Originally Posted by
Mat Growcott
Hey folks, I'm Mat Growcott, joint partner in this along with Joe Ryan. I'm going to try to answer any concerns I can. If you don't want to donate, awesome, we're not expecting people to instantly love this idea just because we do, all I ask is that you keep an open mind and consider taking a look when we work things out.
A very good question and something we have to justify (since a lot of you have focussed on the club aspect of the title).
First, let's define club:
club/kləb/
Noun:
An association dedicated to a particular interest or activity.
A heavy stick with a thick end, esp. one used as a weapon
The club in the title refers to books clubs, as Joe said. The idea is to instantly bring up the idea of people sitting around and discussing a creative work. Of course, going by the definition above, it's perfectly fair to call it a club anyway.
Onto your actual question: the forum section of the site isn't going to differ a great deal from any other forum site. With that said, forums are the same almost universally and, ultimately, it doesn't matter which forum you go to but what its about and who's there. The important difference between the Retro Gamer Club forums and any other forum, I feel, is focus. I've taken a quick look around these forums and they're great, but there's so many different topics and conversations going on that it's impossible to take in everything.
Sure, I have no doubt that we'll offer social forums (perhaps even some form of instant messaging) and a forum dedicated to a wider retro topic, but the important point is that as much of the group as possible is playing the same game - seeing the same things as everybody else. What's important isn't that people are sitting around talking about these games, but that they're discussing them with their peers. Take, for instance, if somebody brand new came along to this forum and posted an 800 word essay on the significance behind Mario's main colour being red, how would the community react? It's for that sort of thing that we want to cultivate our community, although hopefully we'll stimulate more interesting conversation that that.
On top of that, the website will contain features about the chosen game, interviews, reviews, videos and diaries. We're not just playing these games together, we're dissecting them. It may be that you can get these things elsewhere, but I think we'll be one of the first, if not THE first, to bring them together in the way which we plan.
We definitely won't be providing people with games to play - we WILL be seeking ways of getting exclusive discounts on applicable games, although this is in its early stages and I don't have exact details. On top of that, we don't expect everybody to play, or even try, every game, that's ridiculous. Games will be voted on by the community each month, so it'd be nice to think we'd keep everybody happy but the chances of keeping everybody around each month is 0%.
If you have these games, as many of the people interested in joining a website like this will have, then brilliant. As sleazy as it sounds, we're not going to ask too many questions about how people are playing these games though - that's up to them and they do whatever they do at their own risk - and the important thing on our end is that they participate in the discussion on the website and in the forums.
It's a fair suggestion and something that we'll be doing to some extent whether we get the money from Kickstarter or not. Like any other kind of start-up business (not just another games blog), we need a good deal of initial funds. We figured we had nothing to lose from spreading this idea around for a couple of months and getting some backing, learning what people want, before going ahead and spending hundreds of dollars on something we really need a little more money for.
Don't get me wrong, we're willing to put our time and money into this project (neither Joe nor I will take any sort of wage from this until its profitable enough to do so), but we have certain expectations - a custom CMS, the ability to pay our writers for contributions - that we couldn't really do without funds directly for the project.
As charming as the way you worded this is, you have a point. Why SHOULD any of you people give money to an idea by people you don't know and that seems like something you can already do?
Simply put, you shouldn't. We're not going to starve if you don't give us your money, we're not here to give you a hard-sell. Joe posted here because he thought some of you might like the idea and want to get in on the ground floor, we didn't expect anything to come of it especially. As it happens, as a group you've brought up some good points and you've not only made us think about our project but justify parts of it, which is great.
Of course, if you want to help by donating: thank you, and give me money.
---
A couple of other things:
Some of you have mentioned the online/real life thing. Ideally, we'd like to think our members could get together to do this but, ultimately, its something that's easy enough to organise without our help. Creating some sort of actual club would be great, but it lacks the practicality of doing something online, especially with all the options that brings.
I think I answered almost every major point, but I'm happy to answer questions, complaints or whatever as best as I possibly can. As I say over on the project page, at the very least we want people to enjoy this project as much as we do and we can only realize that goal if people challenge us and get us to explain ourselves. Perhaps someone will see the answer, nod their heads and come join us when we launch.
Building a Retro Gaming Club
Reply With Quote
