While researching, we stumbled upon a random review site, thatguywiththeglasses.com, that had randomly reviewed goodgameTV.  This marks our first official critic review.  He describes goodgameTV as "a 'TV' station where it attempts to be G4 if G4 really cares about videogames" and sums up with: "bottom line? I say this site has some real potential and something to keep an eye on."  We're very pleased with this feedback and are very excited for the future.

goodgameTV Partner, Sarcastic Gamer, celebrates its first birthday this week (June 11th) with its latest parody song of Nintendo's latest peripheral and game experience, Wii Fit. The music video, featuring SG's "Dave" Cothran as the fat guy, is now available on Youtube and on the Sarcastic Gamer site.

goodgameTV celebrated its first official Content Update, hence launch, on Friday, June 6th.  Months of preparation culminated in our first successful update.  A sincere thank you is in order to all the staff and production teams involved for helping us make this possible.

As you guys can see, we've been messing around with the interface a little bit.  Oliver has learned Flash in just a few weeks and has converted our Guide into a Flash-based menu so that we have more options.  Although neither one of us is a fan of Flash, especially for SEO purposes, it does help the navigation tremendously, specifically for things that we want to do in the near future.

One of the biggest priorities within the upcoming weeks is to make sure that we really nail down the interface.  It's got to be so user-friendly that it's a non-issue in trying to navigate our content.  Ideally, it's even easier to use than an <gasp> iPod.  Yeah, I said it.  And you guys can hold us to that.  We'll keep working on it...

Expect to see a lot more substance to the site in the next months as well; it will be more than just a video screen.  There will be more interactive portals and we will also be introducing revenue streams.  The ideal is to position ourselves for explosive business development.

In the meantime, I'm working on a lot of the behind the scenes stuff, mostly business development related.  Hopefully I'll have some exciting news regarding that within the next few months.

In WOW, I'm now at level 39.  Oli has taken a temporary hiatus and moved onto Call of Duty 4 on Xbox 360.  He'll be returning to WOW shortly after he shakes his FPS addiction issues.

Production has slowed down as the end of summer draws near, some guys are a little behind schedule while others are right on target.  What's amazing is seeing just how awesome some of the work is: really really good stuff.

I think it's important that we slow down our updates so that we save our best stuff for the big release this fall.  At that point, we're going to do a revamped programming lineup and eliminate some of the extra shows.

We were contacted by a major video game company recently to talk about licensing out some of our new material.  It could lead to an interesting path of development.

I've been giving a few presentations of this site recently and the reaction I get is pretty much universal across the board: amazing concept, great potential.  It's up to us to realize this potential, we'll see if it happens.

In WOW, I finally hit level 30 and got my mount.  Phew!  We're still a ways away from where we need to be in that game, but I do admit that the more I play, the more I like it.  Also, by having more experience with the game, we feel like there's a lot of creative input that we can add to the WOW show, which is great because we can't wait to insert some of those ideas.

In terms of site interface changes, all has been quiet on this front in the past couple of weeks.  We've been busy doing a lot of backend business operations and our production teams have been in full swing.  Expect to see some more significant interface changes by early September.

After becoming more involved in tech media, it's interesting how we've changed our perspective of TV and web media.  Watching TV or online video has never been the same for us ever since starting up goodgameTV.  Instead of watching the shows for what they are, we now catch ourselves picking apart and completely dissecting the production of every show: we look for production techniques, editing, entertainment segments, style, and innovation.  For content, we look for writing and what the "writer is going for" vs the actual execution of the scene.  We also scrutinize how networks and sites try and integrate commercials and identify brand opportunities without interfereing with the viewer experience.  All very interesting stuff.

How that practically translates is for us to implement what we deem to be the "best of" these techniques to form a seamless experience.  Our ultimate goal is to provide a free video game TV channel, one that not only doesn't suck, but is exactly what every gamer has always wanted, AND find a way to make it financially viable.

The last bit that I wanted to impart is that we realize we're not going to get everything right from the start.  But we promise to always try and improve and make things better.  We're experimenting a lot, especially with site design/usage and content.  It'll be interesting to see where we end up, especially a year from now.

