PSA: A Year of Taking One Step at a Time

A message from the Founder

The 7th of September was on Sunday. Why is that of any importance? Well that's the date when I opened the doors on this quiet corner of the internet for niche games last year.

Indeed I've been here for over a year now (Even Andi has been here almost as long too), with what started as a small blog for publishing niche game reviews that would rarely hit 20 views a day, to what we have now with thousands of daily hits & a small bunch of enthusiastic writers expanding the output of the website. To be honest most of the progress has come since the turn of the year and its become a necessity lately to properly juggle full-time work & OGUK business that hasn't been too difficult to get used to thankfully.

So whats in store for the year ahead? Before that Ive a couple of announcements

• As you will no doubt have noticed last week, we have our very own domain now - otakugamers.uk. It's something that I probably should have done a lot sooner a few months ago, but its good to finally have it done. Not only does it make things easier for you folks, but also validates our website to publishers who previously shunned us due to the 'blogspot.co.uk' part in our previous url, which means we'll hopefully be able to bring more games your way from as many niche publishers as possible.

• These past few days I've started the ball rolling on advertising. For the sake of transparency, with all that's been going on lately, I'm going to offer the full lowdown. The adverts will only appear in a couple of places, and is entirely run via Google AdSense so its all automatically generated via Blogger. If at any time that changes & a publisher wants to advertise a game etc, I will make it perfectly clear to all readers if that situation ever arises. Hopefully it all remains as unobtrusive as possible,adverts are something I've been holding off on for as long as possible, but with rising cost of maintaining the site we're hopeful the added pittance will ease our pockets a little as all funding has come from ourselves so far. Hopefully the site becomes self sufficient in the future & our own funds can go to expanding the website instead.

With that done, whats in store for the future then? As the title says 'A Year of Taking One Step at a Time', which is how we've been building the website as time has passed, by allowing new ideas to settle before building on them. Here's the thing this time though - it'd be good to get some ideas from the readers in regards to new endeavours. Ive made mention of a Forum before, maybe even a chatroom for folks to leave messages, and community gaming events & competitions. There's so many things we could add to spice things up a little more that some feedback from yourselves on what we could do would be a big help to us. With the solid foundations now laid, why not help us construct the building to sit atop them?

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