Big Boss Battle at ten years old: A decade of covering the games we love

Big Boss Battle is 10 years old this month.

Hi, I’m Dann Sullivan the EIC and one of the owners of B3. I’ve been here since the very start, which feels like an incredibly long time ago.

The Big Boss Battle, B3, that you see today might seem like it’s been around for ever, however there was a time — a little over ten years ago, as you might have guessed from the title — when the site didn’t exist. Back in 2016 two video game reviewers pulled together and launched a new website with the goal of covering games that weren’t being covered elsewhere, and also creating a place where people could come together to share the games that they’ve been playing while also dusting up on their writing abilities.

At the time writing about games was pivoting towards shorter articles (or hooky titles) to try to match the rising role of social media, while major sites were struggling with that, many were also trying to experiment with video; Where influencers were already sucking some of the air out of their conversations with publishers and developers, and trust out of journos. We didn’t really care much about that, it was something that we were doing in our downtime while hoping to find likeminded people… we were very lucky to be in a position where we could humour doing it for a living, and were happy enough to just get game codes in exchange for coverage.

We wanted to be able to write about the games that we liked, regardless of their size, as well as the games that we’d wanted to like, and we also wanted to help other people be able to do the same.

A lot has, of course, changed over those ten years; for a start, you’re just as likely to find a review or preview of a board game as you are a video game these days. That changed when Matt Smail came on board. We’ve also experimented with different article types, as well as covering tech and gadgets — something that Jupiter Hadley has helped recently spearhead. However, we wouldn’t have got to this point without the efforts and contributions of dozens of different writers over the years, some of them only joining us for an article or two, while others, such as Harley and Rob, have been with us nearly as long as the site has been around.

You’ll also have possibly noticed that in recent months we’ve started stocking and selling board games to UK audiences, have closely partnered with other sites (such as Indie Games Plus) through DigipalsMedia, and that… over the past week, we’ve started up our news coverage again.

The lattermost point really excites me, our news section has sat (largely) dormant since 2017. Back then there were dozens of sites dedicated to video game news, with most of them covering the dozen-or-so big publisher title that came out every month. Nowadays thousands of games are released each month, and mega-publishers are all but gone, similarly (and sadly) many of those rolling news sites that I mentioned are also gone.

That puts Big Boss Battle at an interesting place. We’re ten years old now, so we have made the decision to make some big changes to the site – though they may seem small at the moment. We have secured funding to start paying writers for their content, alongside with board game sales. This is a huge step in the right direction.

As a little gift to you, our readers, we are running a few different giveaways all throughout the month – think codes for games, board games, tickets to events, etc. Keep an eye on our giveaway tags to see what’s being put out there.

And with that, a Happy Birthday to Big Boss Battle, a website that has stood the test of time, through both the highs and lows of video games, that is still standing and looking forward.