Lastly, I wanted to give an update on our WOW adventures: Oliver and I are both trolls, he is a hunter, I'm a warrior.  We're both around level 25 on the Undermind server.  We can't wait till we hit 30 so we can have a mount and stop all this cross-content walking nonsense.  Hopefully we'll be able to do that soon.

After a nice weekend off for the Fourth of July, the production teams are rearing to get back to work.  We have a lot of teams producing pilots for us right now.  Our goal is to have a big launch and release of our new and exclusive content this Fall.

Believe me when I say that we are EXTREMELY excited.  We're really pushing the envelope with new and original show concepts.  Some will appeal to a more general audience, some are very game-specific.  Some will cater to the casual gaming audience, others will be geared towards hardcore competitive gamers.  In any case, expect to see some really good stuff.

Also, it seems that with each day we're peaking the interest of more and more production teams.  That's our goal right now.  People ask why we're not more active marketing or why our viewer base isn't huge yet.  It's because we're still in our production team recruitment phase, making sure we lock down really good producers who can make great shows before we start getting the viewers involved.  The worst thing that can happen is that our shows don't live up to expectations and people come on our site and say, "Great potential but the shows suck."  We're trying to be very careful.  When we decide to push for more viewers, we want them to say, "This show is freakin awesome!  Wow, actually, I like a lot of these shows.  goodgameTV really knows what they're doing."

Lastly, we'll be making some changes to our user-interface and controls to make them even better.  This will perpetually be a work-in-progress as we continue to identify ways to make our site easier to use and navigate.  Expect to see a good amount of changes between now and our big launch this Fall.

I'm proud to say that we executed this update without a hitch, so we're definitely progressing in the right direction. The update might have caused some problems since we upgraded media player scripts and have tried to accommodate Firefox 3.0; there could be some bugs floating here and there. I know that on my personal PC the website seems to be rather buggy. Please report them to Oliver if you find any, oliver[at]goodgametv[dot]com.

In the background, Oliver and I have also been talking at length about the strategy of our website and how we're going to roll things out. It's been a huge learning process for us, talking about what works, what doesn't, what people want to see, etc. Look for some major announcements about how this website will function in the upcoming weeks.

Lastly I wanted to report that Oliver and I will be starting up our World of Warcraft questing in July. I have personally never played the game before, and Oliver has only played it for about a month. I'm getting a little tired of Halo 3 and want to switch up the tempo. I've been a huge fan of every other Blizzard game in the past, although admittedly I was more partial to Command and Conquer growing up. But I certainly appreciate a good game when I see one, and WoW is no exception. We briefly debated whether or not to skip WoW and go straight to Age of Conan, but decided to stick with the "tried and true" rather than pay money to experiment with a buggy game.

We've decided to go in as two ranged class fighters. No tank = all skill. We expect to experience lots of hit and run and dying, especially against bosses. But the point isn't to level grind, we want to make it all about finesse, good decision making, and maybe some PvP. We'll see how that goes. I'll keep you guys posted.

Hi guys,

We're really happy that we've finally launched. What a sigh of relief! Oliver, Dianna, and I had been getting virtually no sleep during the week leading up to launch. We had quite a few complications with some of the video encoding and had some technical difficulties with our server, but we eventually figured it all out. I want to give a special shout out to Jeremy from Alien Bucket for being such a trooper and bailing us out many nights. He was probably the only one that actually got less sleep than us that week.

I've been getting tons of emails with feedback recently. Everybody seems to have the same impression of our site: really awesome potential, but will it be realized? Well, that's what we're going to find out. As much as we pride ourselves on tech, we realize that the main thing that will get people to use our site is the content. We've been working really hard to make sure that when we launch our next wave of shows, it's going to be awesome. I'm not going to give away too much right now, but I guarantee that we have a decent lineup with a couple of shows that have "Big Hit" potential.

We're still working on the site and will be unveiling it section by section over the next couple of weeks. We just got this "News and Blog" section up today, and pretty soon we'll have a "Coming Soon" section as well so that you guys can see the direction that we're heading. Hopefully you guys will be as pumped up about this site as we are. Until next time...

- Brian