Here’s to you lot.
Yes, it’s true. Pocket Tactics readers are smarter, more attractive, and uphold higher standards of personal hygiene than the average Joe or Jane. It’s been scientifically proven by the results of this year’s Reader Survey, which over a thousand of you graciously volunteered your time to fill out last week. I thought perhaps you’d enjoy seeing some of the data from it.
Fair warning: this Almanac is all naval-gazing inside-baseball tomfoolery about PT. If you don’t care (who could blame you?) then we’ll see you tomorrow for news and my review of Spymaster.
We got 1104 responses to this year’s survey in just over 3 days — it took us a whole week to get that many last year. But that makes sense, seeing that there’s twice as many monthly readers of the site as there were last year, who come here about a million times a month.
One guy wrote that our posts have too many jokes and that we should “stick to the basics”. I suspect he’s probably going to give us a bad grade next year, too.
You guys think we’re doing a pretty decent job — that graph above looks like your typical North Korean election results. Those marks for quality are humbling and gratifying. I’m pleased with the site overall. I think that Sean and Kelsey and Dave and FNG Tierney are writing great reviews, and although I haven’t had as much time this year to do features, what I have done (like our recent profile of Ascension artist Eric Sabee) I’m mostly happy with.
Before the end of the year, you can expect overhauled Pocket Tactics Forums and a couple of other new website features, plus one or two new faces joining the writing team. Only about 9% of you said that you were interested in video content, so I’m in no huge rush to start doing too much more of that. I strongly suspect that the aversion to video is down to PT‘s older-skewing audience — the single biggest age demographic slice for the site was the 40% of you between 36-45 years old, and the next biggest group was 26-35 year-olds. Maybe we should start reviewing vacation timeshares in Florida.
Next year Amazon Fire Phone will replace “Chumby” as the comedy answer.
I’m always curious to see what the mix of devices is among PT readers, and a whopping 91% of you own iPads. There were many fewer Android tablets than I expected, and Windows tablets are less popular than Congress and twitchy dentists.
Chumby is back, you know.
Angry Birds: not as big of a guilty pleasure as I would have thought.
What you all like to play has remained fairly steady from last year’s survey, though tower defense games have dropped in popularity significantly, which is an interesting chicken-and-egg problem related somehow to the scarcity of new games in that genre this past year.
This graph tells me that we probably cover adventure and sports games too much — but I like adventure and sports games so that ain’t gonna change.
A couple of folks have asked why it’s so tough to get a PT commenting account, what with the required non-free email address, short waiting period, and mandatory blood sample. The high barrier to entry makes a lot of folks decide it’s not worth the trouble, and to be entirely, brutally honest — I’m fine with that.
I don’t think it’s a controversial opinion that Internet comments on the whole are really, massively, stinky bad. Look at the comments any YouTube channel, sports or politics site, or just about any place with open registration. Pacific Standard just gave up and shut down their comment feature recently. So did Matt Lees. And Sweden’s favourite son Pewdiepie. Gawker hasn’t yet but maybe they should have. There are very few sites on the internet where comments are a net generator of value and insight.
Pocket Tactics is an exception, in my opinion. Our commenting community here is unbelievably excellent; chock full of funny, smart, insightful people who write in complete sentences and use capitalisation and terminal periods as appropriate. I’m in no huge rush to add to that community, and so far it seems that if folks take the time to comply with our slightly more onerous-than-usual registration process, they’re doing so because they want to contribute to the polite, thoughtful commenting culture here, and not just sling snark at each other.
I started PT because I love games and because I love writing about games. I didn’t start PT to become a forum moderator, which is a task I find Sisypheanly tedious. The community that has built up around the site is exactly what I’d hoped for. Thank you all for being a part of it, even if you’re just reading. I’m proud of this place, and it wouldn’t be here without you.
Okay, blah blah blah, shut up Owen and make with the Sunday links already.
- Visual effects artist Douglas Trumbull tells Hollywood Reporter how he saved Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
- The 1943 New York Giants have drafted you — here’s the letter you got in the mail about it. I love that amazing letterhead. (via this reddit thread)
- “Tim Cook is about to announce something. It starts above the earth. It’s big. Perhaps it’s world peace or a way to fix poverty. It’s clearly a big, global thing that really matters to everything on earth. … No it is a watch.” Anil Dash and Paul Ford did the best Apple Event live blog.
- Surely the best reason to get an Android smart watch instead: Goldeneye interface.
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