2009: The Year in Content
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D., President, Avalanche Press
December 2009

When we started offering Daily Content on our web site just over five years ago, it was a very different Avalanche Press. Among the 11 or 12 full-time staff we employed at the time (I'm not sure of the exact number without looking it up) only VP Lys Fulda and I are still here. We moved from a high-end office park in Virginia Beach to a century-old building in Irondale, Alabama, right next to the famed Whistle Stop Cafe (and Norfolk Southern's massive Norris Yards). That trimmed costs considerably — or will when the Virginia lease buyout is complete — and was matched by a corresponding drop in full-time staff.

At one time we had three employees posting Daily Content, and that allowed us to run new material seven days a week, including some fairly involved game variants with downloadable pieces. With those three reduced to one, we've had to cut back on Content somewhat. Early this year we were running new content five days a week, with re-runs on weekends. Then came the Great Migration, with all hands on deck to empty trucks and desperately try to revive badly disrupted operations in our new location. We ran an awful lot of "free marker" content during that stretch. Those are easier for us to create than new written content (like a game variant or historical piece), and fans seem to like them.

Things slipped some more in June, when Susan Robinson (our production director, who also posts Daily Content) and I were running the warehouse by ourselves and frantically clearing out the massive backlog of unfilled orders. Afterward, we abandoned weekend content and began to mix in more markers, extra pieces and game aids — pleasing the hard core, but doing little to attract and retain casual readers.

By the fourth quarter, we'd gotten into a pretty steady five-days-a-week posting routine, but did so by running a re-run on one day per week and a set of markers or game aids on another. We'll probably hold to that into 2010, as we shift every effort into boxed game production and reduce the number of downloads and smaller supplements.

Our new line of downloadable supplements actually debuted in late 2008, and it heavily influenced the content of Daily Content. We did fewer game variants with large downloads, and ran a number of supporting pieces for the larger volume of product. Since the Instant Gratification line is built around strange and unusual topics, its supplements require a bit more backstory than the usual game: pieces included, development reports, historical background and so on.

Still and all, we did have a lot of fun with Daily Content in 2009. Pieces ran from Dave Lippman's chilling take of the Nagasaki bomb to Jim Werbaneth's tale of the Corsair fighter. David Hughes told us about German, Russian and Austro-Hungarian machine guns of World War One and monitors and more, and Randy York tackled the U.S. Navy's flight deck cruiser. And Daily Content would not be complete without something Dutch from David Meyler, like flying boats in Strike South.

We also looked at a hypothetical rebuilding of the British battle cruiser Lion, and at the Turkish navy's cruise into the war zone in 1866. Steve Cabral's output suffered from computer meltdown, but he did give us a fine variant for Second World War at Sea pilot quality, and he'll be back before the year's out with some more naval stuff.

For 2010, I'd like us to get back to a solid five days a week of fresh content, with a good mix of product support, historical background and game-play. We can measure readership and downloads, of course, and there's actually not a whole lot of difference in the popularity of the different types of content. But I suspect different segments of our audience appreciate different types of content, and we've shorted the history-lovers some in 2009 and will look to make some of that up next year.

Because it is a lot of fun: nothing else we do generates as much feedback or as many death threats. In coming months you'll see more alternative-history pieces like the World of Cactus Jack, and more straight-up historical background like the multi-part tale of Radetzky's 1848 campaign in Italy. And it's also unique in the wargaming world (probably in the broader game industry, too) and we're proud of that distinction. There's a new magnum opus from Kristin and Steven High out there somewhere, awaiting completion.