With the end of the year approaching it’s time to look back at 2023. Let’s take a look at what happened on Ladiesgamers. Not to be confused with our yearly Facts & Figures article, which’ll be published later. No, this is more of an overview of the highlights of the Team and the site itself. So, grab a cup of tea or coffee, and let’s go!
The Team at LadiesGamers
Our team is a team of volunteers who enjoy playing video games and can’t wait to write about them. This also means that real life might interfere, causing people to leave. Which in turn means Paula and I need to search for new enthusiastic writers if that happens. Let’s take a look at our team.
We started 2023 with regular writers James, Mina, Lynne, Yair, Celes and Serena, with Caroline as our designer/ writer and Cécile taking care of the programming part under the hood. Changes happened quite quickly.
- At the start of that year, Elena decided to stop writing, which was a sad moment. She had been with the site the longest, she joined in December 2017 and spent 6 years in our team. That is a long time, right?
- Serena left us in March, after writing for us for four months. And Celes left in June, having been with us since September 2022.
- Yair stopped writing for us regularly in August 2023 but you will still see him active on the site as a guest writer.
- The same goes for CJ, who had been with us since June 2018 but couldn’t combine writing with her private life anymore. But she will still make the sales articles and more!
- And though Cécile’s work was done with the move of the maintenance of the site to an external party, we agreed that she would be a guest writer too.
That was our cue find new writers! We found John in April, but due to personal circumstances, he left us again quite quickly. Lottie and Kalina both joined us in April, and I’m happy to report they both are still writing for us, as is Valerie, who joined the team in August. We were complete again!
Two Surveys, a Quiz and News
Somehow, it’s easy to fill the virtual pages of LadiesGamers with reviews. Generally, we can review more games than we have writers, but how dull would that be? Sure, people who are looking for info on a specific game will find what they are looking for, but we want to make sure our regular readers have other things to read as well.
News is Back
So we try to diversify. In 2023 we published two surveys, tried how a Quiz would do, and started publishing news about video games again. The first weekly news articles returned in February. During the week Paula and I collect news snippets and I drop them in an article on Friday. This means it’s not always breaking news but we try to bring news that isn’t mainstream and interesting to our audience.
Surveys
In February we put out a survey to gauge who our audience is and what their gaming habits are. This was the fourth time over the years, as we want to make sure that we are still able to entertain and inform you like we want to, that we still got it right. The results were interesting once again, particularly compared to the surverys from 2016, 2018 and 2020. You can find the results here, and many writers left us feedback which merited another article which you can find here.
Some requests from writers we could instantly make happen, like a menu choice on the site so you can search for games by the recommendation of our rating system. And more convention coverage is challenging, but we did try by covering Gamescom in Cologne and the Paris Games Week Expo.
Another survey was the one for Video Games and Mental Health. A very interesting one, and I was awed and impressed by the responses people gave and the personal stories. Some answers made me want to reach out and give a warm virtual hug…..You can find those results here.
Quiz
Paula also made a Quiz. Our The Legend of Zelda Quiz spanned multiple platforms to test your knowledge. You can test if you are a true Zelda fan. Have you beaten every game, collected every single piece of heart, taken down every boss and explored every nook and cranny of Hyrule? And answer it without using the internet to help you?
LadiesGamers Moved Again
Our baby, aka LadiesGamers, had gotten too big and needed a much bigger hosting plan. This also led to another decision: to have maintenance for LadiesGamers done by a third party. In November it was moving day. Like on December 2nd 2015 when we made our first move, now it was November 9th 2023, when LadiesGamers went to its new home.
Fortunately, all went well, and the little things that needed attention or tweaking were picked up by the company we moved to. You can read all about it here!
So there you have it, the happenings on the site in 2023. Thanks for reading. And for us, time to start thinking of 2024, as in April the site with turn 10!!