Taugrim's MMO Blog

Publishing content about games has been a passion of mine for seven years. I started creating guides and narrated videos, because I enjoy teaching and wanted to contribute to the community.

It wasn’t until Q4 2011 that I gave any serious thought about trying to monetize my content. Prior to that time, I was busy with work / RL, my gaming content was a hobby, and I wasn’t clear how I might monetize my content without alienating the people consuming it.

Late last year I decided to give it a go as a full-time blogger. The past 6 months have been, in many ways, a “startup” experience. I’ve learned a lot about online broadcasting, growing an audience, monetizing content, and improving the production value of my videos. That said, I’ve also come to realize that this isn’t sufficient to make ends meet financially, for now. Therefore, I’m in the process of transitioning back to the corporate world.

What does that mean for this blog? Well obviously I’m going to continue playing games, because they’re fun! And I’m going to continue blogging, streaming, and hosting content about games – but mostly on nights and weekends.

I want to thank y’all for your feedback, insights, and support along this journey. It’s been awesome having a community that constructively and intelligently dialogues about games, and I look forward to continuing our conversation.

Cheers,

Ed Park aka Taugrim

P.S. if you work in the gaming industry, I’d welcome the opportunity to speak with you. I have skills / experience that might transfer to that space, and I’d appreciate your perspective for someone coming from outside the industry. You can contact me @gmail.com, my username is the same there.

I wanted to share with y’all an exciting milestone. During my 15th session of streaming, my TwitchTV channel cracked 100k views and 1k followers:

With the NDA lift for SWTOR on November 18th, I’ve been streaming SWTOR PVP action every day with live commentary.

Much of the traffic is due to my having access to General Testing, which is a limited pool of people compared to the Weekend Tests – i.e. there are a limited number of people who can even stream at this time.

That being said, viewers have been providing very positive feedback for my stream, and this has been a huge encouragement to me

Being a resource to the gaming community has been my passion for 6 years, but until recently it’s been a hobby not a vocation – what I’ve been able to do has been limited to free time outside of work. Recently I made the leap to “give it a go” as a full-time job.

Your support is essential in making this a financially viable and sustainable job transition, and to the extent I do this full-time the more content I can contribute to the community. Therefore here are my asks of you:

1. Spread the word on social media and on the SWTOR forums, and tell your friends and guildees
2. Stick around through the commercials on my stream. I want to create a positive viewing experience so I won’t be spamming them
3. Keep giving me the constructive feedback. In just a week I’ve learned so much from you about streaming and SWTOR

Thank you!

Taugrim

Follow Me

Twitter: @taugrim
Stream: http://twitch.tv/taugrim
YouTube: http://youtube.com/taugrimtaugrim
Facebook: http://facebook.com/taugrim
GAMEBREAKER Host for “The Republic” SWTOR show: http://www.gamebreaker.tv/category/the-republic/

I’m writing to share the launch of a new brand identity system (logo, tagline, etc) for this site.

For the logo design, I wanted a character-based logo that met two criteria:

1. The character is iconic for MMORPGs
2. The character is distinctive and fun

I decided that a Dwarf character with a 2H axe would be a perfect fit to meet the 1st requirement.

To bring that Dwarf character to life, I’ve been working with two talented graduates from Ex’pression College for Digital Arts: an artist named Fiona Quan and an animator named Calvin Huang.

To fulfill the 2nd requirement above, Fiona and I pursued a “Chibi” representation for the Dwarf, and here’s what we landed on:

Fiona did an amazing job of representing my requirements visually! She captured the personality and essence of a Chibi character and provided rich details such as the notches in the axehead and the chain mail links.

As you can see in the above picture, I came up with the following tagline:

pro guides, pro gameplay

Is that a lofty tagline? Absolutely! That said, based on the thousands of positive comments and props I’ve received over the years for my guides and gameplay videos, I think the tagline captures my brand essence and the distinctive value that I provide to the gaming community.

With the logo created, the next phase of the brand identity work was developing an animation clip that I can use as an intro/outro for videos and to kickoff my streamcasts. Here is what Calvin created:

We incorporated sound effects from the following authors:

• Ben “Benboncan” from freesounds.org: author of the sound effects used for the axe downswing, axe upswing, and drive-by effect for the website address and tagline. Thanks Ben!

You can check out Fiona’s artwork blog at 2dtamago.blogspot.com.

You can find Calvin’s portfolio online at hanimated.com.

Thanks again Fiona and Calvin for the amazing work!

Kind of a crazy milestone, considering I started making videos for fun and to illustrate the concepts from my class Guides for various games.

I don’t talk too much about RL here, but I will share that I’ve started working with TGN recently.

If you haven’t heard of TGN, it’s Gamer TV on YouTube, with thousands of videos produced by a network of Directors who cover dozens of games. I’m very excited to be part of a new media company that covers the gaming industry, for 2 reasons:

1. Companies such as TGN will command an increasingly larger piece of the content viewership pie over time, as “new media” continues to complement, supplement, and displace traditional media. The content game has changed radically in the past decade! Content is no longer produced solely by traditional networks and studios, and the Internet / mobile / social media have changed the dynamics of content distribution and access. We’ve all seen the rich impact that blogs have had in terms of how news and information are shared and discussed. Online video is the next wave
2. I love making gaming videos (duh!)

Speaking of great video content, I was a guest on gamebreaker.tv’s Aug 9th RIFT show The Sanctum.

Check out the show and let me know what you think