Greetings Niche Gamer Society members! It’s been a busy holiday season, and we’ve been hard at work both on the front end with new content and on the back end with new website stuff. With the new year we have returned with refreshed spirits and are fully committed to making 2020 our biggest year yet!
Despite the lull in news for the holiday, as you know a bunch of games were released and we put out more reviews and coverage right through the holiday. Our numbers have been surprisingly great despite the usual dropoff in the holiday, and we have been just focused on what we always do – more solid and fun content.
We completed a major server upgrade and improvement, further solidifying our website against our growing traffic day by day, as well as giving us more breathing room while we lay the groundwork for more of the features you guys keep demanding. Our goal is to maintain the 99.9% uptime for our site, while simply making things bigger and better.
Another major project we completed over the holiday is a complete audit of the underlying tools we use for the day to day operations of the site. This, in turn, led to us also completing another big project – drastically improving the speeds of the site. We now load within one or two seconds, and we’re actually trying to make things even better. Our goal is instantaneous browsing.
With these core projects completed, we are back on track with our overall site development and are now in the preparations to start testing and – soon – rolling out our game database, complete with the thousands of games and dedicated pages for each game. The plan with this database is to give you a one stop shop for fun gaming news, community, and encyclopedic knowledge.
Curious about the games you never saw on the Sega Master System since you grew up just after that console generation (or you were sadly a Nintendo-only kid)? You’ll be able to browse every Master System game ever made, complete with box art, screenshots, and info on the game. There’s a wealth of games that many of us have missed or even forgotten, and we want to change that.
With this database, we plan to regularly review classic games, and put out coverage for said games, all of which will be tied to each game’s dedicated page. Showing off fun and unique games that you may have never heard of or just never got around to playing is a core tenet here at Niche Gamer, and we’re tripling down on this with our website and community.
The coolest part? This game database will let you, the fan and reader, review and score games with your user account. In being a member you will not only get early access to this system to help us test things out, you’ll get exclusive perks like unique profile rewards and options, all of which we’re still developing but 100% want your input and help with creating.
We have longer term plans to finally launch our own standalone iOS and Android app, so you’ll be able to get push notifications for new content from us, as well as manage your user profile, reviews, game library (which is tied to our database), and friends all from your phone. We are building on the community that we are so thankful to have as fans, every day.
Our site development has taken a bit longer than expected as most of our budget goes to our staff salaries. Our staff, who produce content every day, are the foundation of our content creation, and we are still in the process of hiring more staff. As we grow and the audience grows, we’ll simply hire more folks, cover more fun games, and give more things back to you, the fans.
We recently had some issues with staff and content, and while we deeply regret this was ever an issue, we have completely addressed the issue and we have actually improved our day to day operations now by delegating more with new editors. Please know that Niche Gamer is both a team of gaming enthusiasts as staff, as well as a community of gaming enthusiasts.
Again – we really can’t do any of this without your love and support. 2019 was our biggest year ever and we are tripling down on the things you guys like most, while expanding our site to include fun and rewarding features to keep you coming back throughout the day, every day. Our commitment to you, our community, has always been our priority – and we’ll keep doing better in 2020!
We love you,
The Niche Gamer Staff
