Today we’re proud to announce some of the changes coming to Niche Gamer, including our Media Partner network!
We’ve been prepping up this update for some time now and it’s super exciting to finally announce what we’ve been working on behind the scenes! We’ve been teasing up our new video network for awhile now – and are super excited to announce the launch of our video network today!
Media Partner Network
We have all new promo stuff for the site that include fancy, original graphics and music to compliment our new video content. We’ve already signed on a bunch of video partners, and we’re looking for more too!
Here’s a taste of our new video network content, with our brand new Mika design, and the debut of her exciting voice actress! Brooke Morgan!
It’s a new year, so we have a new Mika design! For this design, we took lots of feedback from our fans and while a lot of people loved her previous design, we had some fans saying they liked the more classic anime style from before. The new Mika was done by the talented Dennis Pulido – you can view his stuff here.
So, we tried to balance an even more classic anime design with a fresh, sexy, yet cute and tasteful design. What do you think? Sound off in the comments below!
We also have a fancy video intro that showcases our new home – the Niche Gamer space station – and it will play before all our original video content, and video content from our partners:
We’re moving forward with a cohesive, sci-fi yet retro anime feel to our promotional content, our branding, our mascot Mika, our merch, and more. The animation and video transitions we got made were done by the talented Nick Robalik, and the music was done by the also talented Jared Burrell!
The goal is to provide a consistently fun and professional level of production on all of our content, not just written stuff. As we hit new milestones for backers and metrics we’ll be adding more fun stuff to the space station, and more original content to boot.
Website Overhaul
Next, we’ve completely overhauled our site infrastructure and segmented out the servers that run Niche Gamer and Nicchiban; our sister site for manga, anime, and Japanese culture news.
Our primary goals of the overhaul were to: focus on speed, reliability, and the capability to scale our servers as we grow over time. A big part of this infrastructure overhaul was making our site more efficient and save us money – our team really nailed this one.
This may be a bit boring, but a large part of this infrastructure overhaul was separating our database to its own server, streamlining our database, and hosting the core site files and such on another server. We previously migrated all our uploaded media to its own separate server as well, so this is basically the final form of our server infrastructure. The sites are super fast now!
More on the site itself – if you’ve been browsing the site on desktop or mobile, you would have noticed we also overhauled the site’s layout, and more specifically its header area and main menu to massively improve its organization and functionality. Due to the 24/7/365 nature of our site being available, this had to be done meticulously and over time with lots of refining.
We now have a scrolling menu that has way more functionality built into its expanding mega menu, built in searching that functions intelligently, a “big news” header content area that is eye-catching but functional, and a much more improved backer experience. We’ve streamlined our display ads and the backer experience, so now becoming a backer and signing in are super easy!
Our Independence
I want to reiterate a fact that we’ve been saying from the beginning – Niche Gamer, and now Nicchiban and our parent company Pretentious Media, are 100% independent. Our sites are run by myself as the founder and owner, our editors, and that’s it. We have a budget, but we keep our upkeep and staff salaries paid.
I wanted to touch upon our staff situation as well; we brought on a new editor, Brandon Lyttle, who has been helping manage a big chunk of the editing duties on both Niche Gamer and Nicchiban. We’re still hiring more writers, but to help keep the site running smoothly, I have transitioned to a “Publisher” role.
This has traditionally been the last person between the writers and the “owner” of an outlet, but since I am the owner, this has been working best for our staff and our refined, improved workflow. I’m involved with the daily operations and producing new content, and making sure we’re covering things we should. We have more staff, more editors, and overall better content!
The above updates and new features have been paid by myself from my own finances, and Niche Gamer has now signed up to a new advertising network to improve both upkeep and salaries. We have been growing and making the site bigger and better than ever, all with an ever-growing budget.
You may have also noticed we have affiliate links to GamersGate– that link was an affiliate link as well by the way. Not only are we helping you learn more about great games, but you can buy them while supporting us! We’re also aiming to do regular giveaways to get those games into the hands of the lucky few.
The Future
We have many new things planned for the near future, this summer, and beyond. Our long-planned games database is our next project, and soon after we’ll be rolling out user reviews, user game libraries, and more for the site. Our goal is to empower you, the consumer and our reader, as much as possible.
If you support us by becoming a backer and joining The Society, or even just whitelisting us and reading daily, you help support us and our continued growth. While many other sites are content with remaining a news blog, or big corporate sites that gloss over what we cover, we keep improving and growing. We focus on what matters most: fun video games.
We love you guys and want to keep moving above and beyond. Thank you for everything and we’ll keep building this thing with you!
