With the release of our recent Malaysian Gamer Overview and meet the team video, I thought I’d blurt out some thoughts I have had in my mind.
The struggles of meeting invisible expectations.
At Malaysian Gamer, we often find ourselves
(me and frags) struggling to meet deadlines. The reason for this is due to the
fact that it’s basically the two of us, trying really hard to meet expectations
with what we do, either it being a video or write up. Of course there’s no
solid reason as to why we would even want to meet expectations when we aren’t
even getting paid for what we do.
In all honesty, we could have taken that
route, and decided that since no one really expects much from us, we can easily
become lazy and let the site die a slow death. Often this single thought comes
into our minds as with other thoughts like; ‘let start a subscription’ or
‘let’s find a corporate sponsor and do what those other magazines or sites do,
earn money through commercial whoring’.
In the end, we still have our own sets of
ethics and principles; therefore, we find that we want to produce stuff that’s
both high quality and comparable to commercial production. By doing the things
we do in our spare time to a set standard (that often means meeting an
invisible audience’s expectation). With time, of course we want to break out of
just doing it in our spare time and that means moving into a full time gig one
day with a proper social identity (not just in Malaysia but also
internationally).
Expanding The Brand
Therefore, Malaysian Gamer itself has to
keep growing, we obviously can’t do everything ourselves (because with me and frags
we have total of four hands and four legs, I even counted the number of eyes we
have and it comes to a total of eight, how ? because we both are geeky looking
people). So the question often comes down to ‘how to expand?’... to us it means
building a community that allows us to attract others who think like us.
Sharing ideas, creative works of art,
networking with each other and even building strong relationships with foreign
communities. Often that means going out of our
way to meet new people, and making friends (yes, a lot of people think we are reclusive,
but in reality, we probably meet more people than a Sales man running around
selling insurance). In return, we seek to branch ourselves out, with having
more people recognise ‘Malaysian Gamer’ as both a title that is identifiable to
a person and also for being part of a bigger community of people.
Expanding The Site
Malaysian Gamer started out as a blog site,
it was run by frags (Theshi by some closer to him) and it still is today. It
was first made to cover on ‘niche’ strategy games, and then it went on to other
gaming genres and later it would evolve into a sort of Gaming News blog. When I
came on board it turned into a testing ground for making videos.
Today, all those things are still there on
our blog (we don’t really want to stay as a blog honestly). However, in the
next year, we hope to again evolve and turn into something even better.
To see that happen, we have a set plan of
ideas we want to implement, however as I mentioned before, there’s always this
constant battle between ‘Quantity and Quality’. We want to be rid of that and
have both, producing professional content while producing quickly for you guys
to be entertained and share around.
A Malaysian Gaming Community
Again, we aren’t machines which pump out
stuff every day. We both have our own set of responsibilities (in this current
time I’m a student in Uni...F**K) and yet have to find time in our busy lives
to do the things we do (without getting money for it T-T). But don’t see this
as something to get angry over or feel pity at, in fact we hope to encourage
you guys to seek us out and say ‘How can I help’.
Often the separation between those who want
to be in this industry and those who only dream about it is the doing and the
thinking. To put it this way, we aren’t trained professionals, who have been in
this industry for a long time (well it’s about five years now).
We basically just decided that we wanted to
see something happen and just did it.
Often, it’s a trial and error process. We
didn’t know if the site was going to last those years, nor were we even
predicting that our Facebook page reach 500 ‘Likes’ (it’s still going up, so
thank you guys).
Honestly, half the time we think that the
stuff we make is quite horrendous (we aren’t even trying to be humble, it
honestly sucks compared to something like Rock, Paper, Shotgun). Ed – Often times, we are our worst critics. I have a tonne of articles I
have not published because I just think they weren’t good enough.
But we kept at it, making it better every
time we do something, producing stuff which is both a ‘Hit’ and a ‘Miss’ much
like our competitors.
End of the day, we hope to inspire new
people. Those of which can also join us in what we do and also do it for a
living. I honestly don’t expect to get rich soon with what I’m doing, but at
least I love every minute I spent on it.
The Crew
As the site expands, with more and more
people following what we do, and I humbly say that. We cannot do it by
ourselves, we want a crew. Some people call it ‘Staff’ others call it
‘Employees’, I simply say a ‘Crew’. Ed
– I prefer comrades
That’s because we see ourselves as a vessel
(you can even call it a ship), for the upcoming and the inspired.
Without a crew, a ship can’t function. It
can stay afloat with just two people, but honestly it won’t be going anywhere
anytime soon. Me and frags are extremely tired being in the same ocean for the
last five years only inching ahead every single year.
Therefore we want ‘You’ to join us!
We even went as far as making a list of
people we want on board (that list would only see the light of day when we hit
1000 ‘likes’ on our Facebook page) and I can easily say we are ambitious.
However that’s only an ideal dream, we
rather see what you guys can make of this rather than having us give you a
template.
Here’s a hint... we need people who can
write and play games.
Introducing the New guy
That being said,
I believe that now is a great time to introduce one of our newer crewmates.
Introducing Zakh or GamerZakh, a youtuber, media guru (in our case probably our
media god) and Malaysian Gamer. He plays games which are in my honest opinion
are obscure and hilarious (watch his Botanicula Let’s Play videos), they show a
genuine love for the game he’s playing, with a sense of excitement and
intelligence, all rolled into a single video. That being said, he also produces
high quality content which also matches those seen in other more popular gaming
youtube channels (probably better in some cases). But like all of us who struggle
with gaining attention towards his work, he needs solid support from the
community, to continue releasing said content. To do so, he produces high
quality videos on Guild wars 2 (which he recorded a tonne of, during the recent
beta), so check him out if your looking for high quality Malaysian made Guild
Wars 2 videos.
Whats next!
I always tell my
friends (or people who are often curious) what I think is next for this site,
even when writing this I still say ‘we want to make this the first ever
Malaysian Gaming community dedicated to to anything gaming’. It’s vague, but I
can’t really reveal all the tricks we have in the next few months on what we
plan to do and how we plan to do it but we do have a list of things to
accomplish by the end of this year. That being said, I hope that you guys
continue in supporting the things we come up with and help us making Malaysian
Gamer a recognised brand when it comes to gaming.
A big thank you
to all of you!
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