Thank you PC Gamer!

About a month ago, right before I went to see Depeche Modes latest tour in Stockholm, I wrote a short and hasty preview on the more or less marginalised russian first person shooter Ubersoldier. A game about undead nazis killing other nazis. Yeah, I know, storywriting at it's peak. Anyway, not surprisingly it got a few reads the first week and the occasional comment. But considering how new and unknown the developer is in the business and how stupid the title of the game is it didn't get especially large attention. Nothing strange about that.

But last week we suddenly got a huge influx of visitors at Spel², and although we've had a good and steadily growing number of visitors since February, we couldn't really figure out why we suddenly got this boost of visitors all of a sudden. The BF2142 article rush was over, so was the Oblivion review rush. We had nothing new last week to offer but standard material. Nothing that'd draw this much attention you thought.

So I took a closer look upon our webstatistic, and to my surprise I found out that my over a month old preview of Ubersoldier was the cause for all this new attention. 25% of last weeks hits was on that preview. Our most read article this month so far. While this of course was fun for us at Spel², we couldn't at all understand why this small russian title suddenly got this much attention. Or at least I couldn't. That is, until yesterday, when I finally had the time to pick up and read through the latest issue of the swedish PC Gamer magazine.

It appears that Mikael Hjalmarsson had written a thorough review of just Ubersoldier. So it became suddenly very apparent where all this extra attention came from: The PC Gamer readers had gotten interested in the title and wanted to know more. And since we are one of the few (the only?) swedish gamesite with any sort of coverage on the game, well, they came to us. So thank you Hjalmarsson and thank you PC Gamer for bringing your readers to us :) Involuntarily as it may be.

Anyway, my real point here is that this certainly shows what a heavy actor the swedish PC Gamer is in the game industry here. Hjalmarssons conclusions about the game could be described pretty much like being "lukewarm", and pretty consistent with my own conclusions. It's not a big title, and it will never be. But, PC Gamer reaches out to so many readers that they will affect the target audiences instantly. There is no way that Ubersoldier would have gotten any attention at all without coverage in PC Gamer. But now I dare say enough attention has ben made to this title to affect sales in a positive manner.

My sincere hope is that the marketing departments realise this, understand what it means, and pay due respect. The true power lies within the gamepress, not the PR departments. The smallest article can bring attention that it would otherwise never get. And I also hope magazines like PC Gamer are aware of this, although I think they are. And that they use this power in the right way.

While at it, I would be very glad if PC Gamer now could give me a one year subscription for free. Pretty please? I'm kind a low on funds at the moment. No? ah, well, it was worth a shot at least.