Hey everyone and welcome to the Hard Style Gaming blog! It’s been a long time in the making, but the blog is finally made, so let’s talk Hard Style Gaming.

What is Hard Style Gaming?

Hard Style Gaming is about sharing the love of gaming. The brand itself is based around sharing gameplay mostly. There’s a culture based around sharing gameplay. Players like to watch other players play. Maybe you haven’t got the game and you want to see what it’s like, or you just want to watch something gaming related or maybe the guy you’re watching is an absolute king at that game and they’re fun to watch. There’s a whole host of reasons gamers love to watch other gamers play and that’s what inspired me to create Hard Style Gaming, because I’m one of those gamers.

The main aim of Hard Style Gaming is to show off what’s fun in modern games. Interesting missions, great gameplay mechanics or maybe funny clips of what you can do within the mini-world of a game. It’s just about having fun with games and sharing the experiences.

Social Media & The Blog

I post a lot on the Hard Style Gaming social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. Generally they’re shorter clips on the main social media, funny fails, interesting loot and bosses. Things of that nature. Sharing of gaming news and features from other creators and gaming publishers. Points of interest within the gaming community. 

The purpose of the Hard Style Gaming YouTube is to post longer videos, great missions, play-throughs of story campaigns and possibly some tutorials. There’s no commentary on the campaign playthroughs at the moment. I think there’s enough people doing that. I’d like to just show off the games as they are, let the gameplay speak for itself. That’s not to say commentary on videos can’t come later.

The blog has been set up to enhance the experience. Here you will find commentary on games, such as reviews and guides. I’d also like to have gaming news and tech tutorials as a feature one day too.

Who is Hard Style Gaming?

At the time of writing this, there’s only one person creating content for Hard Style Gaming and that’s me, Andy Hardman. Hardman or a variation of that is my gamer tag, depending on the game or platform. I’ve been a gamer for over 20 years, it’s a passion of mine, gaming is a truly wonderful form of art. Players can interact with games in a way that no other media allows you to do. Especially with games being made nowadays, the graphics, the world’s and the story’s being presented in games of today give players like you and me 1000s of hours entertainment. It’s a wonderful hobby to have and great community to be a part of.

I’ve a background in web design and media and I’ve always had an urge to get more involved in the gaming industry. There aren’t any big gaming studios where I live and I love my home and I’m not at a point in life where I’d want to leave my home in search of work. So getting involved in the creation of games isn’t as much of an option for me. Therefore I think working online in a content creator style of work would give me the pleasure of being ‘involved’ that I’m craving. So I’m starting with this, Hard Style Gaming, and I’ll see where it takes me! And coming from a media / web design background, it makes sense to go down this route.

Who is it for?

Hard Style Gaming is for everyone. Anyone who has a passion for gaming, who likes watching gaming clips, keeping up with gaming news and in general just interacting with the gaming community. Hard Style Gaming has been set up to interact with the gaming world through various gaming media and everyone is very welcome and encouraged to interact with it too.

The social media pages are there for quick, interesting clips and the blog and YouTube are there for more detailed, lets say longer content. So follow along, and follow the pages. Like and share things that interest you and leave a comment on things that you really like. Get involved too!

What’s the Goal?

The main goal is to get involved. The gaming community is a very large and interactive community. Full of so many wonderful people that all want to connect with each other and share great memories. The quality of games being produced today create some of the best experiences for gamers and we all love to share are thoughts and feelings with each other. I want Hard Style Gaming to be a vessel for sharing those types of gaming experiences.

Growth is another main goal. I aim to make Hard Style Gaming grow and interact with as many players as possible. As the gaming community is such a wonderful community, the more people that can enjoy and interact with the content, the better. Your help in achieving this goal would be very much appreciated, follow all of pages and share the content, so more and more people can join the Hard Style Gaming community.

What Games?

There’s not necessarily any limit to what games will be covered on this blog (or social media pages). I’m not set on only covering one game or only a small few. Although at the moment, it’s only myself that’s writing for Hard Style Gaming, so only being one person, I can only cover so much at one time. So there’s a limit in that sense. But what I mean is that it won’t always be the same games being covered.

My ‘core’ games at the moment are Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, Call of Duty Modern Warfare and eFootball PES 2020. But I also like to add a new game every month or so. This could be a brand new game or one from the last two years that I’ve been wanting to get round to trying out. And generally what you’ll see are clips from those games on social media, with campaign playthroughs on YouTube. I also like to keep up to date with any new games on the horizon and share any news I find on them as well.

I’m not completely focussed on every game having to be ‘brand new’. I know there’s a lot of hype around games when they first come out, and as a content creator, that’s a prime opportunity to get ‘clicks’. But at this moment and time, I don’t get a review copy early, so I can’t possibly keep up with those that do. And to be honest it’s a philosophy of mine that not all games need to be tried out at launch. It’s a well known fact that games as a live service model, as in, games that release and then are given support and updates and dlcs over the next year or so, they aren’t always ‘finished’ when they release. There’s been a trend of ‘release now and finish later’ sort of approach with gamers calling out ‘half-baked’ games in complaint. Therefore it’s normal for a game to come out and be followed by 1-3 months of updates fleshing out the minor bugs and issues. And sometimes that takes even longer. On top of that there’s generally dlc that is spread out over the first year. So really there’s a lot of reasons to wait and try a game at the end of its first year cycle. It’ll have a lot of bug fixes, it’ll be cheaper and all the dlc will be out. And in all fairness, who has the time to play each and every game on launch? Best having your core games that you get early and try other ones as when you get round to it.

Although, it’s also encouraging that a lot of games are trying to change this perception of being ‘half-baked’ and pulling back launch dates. We’ve seen this with a number of titles recently. Maybe that philosophy will change. Although all year 1 content will not have dropped, so there will still be good reason to go back and try after a year.

Moving Forward

I just want to recap at this point. Hard Style Gaming is a brand that wants to share memorable gaming clips. The YouTube channel will feature story campaign walkthroughs mostly, but with some tutorials from time to time and the blog will feature mostly tutorials and guides, game reviews and sometimes feature gaming news (whatever I can keep up with).

Overall it should make for a great gaming experience and I’d love for anyone and everyone to get involved. Follow the pages and comment on things that you really like. Feel free to tag friends so that they can get involved too.

Moving forward, I want to continue posting the same content on the social media pages, but consistently start adding to the blog also. Over time growth is a major goal. So I look forward to seeing you all on social media and reading your comments!