Regular visitors to the Mastertronic Collectors Archive website will have noticed that things have been quiet here for the last couple of weeks. Usually we have tried to add new content every couple of days, but real life has got in the way recently so we wanted to bring you all a website update as well as give you a teaser for all our plans for 2025…
2024 – It’s A Wrap!
2024 has generally been a great year for us with the site. We’ve now transferred almost all of Anthony Guter’s website across here (the reason why this site was launched in the first place) with just one article left to finish off. On the reviews front, we’ve been adding at least two a week and now have reviews covering 11 different platforms! We’ve got a wide range of checklists, again for far more platforms that ever with cover art, statistics and author credits and we also added a review index to make finding content easier than ever!
Finally, we expanded our writing team bringing in a few new people to help expand our coverage for the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad, and launched a new social media account over on BlueSky where we’re posting and sharing content on a regular basis both from the site and new material.
YouTube Woes
One of the biggest disappointments for us has been our YouTube channel. While we’ve made a steady start bringing you Mastertronic content on our channel (which is shared across all of our sites), we’ve recently been hit with a strange anomaly. For some unknown reason, YouTube have been purging a significant number of channels (ours included) and removing a sizeable number of their subscribers and as part of that we have lost over 20% of our subscribers in the last week alone.
The damage – as you can imagine – is substantial and we don’t know how this will impact on the visibility of future videos. There’s been no explanation as to why this has happened. Has it simply been a case of dormant accounts being removed or just trimming bot subscriptions. We simply don’t know. However, we do ask that you spare a few minutes if you can to subscribe and check out the channel. There’s plenty of Mastertronic, retro and modern gaming, sci-fi, pro wrestling, and geek unboxing content and we’re sure you’ll find something to enjoy on there.
Working Smarter
One of the key things I want to try to do personally is take a new approach going into next year. As most of you know, as well as being the founder of our entire group, Infinite Frontiers, I take the lead across all four of our sites and our YouTube channel creatively. Frankly, that’s not an easy task at the best of times, especially as everything we do here is in our spare time!
I actually stopped working over a decade ago and I’m a full time carer for my wife so anything I do creatively is done to fit around everything else I do here at home. But spreading my time across five projects in between needing some time to myself to unwind isn’t easy so I’m aiming for a new approach for 2025.
While I obviously can’t find more time to work on our projects, my goal is to use the same amount of time better. If I’m going to do game reviews for YouTube for example, I’ll be writing scripts for several reviews at the same time, capturing footage in bulk and then recording the audio again in bulk. The reasoning behind this is that the latter needs to be done in a separate room and it’s a more effective use of time to record several at once and edit them as needed.
It’s the same for preparing artwork for content online. When I’m scanning images for any of our sites, I’m aiming for lengthy scanning / editing sessions and while it can be tedious doing one job for a few hours, it’s better than lots of shorter scanning sessions.
When it comes to written content, I’ll be taking this a step further. All of our sites have the facility for us to schedule content and if I do find myself in a position to write articles quickly, I’ll take advantage of the situation and plan content weeks ahead and simply schedule them, hopefully getting pieces ready well in advance of when they’re needed. As our readers, you won’t notice anything, but it should make our lives easier behind the scenes!
2025 – What’s Next?
So what are we planning for the next 12 months? Quite a lot, but here are a few of the highlights…
- New Videos -we’ll be working on a lot of fresh content for YouTube including game reviews, more art based videos and a few more surprises… and we’ve got the first of these going live tomorrow!
- Reviews – we’re continuing with our plan to publish at least two reviews per week so expect to see at least 100 new reviews next year. But knowing the way our writers are at the moment, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot more than this!
- Checklists – we’ll be adding more to the site, and expanding the ones we have even more.
- Interviews – we’ve been promising these for a while, and we hope to have the first ones done very soon
- Articles – that’s been one of the quieter parts of the site for 2024 but expect lots more in that department too as well as plenty more that we’re keeping quiet about for now…
So all that said, we’re pretty excited about what the new year holds so stay tuned and if you’re not already doing so, don’t forget to follow us on all our social accounts, YouTube and subscribe to our newsletters for updates as new content goes live on the site!
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