Hey guys – it’s Brandon here, the owner and EIC of Niche Gamer. This is your January 2018 Patreon update and overall progress report.
At the tail end of last year, we ran our very first community poll for the 2017 game of the year. The results were spectacular with thousands of votes, and the clear winner was NieR: Automata! We later did our own staff poll for GOTY, and the Niche Gamer 2017 game of the year is once again — NieR: Automata! There’s something to be said about the staff on a gaming website mostly having the same opinions as their fanbase, isn’t there?
We have something really fun planned to celebrate NieR: Automata being our 2017 game of the year – please stay tuned!
We saw lots of changes last year – we announced changes to our commenting policy and loosed up our moderation on commenting. We want to give you absolute free speech and a place to hang out without fear of tone policing, within the confines of a few laws we mention in our terms of service.
The response from the community has been incredible, and since bringing on our new community manager and social media memelord, our social media extensions have been exploding as well. Our new advertising partner has been very supportive and our rates have been great!
We also launched our official Discord server, and there’s already over a thousand users on there and it’s quite wacky! We have a Patron-only channel on there now! This is meant to replace the Patreon-chat tier we originally planned, however the Patreon app is horribly broken and unreliable. This way, Patreon backers can talk to all of the Niche Gamer staff, privately, 24/7! If you’re already a Patron, simply respond to our direct message on Patreon with your Discord username and number and we’ll give you privileges to the Patreon-only group.
Our traffic has been consistent with an upward tick, however recent spikes in our traffic are making us want to have a few more aggregates to compare numbers. Some traffic measuring sources are saying we’re getting way more than we thought, while others are saying less. We’re working on having multiple options running in parallel so that we can have the most reliable numbers possible (it’s never really reliable unfortunately).
As always, we’re working on implementing fixes and changes to the site on the backend (server, database, small layout tweaks, etc.) to further improve your experience on our community. We’re expecting to finally launch our anime/asian culture sister site soon, and soon after that – user blogs on Niche Gamer!
Our main goal here at Niche Gamer has always been to keep providing you constant news updates, reviews, videos, and original content – while also providing a fun and censorship-free platform to encourage discussion and community.
If you haven’t backed us on Patreon, check us out! We also accept one time donations via our PayPal, over on our donation page. If you simply want to keep browsing the site for free, please consider whitelisting us so we can remain independent and keep the lights on.
Here’s looking to an excellent 2018 — expect to see us at this year’s Game Developers Conference, E3, and more! Stay tuned! We love you guys!
