Today is the day: LadiesGamers is 10 years old!
On this day on April 25, 2014, I published my first blog called Mood Swings in Gaming. And now, we are at article number 5,000, and of them, I did 1,760 articles myself. Can you imagine that there are times that I don’t remember if we’ve written about a topic before or not? Fortunately, we have an excellent search function and menu structure to look back!
You can bet we are going to celebrate in the upcoming weeks. Expect a lot of anniversary articles, the thoughts from the team, and looking back at our former writers, we’ve asked publishers for their opinions, and there are the results for the survey, of course! So check back to see what specials we have to offer!
A Journey of Changes
LadiesGamers didn’t get to be what it is today just like that, mind you. At the start, this was a personal blog, not the site that it is now. Short bursts with thoughts about video games, you’ll notice the difference in the first articles when comparing them to what we write now.
Growing Spurts
Over the years, the site has grown in spurts. 2017 saw the start of actually reviewing games, and at the end of that year, the one-woman show (with help for our banners from my daughter) turned into a team effort. Not just a team of more writers, but help in designing and techy stuff, too, as Jonah and Evriun joined. In 2018, the team grew further, and we changed our rating system. We used to have marked scores like so many websites do, but we decided to change it to our thumbs system. We try to match a game with a writer if we can. Someone who loves farming sims will judge the game in a very different way, the same as the fans of the farming sim genre. They know what to pay attention to, things that appeal to lovers of the genre. And we feel the thumbs represented our views in a much better way, welcoming personal feelings into the mix.
Daily Management
In August 2018 Paula joined LadiesGamers, you can read about her journey in her anniversary article, and that marked the beginning of a big change. Eventually, in 2019, I asked Paula to take up additional tasks, as the site really was growing too big for me to handle on my own. You’d be surprised at how much work there is behind the scenes: manning the socials, contacting publishers and developers, making sure the team can work like clockwork, keeping track of the review codes and much more.
At the start of 2019, we added Steam gaming to our range of interests. Before then, we had just focussed on handheld gaming, but we wanted to give indie developers more attention, and Steam is really a platform for many, many great indie games. Little did we know at the time that Steam would bring the Steam Deck and turn it into handheld gaming, too!
Looking at the Future
On a personal note, I couldn’t help but think while reading the first blog, Mood Swings in Gaming, that nothing much has changed in my gaming. I still play the games that I feel like in my spare time, though of course, my review games have to come first! My gaming devices did change, though; these days, it’s the Nintendo Switch or the Steam Deck. Unless a Steam game doesn’t work on the Deck, then I take out the gaming PC. But let me tell you, it’s still not my favourite gaming device.
Time to move forward with LadiesGamers. We know what we should do, we know to be future proof we should focus our efforts on our YouTube channel. At the moment, it hardly gets any attention at all, and that’s because it’s not our passion to make videos about gaming. We still love a well-written article, something I know many people are turning away from. It seems just pressing play and going about your daily business while listening to a clip at the same time is what many people do these days.
On the other hand, we are quite happy with where LadiesGamers is now, and maybe we will cherish this for the next 10 years. Can you imagine? Paula and I would be 70 years old by then…
I wanted to end this article with a BIG THANK YOU to our readers, writers, publishers and developers we work with. These celebrations wouldn’t have been possible without all of you! ❤️
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