Maintaining a gaming blog alone?

Hey there,

I need your most honest advice, as I have no one to share it with besides the gaming community itself - yes, you are also allowed to be harsh as long as it sounds reasonable :)

So, I am a PC gamer and I started my own gaming website/blog in August 2016 to share my thoughts on various games with a heavy focus on single player games. To attracts more visitors and readers, I've set my goal to purchase the newest PC games in order to review them and to give my most honest opinion on it.

However, I realized that this hobby and passion that I have is actually expensive. Each game can cost between 10$ and 50$ and as someone who is not earning all too much each month (office job), this is getting really expensive.

To make things easier and to save me some costs, I thought about covering old games but they may not attract any readers since I am thinking to myself: "Who is going to read about Just Cause 2, Dark Souls 2, Fifa 2016, etc.? Like, no one is looking to read reviews about it anymore."

You get the drift.

Additionally, I also thought about covering competitive multiplayer games since I am huge fan of such games (CS:GO, LoL, Dota 2, etc.) and they usually do not cost anything, but since I manage and write everything by myself, it is very difficult to keep up with the pace (i.e. to write about the latest news, updates, tournament results, I will have to spend multiple hours each day + writing about it).

Last option for me would be covering indie games as the chance might be higher to receive a free copy in order to review the game, ergo saving me tons of money (for example, I was able to get a free key from tinyBuild for the game HelloNeighbor - getting free copies to review from big-name publishers such as EA, Ubisoft, etc. is impossible for me as a small blog), but I am not expecting many readers for such games to come and read about it, thus receiving waaaay less traffic.

On this matter, I am stuck and I have no idea how this all should develop. I am fairly new to blogging and simply cannot decide for myself how I shall proceed and if there is even a chance maintaining a gaming blog all by myself with little budget. My final goal is to be a well-known gaming website, but many of the popular websites were not bootstrapping but started with a small team of writers that share the same passion.

Does anyone have an advice for my problem? Is anyone of you in the same shoes like me? It would be easier if I make couple dollars after each review with my blog in order to pay for games, writers, and so on but this is sadly not the case yet.

Ray

PS: Please delete this topic if it does not belong here. Sorry!