gameon: Well my idea would be based on the community side. It could have a new set of people each week, discussing games they've played/recommended. New GOG releases. Etc.
Just an idea.
Yep. I think that the amount of promos and new releases is big enough to support a podcast by now.
Some ideas off the top off my hat:
- Organize a group of 3-5 people who already know lots of the games in the catalog, then get them together for a conference call at the time when a regular promo (like the weekend promo) is announced. This should prompt some interesting insights and conversations about the games in the promo, and also capture the emotions (which is important for podcasts, and something that many podcasts fail at, imho). Would need to be released quickly afterwards while the promo is still fresh.
- Discussion of the latest releases, obviously. Perhaps an in-depth review of one.
- Forum watch. Giving a quick overview about the current main topics in the forum, quoting some especially memorable statements, perhaps commenting a bit. Ideally done by two presenters so that there's an opportunity for dialog and different viewpoints. The quoted statements should be interesting enough for the people who didn't read the respective threads already, while the comments would need to be interesting enough to keep the attention of the listeners who've already read the posts.
- Trying to get GOG employees for "Inside GOG" interviews, perhaps starting with those who were part of the community even before joining GOG (Judas, Thiev)
- Looking beyond our own noses. Have a section where a non-GOG entity (gaming site, developer, blog, etc.) is presented. This could cause the respective site to post the podcast as well, and could in turn bring new customers to GOG.
- Riddle. Play sound clips from a game, have listeners guess the game, give out a prize. Or: Give hints to a gift code that can be redeemed on GOG. You could drop hints throughout the podcast, to give an additional incentive to listen to the whole thing.
- Portrait of a well-known community figure. How s/he came to gaming, or found GOG; favorite games; why s/he likes to be active in the GOG community, etc. Has a risk of degrading into navel-gazing, but can be interesting if done right. Shouldn't be too long.
- Name a game that will be reviewed in the next podcast. As users to send in audio clips with 1-3 sentence mini reviews of the game. Play those clips before the review in the next podcast.
And so on. ;)
However, writing down ideas is easy. The hard part is making them work . i.e., investing the time and effort to actually produce such a podcast. Even finding the right people can be difficult. I can't listen to 80% of the podcasts that I might be interested in because the speakers' pronunciation is not clear enough to be followed by a non-native speaker without immense concentration, and usually I'm not in the mood for immense concentration when I consider firing up a podcast.
