The summer is upon us. That means vacations, things to do outdoors, etc… I felt that this is a good time to post up GRG Summer Update. What our plans are for the summer and how we plan to ramp up for the Fall.
Slowdown on planned events.
Attendance gets a little shaky during the summer and this really affects the smaller game nights. The Forza and ESO nights will be sidelined for the time being. We may sporadically schedule a game night for each during the summer.
We will continue scheduling Monday FPS Nights, Drunken Friday BF1 and of course our weekly GRG Community night. Mondays and Fridays are more casual and are well attended. Then there’s our Community Nights on Wednesday which is pulling in about 30 people in BF1 alone (not to mention other games GRG members are playing).
We’ll always welcome a random game night (ie Rocket League, GTA V) if people are interested or volunteer to run it. Just PM a staff member and we’ll get it going.
Fall plans
Major push towards Destiny 2. Expect a large percentage of GRG to participate.
We need to work ways to get everyone in GRG involved in events with small fire teams.
Need GRG to step up and help each other. Don’t wait on staff or events. We look for “power users” that will help create GRG fireteams on their own.
Call of Duty WW2
Thinking this will bring back a few people to the series. We are planning to recruit and plan events when this ships.
PC Master Race
Our PC group is continually growing. It’s hard to actively recruit as PC gamers game hop often (steam sales and cheap games). Looking for ideas on how to recruit and continue the growth of the PC gamers of GRG.
Looking to add some new staff
We’re looking to increase GRG staff to assist with running events and helping with the site. We need people for XB1, PS4, and PC.
What we are looking for:
Someone that understands GRG’s culture and methodology.
Someone who’s active on the forums and on game nights.
Most importantly, someone that is very outgoing and can fill out a game room.
In Closing
Even though summers are slow and activity wains, we are still committed to providing and growing a community of like minded older gamers that always have a place to hang out.
We haven’t really used Reddit for recruiting for awhile now. 99.9999999% it’s just people that want an immediate LFG. I’m not sure how we will handle fall recruiting just yet but I do know we’ll reach out to the specific game’s forums and post there. We are also having incredible success with posting our events to our XBox Club page under LFG. What’s scary is our current best way of getting new people, Google Search. @Grex has got our SEO working properly and people are finding us from Goolge searches.
Although most run searches on “Mature Gamer site” and still wind up here…
Yeah, we are going to try and stay away from reddit. In regards to Destiny specifically, in addition to official game forums i am also putting a lot of stock in the in-game clan features and try and promote ourselves through that as well.
As for other games aside from “Google” searches, official game forums will be our first target and Xbox one groups. if there are any other ideas out there please share them.
The retention just isn’t good. Most create a site account but never even click the forums. Or have a forum account which automatically gets generated once you click forums. GrimReaperGamers.com and Forums.GrimReaperGamers.com are really 2 different sites and everyone here has 2 accounts. We use magic to seamlessly integrate them.
One of the issues with recruiting from Reddit is actually the huge influx of new people. While we’re a large gaming community we’re just not staffed enough to handle that huge increase. It’s why we really rely on our community to assist with helping GRG noobs into games.
That and we’ve had some serious mega drama come from recruits that we get from Reddit. That’s probably us generalizing and technically we can get assholes from anywhere. We’ll see where we are at come Destiny and recruit accordingly.
mainly for this reason. Most of the people that state they found us here usually signup and disappear. Not sure i really understand why but something we have observed.
I agree, we are generalizing and probably shouldn’t. We got quite a few good members from reddit posts.
We’ll really have to see where we are in the Fall. Recruiting is so far off my radar at the moment it’s hard to say what we’ll do.
If we do recruit we really need to work on a support structure to handle the new guys. It’s one thing to get sign ups but we’re more focused on retention. That’s what’s really important. So don’t get hung up on whether we recruit from reddit or not. We will recruit in the fall (as always) and I’ll probably pull a @anon42851937 and lie and post on Reddit.
On a personal note…my summer won’t be as busy as it usually is.
My kids are both playing softball right now, until the end of June. Then, my son is playing in tourneys through the summer, but after 12 years my daughter is hanging up the cleats. I still playoung ball on Tuesdays through Thursdays, but the there will be less practices and games with only one playing now. So, I will be busy, but not like usual summer busy, so I will be around for events here and there.
And in November when COD WWII drops, I will hopefully be busy again - unlike with IW.
I CAN’T WAIT TO START HAVING COD game nights again.
I’ll do a couple of Friday night things in June, working around when I’m away for Scouts the last week of the month. After softball is over at the end of June, I’ll get back to some Thursday night events.
