Year in Review

Recently, we had our last team meeting of the year, just before Christmas Day. It’s been a strange year, of that there can be no doubt, but the team here at XboxEra have flourished.

We shared some cool highlights, some lessons learned, and what we’ve got planned as a team for 2021. We also got to welcome some new faces to the team, and we can’t wait to see what they bring to the table.

Stats!

As well as some steady growth on YouTube and Twitter, it’s our forum and site that’s seen the greatest increase in traffic.

XboxEra has been visited over 2.2 million times in 2020, and the forum has had over 3 million page views. Not bad!

It’s not all been plain sailing – we recognise where we have erred (Bungie, anyone?) and we’ve obviously been called out more than a few times when rumours we’ve heard don’t come to pass. On the whole though, I’d like to think we’ve done more right than we have wrong, and as a teeny start up running with no advertising and pure word of mouth to drive users to us, I’m proud of everything we’ve accomplished in 2020 – particularly with all the challenges we’ve faced globally.

I am extremely grateful to everyone that contributes to XboxEra, but if you’ll indulge me, I wanted to make a couple of key shout outs from my perspective. Firstly, a massive thank you to Predrag – his art work and design skills are frankly, stellar and really give us a look that is not only professional, but in my opinion puts some of the larger organisations out there to shame. He is tireless in his approach and speed, and we wouldn’t be where we are without his efforts.

Suikerbrood, our resident news hound is often first to find ‘new news’ and get it out there in longform for the site. It’s a thankless task, and we’re going to do our best to at least try to compete and beat him internally to posting new stories every now and then. I’m not sure if he ever actually sleeps, because he seems to catch and post everything.

Our video and writing teams – (you know who you are) frankly, and I’m sure our readers/viewers would agree, are killing it. They are pumping out high quality, non-clickbait content on a regular cadence, from our weekly news segment, reviews, opinion pieces, let’s plays, and podcasts – it’s awesome and the channel and site wouldn’t be as good as it is without them.

Thank you!

Before I wrap up, a massive thank you to our Patrons. When we launched our Patreon, I wasn’t sure what the response would be. To see it be so positive, and to see that support remain so consistent over what has been a very difficult year for everyone – is humbling. As our ambitions grew, their contributions allowed us to focus on creation and community, and pay for our hosting and server costs.

They are as responsible for enabling and nurturing this community as we are for creating the name for it to sit behind. We are eternally grateful to them.

Lastly – a thank you to our community itself. For being here, commenting, providing feedback and guiding us to provide you all with a forum that is modern and fun to use. Despite what we were told about managing a forum, we’ve been surprised as how smooth it’s been, relatively speaking. We also have some really good posters, creating great content. One particular shout out on this is forum user brunopcosta1 who has created some seriously amazing OTs.

We’re looking forward to seeing XboxEra grow in the weeks and months ahead. We’ve got some very cool things to share, some new shows and content that will be driven by YOU and your input, as well as some secret things that I’ve been sitting on for a very long time and I honestly can’t wait to start talking about.

I wish you all a very happy new year, and we’ll see you in 2021.

Sikamikanico, signing off.