If you’re on our discord, you can see that we’re a fairly active group. Coming to the site however that may not be as apparent. This post I hope can address some of what’s been going on, and I’m sure it’s a bit overdue.

The website itself…

Up until now we have primarily been a discord community. Partly, because discord on its own has served our needs. Other part has been various stages of hiccups which I’ll go through.

Hosting

We have switched our website host a few months back. Our old hosting was very limiting and held us back from many things. Our new host has been performing very well and has allowed us a responsive website that should clear the way for other aspects.

The store

As one of the longest ongoing projects, promised early on in the formation of Obten, this has had a lot of roadblocks. We did get merch going for our creator program but the implementation was problematic due to importing designs. That has largely been cleared up and we’re ready to start taking on creator program members who are ready for merch sales. It’s never too early!

Our software/games, however, has had bump after bump. Ultimately what resulted in the move. Once we did get it working, products had to be added manually. Working with our distributor, we now can mass import, which is why we’ve had a large influx of products! There’s still problems that are slowing it down but we are on track. Our aim with the software sales is to generally be able to beat a game normal price. We may not always be competitive with other “bundle” sites, but money spent in our store goes directly to support the community.

Points

We have added a point system. Every dollar spent will earn you points in our shop that you can later apply for discounts on future purchases. We can also award points for many other tasks, which we’ll address throughout the article.

Memberships

We currently use Gamewisp to manage memberships for those that wish to financially support the community. This money has largely been used thus far to host two game servers and purchase scripts and upgrades for the site, as well as hosting. We’ve generally kept an “even” balance so other things have been limited but we’d like to be doing more.

We will be moving memberships from Gamewisp to inhouse on our website. This has some good and bad at the moment but the good outweigh the bad in my opinion…

Good…

• We keep more money by only having PayPal fees to deal with. No more cut to Gamewisp
• We can offer a discount in the store for the memberdhip
• We can deliver content directed at a specific membership if we want.

Bad…

• Role benefits for discord/forum will be lost initially. It can be done manually, but that doesn’t scale well if we get a bunch of memberships
• Shoutout/name in credit type stuff becomes difficult. So may be dropped.

The membership tiers will remain the same as they were on Gamewisp. In addition, there will be a membership for the creator program that will be given, not bought. As well as a free “regulars” membership that can be requested once you hit the requirement on discord for the role.

I’m open to any suggestions or thoughts on this

Forums

Forums has been hit and miss, early on we used them primarily to dissimate information for our creator program. We had a stint where we tried to use it regularly, but our size has always been small enough that it was usually not necessary for a threaded conversation. Plus it was a separate signup/signin from the WordPress site which made it problematic for many and most just opted to not do it.

With the discord getting larger, and people are being more active, it’s getting harder to keep up with a conversation.

As such, we have switched over to bbpress, a forum system that works within WordPress. We’ll be keeping it very lean to begin with and only add additional forum categories as they become necessary. I would encourage you all to decide if something you’re posting is better suited for the discord or for the forum. It’ll help the discord stay coherent over time and bring some life to the site which helps us grow.

Advertisements

We started running ads back in late Novemberish. The ad system we have allows a user to buy a slot and have their image or gif or whatever posted for so many impressions. These I’d like to gear/offer generally as a way for users to promote their channels, videos, other projects…. Whatever really. They’re all very reasonably priced and since most (all currently) run on impressions, you only count when someone sees it. And again, the money earned from these ads go to support the community.

Articles and content

Right now, I’m the only writer. I’d love to see others write but there’s very little incentive.

I am working on a program for compensating anyone that writes for the site. All goes well, we should have something concrete in a couple of weeks. If you ARE interested in writing for the site, please get with me ASAP as I’d like to develop a system and get some input on it.

Short version being paying in a “point per word” format as well as being able to promote your content in your articles. You would write your articles or reviews and if used, points applied to your account.

Affiliate Programs

In the past, we’ve had 2 affiliate programs through the site, one being for advertising and the other for the store sales. If you refer anyone to either, you’d get a portion of the sale. They are separate programs you have to sign up for.

The advertising one is staying and I encourage anyone that might know someone with a service to offer or a creator looking to advertise their channel(s) to sign up for it.

