Brutal Gamer as of April 14th 2011 |
|
| URL | http://BrutalGamer.com |
|---|---|
| Slogan | "Brutally Honest" |
| Commercial? | No |
| Type of site | Video Gaming Blog/Podcast/Community |
| Registration | June 2008 |
| Available language(s) | English |
| Owner | Leigh Groocock [1] |
| Alexa rank | 184,337; 10,939 (January 2012[update])[2] |
| Current status | Active |
Brutal Gamer is a video game blog published in the United Kingdom, founded in June 2008 by Leigh Groocock. It was a community focused blog site that has now grown to be one of the most up to date news, reviews and previews sites in the UK.
Contents |
Brutal Gamer was founded in June 2008 by Leigh Groocock.[3] With help from several community members of Sarcastic Gamer[4] a new fledgling site was created to try to compete with the growing tide of USA-centric blogs like Destructoid, Kotaku, Joystiq etc.
The initial line-up was as follows:
The site was launched formally in July 2008,[3] along with the now synonymous quote line ‘’Brutally Honest’’.
The writing line up was expanded in August 2008 when Zeth Ward joined the staff as a writer. Over the coming months the line-up altered as original contributors ‘Chexd’, ‘Mitch’ and ‘Addison’ all left the site. During this time the site was maintained solely by the remaining two members of the team Groocock & Ward. The site still managed to capture the attention of the community and steady growth followed.
Mike Jones joined a few months later in March 2008 and, via his Lookin’ Back feature managed to draw new audiences to the site. New writers Barry Guihen and Jeff Harper soon joined the team and the early complement of staff was formed.
Rapid and consistent growth took the obscure blog site from quirky oddity to a globally read site. Soon the readership swelled to bring Brutal Gamer to a significant level where global and local publishers alike were willing to deal with them on a daily basis.
Following a massive hack on Brutal Gamer’s host server in April 2010 (via a security hole in another sites code on the shared server) the site went completely down for almost two weeks. A minor slippage of global traffic occurred and forced a change of hosting company to a dedicated cloud server.
As the site grew so did the staffing levels and in September 2010 Brutal Gamer was ranking inside the top 4,000 site in the UK, and slowly cracking the top slots in the US and Canada. This marked the biggest impact on the site and it was now becoming a recognisable “brand” in the global gaming community. The ranking placed it above contemporaries like Now Gamer, Beefjack, GamerLimit, Sarcastic Gamer[4] to name but a few.
The site had it’s third major overhaul in July 2010 [3] running a heavily modified theme and new clean look interface. A new logo was introduced as well that replaced the comic styling of the original “BG Ant” character with a new fanged version.
New staff members Amy Nelson, Troy Benedict and Justin Alderman were taken on to help round out the US operation along with original US stalwart Jeff Harper. With this move Brutal Gamer could now offer 24/7 news, reviews and coverage - a unique position in the UK with only VG247 offering the same at that time.
In April 2011 the site underwent a staff re-shuffle moving several team members in to more prominent roles to promote growth and longevity of the site. A new Indie focused editorial section was also established to promote a rapidly growing area of video game development.
Editors
EU Staff
US Staff
Contributors
Former Staff
| Hosting | Barry Guihen, Zeth Ward |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Updates | Tuesdays |
| Length | 50 - 70 minutes |
| Production | Mike Jones |
| Debut | 13th July , 2009 |
| Genre | Video gaming |
| Provider | Brutal Gamer |
| Website | http://brutalgamer.com/category/podcast/ |
The original podcast line-up featured Leigh Groocock, Ben King and Zeth Ward. Only thirteen episodes were ever recorded and the podcast ended in late 2008.
July 13, 2009 [5] the podcast was revived due to popular demand from Brutal Gamer’s community.
The new podcast is edited and directed by Mike Jones.
The podcast are roughly an hour in length but were plagued by poor audio quality in the earliest of recordings. The style of the podcast is that of a relaxed ramble amongst friends at a bar. Plenty of the weeks news and current played games are covered but also retro titles are discussed as well as general comments and discussion on the Video Game industry as a whole
The Brutal Gamer Podcast spent an extended six week period in the Apple iTunes New and Notable section upon initial release and continues to be enjoy by thousands the world over. There is also an associated App for both the iOS [6] operating system devices and Android [7] devices.
Current Podcast Line-Up
A few of the Interviews and Features to be found on Brutal Gamer: