One year. It’s hard to believe it’s been one year since we launched Gamer Social Club. That’s right, somehow we managed to go an entire year with this thing and survived to tell the tale. As we celebrate our anniversary today I wanted to take some time to reflect on it all. What we’ve done, what we’d still like to do and give thanks to both our readers and all the members of the team who have made it all possible.

For those of you that have been here since day one you know how hard the entire GSC team has worked. We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into (we probably still don’t). All we knew is we were passionate about games and wanted to cover them. I was a small time influencer on Twitter/X, and was constantly told by gamers that they were sick of the media and wished they had a better voice that represented actual gamers. So I went out and recruited just that, gamers. I probably could have just went the influencer route, that’s the popular thing to do these days, but I wanted to uplift others and give them all a voice. So let’s give this website thing a chance.

I had no idea of what to truly expect. I had no real marketing background or experience, I simply thought “i’ve got some followers so this will work out”. I had spoken to a few people in the industry who said respectfully your following won’t mean much, websites are all about SEO and google traffic which will take a long time to build up. I was told I’d be lucky to sniff a thousand views a month for quite awhile. Our first month we ended up doing just over 5,000. So naturally I thought “huh maybe those people are wrong”.

Thankfully I still listened to all the advice because they were of course right. Little did i know X would come along and just destroy links in their algorithm, but indeed growing the business is all about search engines and to a far lesser degree social media. That and relationships, and boy have I put a ton of time and effort into building relationships. 

The absolute best thing about doing this is building those relationships, both with my team and those within the games industry. GSC would be nothing like it is today without my writers and without PR teams, developers and publishers believing in us. I’m incredibly honored to even get the chance to speak with developers and PR teams and quite frankly PR workers don’t get enough love. It’s not easy dealing with a million emails and grumpy editors/creators who don’t like being told no at times. There’s too many to name, but you know who you all are. 

Speaking of the GSC team, I want to thank you all for all you’ve done. This goes for those no longer on the team as well. We’ve built something incredible and it’s because of all of you. I couldn’t be more proud to have you all be part of this and I can’t wait to see where we go from here. 

Lots To Be Proud Of

It’s hard not to talk about the accomplishments of what we’ve done our first year without talking about becoming a partner on Open Critic. It was a goal of ours coming in but we really had no idea how to go about it or how realistic it would be. By late summer though we had got accepted and were considered a legitimate enough outlet. We were actual critics! It’s a great feeling every time I post one of our reviews there both big and small. We wanted to be a voice for gamers and now we are in a way. 

Then of course there’s our growth. As I said earlier, I was told we might get to do a thousand views a month if we were lucky. We started at 5,000 our first month and in February we did over 40,000 with 30,000 unique visitors (side note here, i dont know why unique visitors is so much more important than actual views for companies, you’d think someone clicking multiple articles on a site would be just as valuable). I don’t think many sites talk about numbers like this but I like being open and transparent, and it’s not like people can’t see peoples Youtube views and other things. Theres no need to hide it in my opinon.

Lastly I’d have to mention how we’re gaining credentials as we grow. Last year myself and Jamie were able to go to FanExpo in Toronto as press. It was a surreal experience and while FanExpo isn’t huge for gaming it still was great to see what it was all about. This year we have writers going to PAX East as press and who knows what the future holds. 

Thanks To You, Our Readers

Now to thank the most important people, the readers. Whether you’ve been a supporter of ours from day one and been apart of our growing community on discord, or you just stumbled on the site one day from a review or news piece. Without you coming to the site we don’t have anything. We hope we are a voice for you in the industry. We are humbled by every milestone we hit. And even the haters, thank you for motivating us to be better everyday. 

So what will we do for an encore? Well we have some big plans as we look to continue to grow. As sites grow they tend to start leaving the indie scene behind as they move on to bigger things. We at GSC are kind of doing the opposite as we want to highlight even more indies. We’re lining up some fun projects that I look forward to sharing soon enough. There’s also a couple surprises I’m personally working on but that will get unveiled in due time. 

Beyond that we are going to continue to do what we’ve been doing, writing as many reviews as possible and covering the news to the best of our abilities. Being a volunteer team we don’t get to all the news like other sites, but we do what we can. 

With all that said, thank you once again to everyone and let’s make year 2 even bigger and better!