think is worth writing down and I make it happen. It’s a very therapeutic process for me. However, I also love to look at my analytics to see what does well and what doesn’t. Posts about fightsticks? Money in the bank. Posts about sexy video game characters? They never go out of style. Video game reviews? The numbers aren’t pretty.

The reality for me is, my video game review posts, in terms of views, pale in comparison to the other content I write for the site. I would have no problem with this if video game reviews were my passion and all I wanted to write. I would also not have a problem with this if I didn’t care about the numbers. Neither of these are necessarily the case.

I do enjoy writing reviews from time to time, especially when they’re about games I really love that may not get the hype as some of gaming’s other big releases. For instance, I really enjoyed writing the Catherine review, because I thought it was a fantastic game that I thought deserved the love. I don’t regret writing what I wrote for a second. Did the world get my message? Outside of a few dozen of you, no.

I have a few theories as to why my reviews tank. The most obvious reason is the fact that game reviews are a dime a dozen. Head over to Metacritic, and you’ll have access to dozens of reviews from major and minor outlets for any given game. Do a Google search, and my reviews are buried behind the likes of IGN, Gamespot and Kotaku. All of these outlets have been doing reviews forever, do it better, and have the review market share locked down. I’ve found my own niche when it comes to my personal posts, more creative posts and posts that cover topics that major sites don’t; all of which perform well. Do I ever see a day when my reviews can some sort of traction against the top dogs? At this point, the odds of that happening are slim to none. The only way this changes in any sort of meaningful way is if my reviews index higher on Google search results. Unless I’m willing to throw down the cash for paid search results, that’s probably a non-starter.

If I approached every review with the excitement that I approached writing the review for Catherine, I wouldn’t be second guessing this subject. However, not every review is a joy to write. They also take a lot of time and work to create. For one, in order to write a fair review, I have to put in the time to play the game. This could take dozens of hours depending on the length of the game or time I feel is required to fairly judge it. On top of that, there’s very much an art to writing a good review; an art I don’t feel I do very well. Trying to find the right balance of insight, fact, emotion and entertainment is very hard, and requires a lot of time on my part to craft something I’m happy with. If it’s a game I don’t like, mustering up the energy to play that game to completion and write a full review is even tougher.

Although I’m not dealing with money, there absolutely is a return on investment calculation I could apply to this. Most of my other post types are fun to write, can be written fairly quickly and do decent-to-great numbers. Reviews on the other hand, aren’t always fun to write, always take a lot of time and consistently do poorly. Having only a finite amount of time available to me to write, wouldn’t it be best to maximize my ROI by only writing the posts that make me happy and bring in the visitors, rather than focus on posts that are hard to write, take a lot of time and don’t bring in visitors?

The only game reviews on In Third Person that get a lot of views are my iOS game reviews. This is likely because there’s a ton of iOS gamers out there, not a lot of established iOS review websites, and not a lot of ‘educated’ iOS gamers who go to the same sites like Touch Arcade and Slide to Play for reviews (though they are awesome at what they do). In this market space, Google search is my best friend. Lots of people find my iOS reviews through Google search, which isn’t the case when I write about console games. Random and tangential fact: the most viewed review on In Third Person in 2011 is the Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 for iPhone review. I’m hoping that a few of you changed your minds on purchasing that game thanks to my review, cause it’s awful. Even after all of the patches and updates, it still falls well short of the bar set by Street Fighter IV: Volt and King of Fighters-i.

All things considered, does that mean In Third Person will cease writing reviews? Probably not. I’m fairly certain that if/when the itch comes to write a review, I’m going to want to scratch it. However, I will absolutely keep it in the back of my mind the fact that reviews don’t do well on my site, and that at a certain point, it’s not worth going the distance on a review that will most likely get trounced by a post about my new car or by posts about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game for NES.

What do you think? Should I keep writing reviews? Should I re-allocate my time towards posts that will gain more visitors? Should I even be using visits as a metric of success if my goal for this site is to be my personal outlet first? Let’s discuss in the comments!