The shop one however is potentially being removed. With points, sales, and other things, watching to make sure that we aren’t LOSING money on a sale starts being a very hard balancing act. For now it’s there and I’d encourage you to sign up. But it may be reduced in its allowance/effectiveness to you, or completely removed. I just have not had enough sales to properly see how it effects us.

New things coming

With all our old stuff out of the way, new things I’m looking at expanding to…

Courses

I’m looking at putting some actual education courses on the site revolving around content creation. These would mostly be a paid item, with some free ones scattered in. The revenue from these would go partly to the community and partly to the course designer. If you are in our creator program, all courses would be free with an option to donate.

If you have a course that you would want to design, you can get in touch with me and we can figure something out and implement.

Tournaments

Another old bullet point for our community activities, I’m looking to actually start implementing “regular” tournaments. We’d have typically two types…

• Free tournaments – Free tournaments will not have an entry fee. Prizes will be limited by our current funds and/or awarding points in the store.
• Paid tournaments – These tournaments have an entry fee, with a portion of the entries going to the community and another portion going into a prize pool, awarded to the winner(s) in some fashion.

I’m looking to schedule our first tournament in the later part of August or early part of September. Our first game will be Brawlhalla as it’s a free-to-play game that is easily accessible. I should have a date narrowed down and sign-ups available soon. Sign-ups will be hanled by “purchasing” an event ticket from the store.

Tournaments will sometimes be closed to the community, other times they’ll be open to act as a recruiting tool to grow our community. When able, we’ll broadcast tournaments on the Obtenebration Network twitch channel. Other games I’d personally like to see us do tournaments for would be Darwin Project, Rocket League, and a few others. Also I’d love to see suggestions from the community if you think something would be a good fit. If things work out, we could do a monthly or bi-monthly tournaments.

Game Servers

As mentioned, thus far we have hosted two games, Minecraft and Project Zomboid. Though we have since announced their closing for various reasons, I believe they were ultimately successful. Showing that the community can come together to work on something. This motivates me to defenatly attempt future projects, first being Rend.

Rend has been an exciting prospect for us for awhile due to many of us enjoying survival games. It will also present an opportunity for us to play competitive within the community which we have generally not done yet. It just released so we have to wait for people to get it and see where we stand on funding for putting together a server for us.

With proper funding between store sales, advertising, and memberships, I hope we can look at other games in the future as well that the community would be interested in.

Board game night

One last project was board game night, that was being held on first Saturdays of the month. This is something that I myself had to drop managing due to time and other projects. But if there is still interest I can try to get it going again, or if someone wants to take over managing this, please get in touch with me.

Obten Programming

We want to utilize our YouTube and Twitch more. Some things to discuss here…

From Shadows Podcast

For awhile we ran a bi-weekly podcast. If you enjoyed this and would like to see it return, let us know and I will work on getting a crew back together for hosting. It was a gaming and creator space talk/discussion show.

We’d like suggestions on other video projects as well. If you have an idea for something, bring it to our attention. If you have a show that you want to do that wouldn’t fit on your own channel, talk to me about getting a time slot you can do it on. I know there’s interest in doing an esport related cast, and I’ve heard other ideas thrown out there that you’ll just have to refresh my memory.

Wrapping it up

There’s a lot here to take in. Ultimately I want to see more going on for us. I want to see our members have a place they can enjoy spending time in many of our facets. This is just as much YOUR community as it is anyone else’s. UTILIZE THAT! I love and appreciate each and every one of you for all the time and effort you put into it already just by being here and having serious debates, gif/meme wars, the jokes, and of course playing with you and watching your channels grow. I know you put a lot of work into your content if you’re already a content creator. I know there’s some of you that want to get into it but don’t want to or can’t start your own channels. This is a place where you can find ways to participate and start that journey. I love and appreciate all you non creator/creative types that are here just to play games with friends. By playing with content creators you are also dealing with a layer you normally do not have to deal with if you were to just fire up a game and go.

You make this community what it is, and you make it what it can be.

So if you have questions or comments or concerns… Please leave a comment, post on our forum, or mention it on discord. This is community belongs to all of us.

Thank you, and here’s to the future!