Intoduction
Good day everyone! Since the site has been up for about a week I figured it would be good to put up a little post detailing what our future plans for the site are, and why we need your support to keep improving Weight Gaming.
Patreon
First thing first, we set up a Patreon! We did this so we could raise funds to help run and expand Weight Gaming. By using Patreon as our income source we will not need to run ads on the site to fund our operating costs, and it makes the site less reliant on a single person’s income.
Not only will this money help us with operating the site, but it will be used for improvements as well. For example we are already close to our $50 goal which will allow us to set up an automatic offsite backup system. This system will allow us to store weekly backups on a remote server, and help us guard against data loss like we experienced when we lost the old site.
But, if you think the money we raise through Patreon will only be for running and expanding the site; well we have news for you! Any extra money we get through Patreon that we do not use on expenses we want to give back to the community! Right now we have two ways planned for doing this:
- Dev Grants
- Cash Prizes for Game Jams
- Offer services like project management servers and issues trackers for free to devs
The idea is that through these methods we can help encourage more people to try to produce fat and expansion themed games, and help support the development of these games both financially as well as technically.
The fact we can give back to the community in this way really excites us, but to do it in any meaningful way requires more funds then we can produce ourselves. So we really require the community’s support here. So if you want to see the site really reach its full potential, or just want to see more games with fatties in them we would urge you to consider supporting us. Anything that you can spare helps us to not only make the site better for everyone, but allows us to better serve the community.
The Future of Weight Gaming
So now that we are done talking about Patreon, lets talk about our plans for the site. This wont be a full comprehensive list of what we have planned, but it should give you a good idea of what we have planned. We have a bunch of changes planned that with time frames that span between 1 to 24 months.
So first lets talk about some of our short term goals. These are goals that we want to have done in the next 1-3 months. We have finished most of them as most where related with getting the site back up. Right now though we have to major short term goals we are looking at achieving.
- Getting an automated back up system for the site up and running. This is dependent on our funding through Patreon though as we need at least $50 a month to cover the costs.
- Adding an additional moderator to our team. We will be looking for another moderator preferably some where in Europe or Asia to help expand our moderation coverage. This is due to all 3 of us not being available around the same times.
For mid term goal (goals we hope to have done between the next 4-8 months) we want to start trying to do more community related things. We want to begin organizing some Game Jams, hopefully with some cash prizes, and we have plans to start up a tutorial video series on topics from sprites to project management that the community can contribute to.
The biggest mid term goal we want to focus on is setting up dev grants. We have actually already started to take steps to implementing these “grants” with Cakehoarder’s Juni’s Appetite. As a few of you may know from her post on DA she needed some money to help get her car fixed. This would have delayed the development of the game as she would have had to taken commissions to raise the funds for repairs. We here at Weight Gaming wanted to help out so we contacted Cakehoarder and offered her what funds we could spare to assist her. We hope that we can assist more developers in the future in this way, but as stated above this is really dependent on how much money we are able to get through our Patreon.
Finally, lets wrap this up by talking about our long term goal for Weight Gaming (goals we want to achieve in 12-24 months)! Ultimately, our goal is to set up Weight Gaming as a store front that can be used to not only distribute expansion related games, but to allow devs to sell their games. We feel that allowing this will help encourage not only more games with expansion related content, but encourage higher quality as well. Games can still be distributed through the site for free, but for devs that might be looking to make some extra cash or even earn a living from their games, this will allow them an easy way to sell their games!
While some of our goals may sound ambitious, I know that with the support of this great community they are achievable!