Hey guys – it’s Brandon here, the owner and EIC of Niche Gamer. We had a super busy summer, and we went straight into an equally busy fall and holiday season. It seems like we really have no downtime, as we’re even busier now that the holiday release season is in full swing!
First things first – we have successfully implemented a direct Patreon to Niche Gamer account system. Now, if you sign up for a new account or are logging into an old one, you’ll see a “Log in with Patreon” option on our login portal (which you can access from our main menu under “Community”, or via the account silhouette button in our header on desktop).
This lets you connect your Patreon account to your Niche Gamer account, and if you still haven’t gotten an account for our site, this new system lets you get one automatically for that ad-free browsing. This removes a ton of overhead from our day to day operations and makes it a lot faster for you to get those awesome perks, including the early access to the recently relaunched NicheCast.
That’s right – we’re producing timed exclusive content for our Niche Gamer Society backers, starting with our main show, the NicheCast. The most recent episode is still timed exclusive to our new $5 Elite Member tier, and our forthcoming episode (every Wednesday now!) will be timed exclusive, while the previous episode becomes live for everyone else.
We’re in the planning phases to roll out more original content, all under a timed exclusive release schedule. The goal is to give our most passionate fans – you guys – some fun perks that you can only get early via becoming a member. We don’t want to paywall things completely, and yet we want to give you all something cool for being this supportive and amazing.
We also have some fun things planned for Niche Gamer Society members that maintain their pledges for like 6 or 12 months. We’ll be offering Niche Gamer Society backer-exclusive tshirts and other physical goodies for really supportive members of the Niche Gamer Society. We’ll be putting up a poll here on the site with access only granted to users that have been members for X number of months, and we’ll give you a heads up as to when.
Going back to original content – we’ve hired several new staff, the most prominent being AlphaOmegaSin! Alongside Alpha we’ve hired three other staff, and we’re already in talks to hire two more big YouTubers as well, and a few other staff to help with both Niche Gamer and Nicchiban. The other two bigger YouTubers we’re hiring make some awesome video content, so we’re already talking about them making video for us too.
Between Alpha, myself, our current staff, and the soon-to-be-hired staff, the plan is to offer several original content series in both video, podcast, and written form. We’ll have a weekly schedule for all of the original content, with a rotating cycle of timed exclusive content for only backers. Think of your pledge has not only helping support all of the operations and staff salaries at Niche Gamer+Nicchiban, but also our original content, too!
If you didn’t notice above, we have a new design for Mika, our mascot. She’s gotten a lot thiccer and more womanly to fit her “older sister” persona to Lana, the mascot for our new anime+Asian culture site, Nicchiban. We’ll also be redoing Mika’s sidekick to look similar in style. We’ll also be unveiling a really exciting new project related to our new video content, and our overall theme+brand. Stay tuned!
As for the new features we have planned – I’ve mentioned it before however we are ramping up to roll out our game database, complete with individual game pages for every game you can think of. Yes, this means encyclopedic amounts of info, articles, screenshots, and even video for each and every game. We’ll have a review system tied into each page, and the option to “add” a game to your library, which will live on your profile page.
Yes, that means we are planning to roll out user profiles and blogs once we iron out the kinks with the game database+pages in the coming months. Before we roll out this game database we’ll be doing some much-needed server upgrades over the holiday break, as well as mobile site optimization so that our mobile site is running faster than ever!
As you can imagine hiring all these staff and developing these features means more of our budget is allocated to staff (we pay our staff flat rates for all published work) and the site. The more you spread the word to friends and family about us, the more potential support we can get. We really are outsiders in the industry, and as such, get zero support from big names or competitors. We have only succeeded through you, the fans.
Again – we can’t do any of this without your love and support. With the growth we’ve had in both traffic and direct support, we can do even more content, but we still want to do more! With your continued support and more new fans and pledges, we can soon compete with the big boys – while staying true to our roots. We are the new enthusiast gaming press, and we will keep fighting to get better for all of you, our fans!
Make sure to spend time with your fam and/or friends this holiday, and be safe. We’ll see you in the new year :) Thank you all so much for an amazing 2019, we can’t keep doing this without your love and support. We’ll have new podcasts through the holiday but this will be the last update post until 2020. From myself and the entire Niche Gamer staff, we love you all. Have a wonderful holiday and we’ll see you on the other side <3
-Brandon Orselli
Founder, Editor-in-Chief
