I like to put weird little clues into things mostly for myself, like a path to a puzzle that I don’t expect anyone will solve. My last post on my personal site here. “My Final HyperX Cloud II Mic Test,” was also my Final Mic Test for the foreseeable future.

See how it’s hidden right there in the title?

“Alex, why would you step back from mic tests and headset reviews? Isn’t that your ‘thing’ that you do?”

It certainly was for a long time. But a lot of factors have conspired to push me in different directions. The endeavor got to the point where it was large enough that I had to treat it like a business. In other words, it had to start supporting itself to be sustainable. It hit this goal, for a couple of months—and then the pandemic hit.

My read rates actually went up during the insanity of 2020, as demand exploded for work from home gear like gaming headsets, and for ways to stay entertained at home. However, in 2021, a steep decline in demand started and now my Medium profile and this site are sitting at about one tenth of their peak.

It doesn’t make any financial sense to keep going the way that I was before, and honestly my heart isn’t in it either for a whole variety of reasons.

Going forward, this is a chance for me to treat this more like a hobby again. I can cover things like video games and music—topics which I always intended to write more about when I wasn’t buried under headphones and gaming mice. It’s also a chance for me to try out new types of content here, with more posts about process/behind the scenes stuff, and maybe even a review or two that doesn’t fit my Medium audience.

My follower numbers on that crazy platform have seen an explosion this year. Weirdly, they follow an inverse curve to the number of people actually reading my stories. That’s an infuriating and baffling data set to work with, and provides me with no useful data other than perhaps whatever mechanism that Medium uses to entice people to click “follow” has seen some great efficacy boosts in the last six months.

I’ve covered some of this stuff in detail over on Medium as well, so I’m sorry if this is a retread for you, but this rambling blog is the sort of thing I want to write more of here. Sometimes there are days (like today) where I find myself with some time to write, but without the background prep done to put out one of my more traditional pieces.

I’m finally working my way through Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and that game is really cool. I’d almost say it’s underrated…except I think it sold the best of any game in that franchise, so that would be ridiculous. It’s just been so weird to see all these Ubisoft backlash pieces prominently mention that game as “dull” when I think it’s perhaps their most beautiful game, and one of their most mechanically interesting. The rampant abuse at the company was/is awful, and fully deserves the criticism it has received, but I’m also genuinely surprised that Valhalla didn’t win more praise in the higher levels of the press and the community, as far as the discourse goes.

Even though I have a Ubisoft + account, I decided to pay for Dawn of Ragnarok on Xbox since I wanted to support the team, and since it’s one of the first things to come out of the studio after their many big rounds of “house cleaning” regarding the abusive business practices. I hope to write some more coverage of that soon.

This new non-specific direction doesn’t mean that I’ll never review a headphone or headset again, but I did let the two companies who were sending me review samples know that I was going in a new direction and would have to step back from working with them. The fact that this brought me some relief let me know I made the right decision.

It also frees me to cover what I’m interested in, and not just the “latest and greatest.”