What to expect from TSP in 2023

2023-01-08 Misc

It’s been quite a ride for The Strat Pack since the site’s original soft launch in September 2021. More than a year later, after a site design upgrade and 76 articles, my musings on games and adjacent interests have amassed nearly 50,000 views, which is certainly more than I expected at the start. I appreciate everybody for taking the time to read them, and especially those who have emailed in to give their views and chat about their favourites.

Some articles have performed much as I’d have hoped - my introduction to Formula 1 model collecting is the fourth most read article here, for example - but often there is a huge disconnect between the effort I expend writing an article (and how proud I am of it) and its reception, and that can be tough. A simple how-to guide can sometimes yield tens of thousands of views, while a sprawling retrospective can get nowhere near breaking into triple figures.

You can add to that the pressure that I have put myself under to deliver weekly articles. This has a few knock-on effects, including the occasional rushed news or opinion piece when I run out of time, but the biggest consequence is forcing me to play games to a schedule. If I have a review or retrospective slated in for a specific date, I’ll sacrifice my evenings for the preceding week for play sessions to finish it, even if I’m not in the mood. But gaming is a longstanding hobby of mine, and it shouldn’t feel like a chore.

Furthermore, I also feel like I’ve already covered most of the older games that immediately sprang to mind when I started the site, and there aren’t enough new titles I’m interested in to provide a consistent flow of content. When I paused work on posts over the Christmas break, I found myself playing a lot of endurance races in Automobilista 2, and that wouldn’t be fertile ground for many articles without repeating myself a whole lot.

Fear not - it may sound like I’m building up to shutting down the site, or at the very least going on hiatus, but what I actually want to say is that in 2023 I’ll be taking a more relaxed approach to The Strat Pack. Articles will go up when I have something specific that I’m enthusiastic to write about - not on a fixed weekly basis - and I’ll open up the subject matter more often to films, television, music, and so on to accommodate this.

The outcome (I hope) is that although posts might be slightly less frequent, they’ll be of higher quality when they are published, and will be worth your time to read. It might sacrifice some numbers from algorithms that demand regular updates, but I think this approach will produce a site I can be more proud of, give me more time to play games I want to play, and be more accommodating to other changes in my life heading into the new year.

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you will continue to do so. Please follow me on Twitter for updates regarding new articles, and I hope to connect with many more of you as the year goes on. All the best for 2023!