Regular visitors to the Vita Player website will have noticed that things have been quiet here for a while. We haven’t been able to add as much content to the site this year as we would have liked, 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 mixed bag for us with all of our projects. At the moment, I am currently our sole active writer for the Vita Player site which does make things difficult to keep on top of all of our projects alongside my day-to-day life as well. To try to alleviate this, when I’ve been looking at reviews for much of this year I’ve tried to cover multiformat indie titles so I can make use of the same reviews on both this and the Infinite Frontiers websites with just minor rewrites. There are still a huge number of games I haven’t reviewed yet so this approach is still one that’s worth taking to give us plenty of coverage.
At the same time I’ve made a start on a new review index which will help many of you find all our game reviews at a glance. It’s still early days with this one, but I hope this will become an invaluable part of the site as it grows.
Finally we have 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 had quite an active year in 2024 posting over 30 new videos, 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 PS Vita, 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… I’ve already got several new reviews in script form already with footage captured so hopefully I’ll be back to Vita game reviews very soon!
- Reviews – my goal for 2025 is to publish a minimum of one new game review every week for 2025, but ideally more.
- Review Index – as well as adding new reviews as they go live, I’ll work through our archives and continue to add these to the list.
- Articles – plenty of new articles and features keeping up with fresh Vita related content,
- News – we’ll continue with our regular PlayStation Store sale updates, and after a hiatus, we’ll be back with our weekly/fortnightly homebrew updates.
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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