Goodbye Weekly Round-Up Wednesday

So long, farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, goodbye!

Weekly Round-Up Wednesday (and its earlier incarnation, "Pile of Shame Sunday") was originally set up as a means of delivering regular weekly content to the blog and a way of me sharing what progress I was making on my backlog to anyone that was interested. The notes I recorded on these posts were often used when compiling reviews too, so they were quite useful to me. However, it's become apparent that maybe the posts were not the kind of content people wanted to read, unless you were a big fan of whatever game I was playing or a developer. Also, despite the posts being not that lengthy either, they still took some time to compile. I obviously take a lot of inspiration from bigger gaming websites and blogs, especially PC ones, so I started wondering what they have been up to nowadays? I know in the past they used to do weekly posts, which is part of the reason why I started the Pile of Shame Sunday posts, but do they still post this kind of stuff? Is it worth doing nowadays?

So I checked out the following websites and blogs:

• IGN
• Gamespot
• Game Rant
• Kotaku
• Polygon
• Rock Paper Shotgun
• Eurogamer
• PC Gamer

None of these sites do weekly articles anymore. Some run weekly podcasts though so perhaps this is now a substitute for the blogs/websites that used to run weekly posts.

I also checked to see how many news or posts about PC games were made by each of the websites/blogs over the past 24 hours. Most only had a handful (even PC Gamer) with a couple not even posting anything about PC games in the past 24 hours. Game Rant however had a ridiculous number of posts related to PC gaming over the past 24 hours: 59. A majority of the posts though were tips 'n' tricks articles or walkthroughs for recent games, or opinion pieces. A lot of the posts were also funny videos gamers had posted on Twitter.

Anyway, it's for these reasons that I've decided that this weekly post will cease to exist. Maybe I'll revisit the idea in the future or even start up a podcast sometime but for now, I'll instead do the following:

• For those that were fans of the games I was playing, I can better deliver what they want by focusing my time on reviews and if I happen to be playing a very new game or a beta, I can provide first impressions posts like I used to in the early days of the blog (which would be also useful as a form of early feedback to developers).
• To ensure that there is regular content being posted each week, I'll publish at least one post a week (but I'll aim for a few if possible). Posts about gaming-related news, new updates and new releases seem to be my natural fit so you can expect a lot of those. If I ever encounter issues that I find solutions for in games, I'll also be sure to share these.

Despite them just being silly posts that provided a summary of games I played during the week, I feel like retiring the posts is the end of an era. The "Pile of Shame Sunday" posts started on 21 May 2017 and were renamed on 9 January 2021 to "Weekly Round-Up Wednesday" so that's almost 6 years of my life I have been doing them. While I'll kind of miss them in a way, I'm also looking forward to the freedom I'll now have to post when I want and be able to invest more time in reviews.