I'm a Big Fish now
After two and a half years of daily news scribbles and the occasional rant about the videogame industry, today I'm joining it. I've been hired by Big Fish Games to be their new product manager for online games.
This is actually where I've been directing my career for some time. Big Fish Games is (in my opinion) among the best online gaming destinations with one of the biggest portfolios of titles. They actually release a new game every day, 365 days a year.
Big Fish also happened to move into the same downtown Seattle office building where, until yesterday, I worked as member communications manager at HealthTalk. I've spent the past two years helping people face chronic illness. Believe it or not, it was actually a great job and it pained me to leave it. But at the same time, I couldn't NOT pursue my dream.
Big Fish Games is a casual game company, and Gamestay has always been about the middle-of-the-road gamer: more than casual but not quite hardcore, either. That means I've sometimes included news about casual games - particularly Xbox Live Arcade though now and again I've written about other interesting titles and destinations that crossed my radar. Personally, I love casual games and always try to carve out time for them.
But now, in my professional life, I'm going to be focused on casual games full time. So the balance in my news blog may shift a little over time (you may have already detected it). I'll be sure to call out my affiliation anytime I do report on something that me or my company had a hand in, though I think you know by now that I strive to detach myself from any built-in biases - except for my ingrained bias against stupid or ill-conceived decisions that impact gamers in big ways.
Basically, I just gravitate to stuff I really like that I believe others will like, and the stuff that really pisses me off.
It's my hope that I'll also be able to blog some about my job and the interesting things I'm involved in. Assuming I can, I'll probably restrict those sorts of posts to my personal blog (what you're reading now), though I may bubble up some of the more interesting items to the news blog as well. The overall goal of this site remains the same: to help you wade through the mountains of gaming news to home in on the most useful, relevant and just plain cool items.
I know that - like me - you're busy, and you want to save what little free time you have for actually playing games. Maybe you'll try Big Fish Games, maybe not. But we'll still have lots of fun.
-=Gamewatcher
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