Looking at the competition, Present and the Future of L337 Gamer Review

Well I don't often look at other start-up gamer journalistic blogs (though I should), something possessed me to do just that a few moments ago. I looked up L337 Gamer, both because of the similarity to L337 Gamer Review, and because the proper spelling "1337", is confused enough with L337, that it wouldn't affect the Google search too bad.

I've seen my competition and feel.....pretty damn good about my efforts through blogger. While Blogger may not be a flashy site like Joystiq or as professional as gameindustry.biz, its still light years ahead of the competition.

l337gamer.com

OK so this blog which is hosted by GoDaddy and the home page reads as follows, "All your gaming needs and desires from cheats to walkthroughs.". While I don't have walkthrough's, neither does this guy. His navigation bar gives you three options, home, upcoming games, forums. The homepage is just that little quote I listed above with unmet promises and a Gears of War vid featuring the song "behind blue eye's", by limp bizkit. The upcoming games section is thrown onto one big page and doesn't look appealing to the eye's with the month being mentioned after every damn platform (couldn't it just all be under a giant header "June" ?). Wii is spelled "WII", throw in another "W", and your likely to confuse the Wii section for section about world war 2. The forums don't work with the opera web browser,(or any of the other browsers that aren't IE or FireFox), so we can assume this blogger thinks we are back in 2006 when the only two browsers anyone seemed to pay attention to where FireFox and its evil corporate web browser competitor Internet Explorer (because some people assume that Microsoft = evil).

What I offer that he and others do not:

While its next to impossible. OK absolutely impossible, for one man to create a site or blog that can report and compete with the massive and well established big boys of gaming journalism like Joystiq and 1UP or even PC-Gamer. L337 Gamer Review isn't about competing. L337 Gamer Review is about one gamer and in time many gamers, writing reviews and reporting the goings on in the game industry. If I had to compare myself to someone it would be Jerry Yang of yahoo and fellow yahoo co founder David Filo. The two started yahoo out of nothing more then a few cobbled together PCs and servers in a trailer on the Stanford campus as a side project meant to categorize relevant sports data for their fantasy football competitions.

I recently received not one but two emails relating to Atari's upcoming Dragon Ball Z Burst and Alone in the Dark. I can't even begin to describe the feeling of joy I had reading those emails. Its those emails that keep me going and going the extra mile rather then burning out at the sheer immensity of the task. I for one would like to see Atari resurrect itself in much the same way Apple Computer was able to do so. Weather a company with a reputation for retro games of yest er year can do this is still in question but for some in the media and close friends to write off Atari is in my view a mistake.

If I had to sum up what I have that others in the same boat don't have in 3 words it would be, Content, passion and the presentation to get it out to fellow gamers.

The future:

In the future I plan to move away from blogger and create a fully independent blog and or news service for gamers. There are plenty of talented writers and fellow gamers out there who need an outlet for their views. I think L337 Gamer could be that outlet. As for design, I plan to implement flash in small amounts and then expand the sites interactivity as the share of potential viewers/subscribers with a high speed Internet connection not only expands (pretty damn big as is), but also as the amount of data expands beyond 100MB to 500MB over the next few years. Yes that means L337 Gamer is going to keep going throughout the summer, fall and make a huge splash in the spring of 2009.