What Are The Goals Of High Level Games?

We have a vision for what we want to be, and then a bunch of smaller metrics that we want to achieve along the way. Let’s talk about what some of those are.

I basically wanted to put together a hub so that gamers from all walks, from professional game designers, writers, bloggers, to just passionate fans and hobbyists like myself would be able to have a constant stream of easy to digest and interesting material about this crazy hobby we all love.

To that end, a couple of us decided to go ahead and create a podcast. None of us had ever done anything like this before, or even knew what the hell we were doing, but decided that we would start to go from there. So we pooled what little money we had from our decidedly not gaming careers and we set out to figure out how to record and edit a podcast, where to host, how to design a website, how to create logos, and what kind of social media we should use. Basically, we googled a lot, took inspiration from what others were doing, and just bumbled through. Everything we have put together to this point we have done ourselves, through hours and hours of trial and error. And frankly, we are pretty damn proud of what we have achieved.

As far as what we are trying to accomplish, our goals are pretty reasonable, in my humble opinion. They just take work and time. So what are the concrete, rather than broad vision, goals?

• 2500 Individual Readers Per Week for our Blogs (We have pretty much exceeded this goal on almost every week)
• 1000 Likes on Facebook. (About a third of the way there)
• Ravenloft Corner Blog – A Bi-Weekly Offering focusing exclusively on Ravenloft. (We have three writers that are doing this now with our first one already up)
• Increase the amount of regular columnists from 5 to 10. (Currently a columnist writes an article once per week we want to ease the burden on them from that to once every two weeks and bring in new people with experience in games that aren’t just D&D and Pathfinder)
• Finish This Season of the Podcast. (In progress)
• Get to 100 podcast downloads per day.
• Work to create a setting for online publishing. (We are looking into doing something at some time in the medium to long term, just for fun, though it would be nice to recoup costs involved and actually compensate the people that will be working on it)
• Pay the writers. (Listen, right now no one gets any money and the people who run the site pay for everything and do all of the work out of their own resources. And those resources are limited. But I think that it would be amazing to be able to somehow raise the approximately $15,000/year that we have estimated it would take to ensure that every writer gets paid something for the incredible work that they produce. That $15,000 is something that I have been thinking of quite a bit. It would pay each blogger about $50.00/blog and pay for small items like web hosting and a couple of hardware items for the podcast. I mean, that sounds like a lot of money, but after you start divvying it up even a little to help honour and show your appreciation to creative people providing content to the site, it doesn’t go very far. And if you look at the idea of getting content up every weekday, that works out to 262 days, and each one of those people gets $50, that accounts for over $13,000 before anything else is handled. At $15,000, we get to pay everyone but the people who started and invested in making this a reality - which we don’t care about because we are doing this for love of the hobby – and break even on what it costs to keep us going and growing)

 
What does everyone think about this? Misguided? Something we should work towards? Thoughts? Questions?

-VP Quinn

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