Proposal

[Scarface]

Today I received an interesting proposal in the form of a PM, I wish to share it with the members and get some feedback.

This is the PM verbatim:

I am writing to you about your site: gamers-gateway.com

Basically in this email, I am describing how we can offer you more members, forum activity, traffic and marketing.

I am the managing director of iVirtua Media Group, and we are opening and running this year, two LAN Gaming Centres. In this centre we would like to offer and provide our gamers and customers with gaming related discussion forums to use, which will be approved buy us. We have carefully chosen a few from the internet which we feel are more independent and unique as opposed to the larger, sometimes off putting forums with less quality discussion content.

iVirtua Media Group would like to in effect, partner with some gaming communities in the UK, US, Canada and abroad. We are opening in Newcastle, Tyne and Wear, and Bournemouth, Dorset, to begin with, with a vision to expand our LAN Gaming centres with partnerships with retailers and catering providers to provide the leading gaming experience in the UK, brining together independent and non corporately/conglomerate owned businesses.

To begin with, I would just like to confirm that you are the owner/manager of gamers-gateway.com - If you are not - and my director of operations who forwarded me your contact details is mistaken, if you could forward me to the individual who owns the forum, I would be most grateful.

My colleague Jamie Taylor along with his team has assessed your site, gamers-gateway.com's suitability for our approved forum network. We aim to provide independent forums, with an opportunity to "take on" and compete with larger gaming forums.

This will be enabled when we promote a small group of forums to be used by people in LAN Gaming Centres (similar to Cyber Cafes) around the UK, with gamers participating in this network of forums in a regular basis. We will be able to help some other selected forums who fulfil certain criteria by promoting them and providing resources free, as part of an "approved forum" list. We feel gamers-gateway.com meets this criteria.

[Scarface]

cont ...


How does this benefit you?

* Provides you with free marketing and advertising
* Raises your personal profile
* Ultimately allows you to contribute in a bigger way to the gaming industry
* Allows you to use our dedicated server infrastructure on a free but contractual basis, to handle an influx of traffic and users
* Allows you to consult our experts in web development and server management
* Provides users and "activity" to your forums



How does this benefit us?

* Allows us to provide gamers using our state of the art LAN Centres in 2008/9 with best independent gaming forums
* Allows us to provide a community aspect of gaming to those who would not usually participate
* Allows us to promote the independent gaming sites and forums to provide, ultimately, true competition towards larger corporate ventures.



What happens if you decide to join our network?

* We will allow you to take advantage of out dedicated hosting as of February/March 2008
* We will add your site to a special community portal available from our client (like steam client) and also in our LAN Centres when they open later in 2008
* Begin promotion and advertising through our media partners, UK and soon to be US magazines, and our Podcast.
* Fix any web development issues with the site, if you wish
* Optional adding of our LAN Centre logo at a later date



If you are still interested or would like to know more, please do not hesitate to contact me at samengland.*****@******.com, my personal email address.



I look forward, to working with you in the near future.


Kind Regards

Sam England
Executive Director
iVirtua Media Group (UK)

Newcastle, Tyne and Wear
Bournemouth, Dorset

iVirtua Media Group Offices: Carlisle, North; East London, London; Penzance, Cornwall

[Scarface]

I did some research and got these hits on sam england:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/samengland

.. and iVirtua Media Group

http://www.ivirtuaforums.com/
http://www.ivirtuaforums.com/ivirtua-media-group-img-to-launch-game-servers-pr-t36315



So thoughts?

From my point of view it seems to be a straight reciprocal promotion deal, they link to us we link to them sort of thing. I imagine we would be in a list of endorsed forums and we would show a banner ad or even modify our header to reflect the affiliation at our end.

They seem to be a legit bunch of young guys with some honest ideas and plenty of enthusiasm. It's interesting to me that they knew who to contact, assuming that is, that the other admins have received nothing similar.

We are actually loosely affiliated to other web sites, in so much as they have links pointing to us, but we do not provide reciprocal promotion as their worth is marginal at best, and I don't see it interfering with this arrangement.

I would of course have to run this past Jeremy, and he could veto it entirely.

[Loop]

Just a pity he can't spell.

[Nitrous]

The ivirtuaforums.com link doesn't work at the moment.

[QuizMaster]

Ahhh, affiliation. I was just thinking it has been a while.

My only concern is that this PM seems a bit too cookie-cutter to me. Of course, I wouldn't expect them to write an original piece each time, but still, a personal touch would be nice. Then again, this is business. But I am afraid that is all this may be. Reading the PM makes it sound like some glorious connection between members of the gaming community and suitable forums..... but perhaps this is just taking the time to put our forum name on a list somewhere.
After perusing their web site, I thought the staff page delivers a sense of humanity, but just looks like ads everywhere.

In the end, if you think they're legit....

[Scarface]

The ivirtuaforums.com link doesn't work at the moment.

Works perfectly for me.

[Talmon]

If we did indeed receive enough of a boost in users, that an additional server might be necessary.

What would that do to the overall quality of our discussion?

If this simply means a raise in epic lolz, and TyPiNg lyKe ThIs,
I don't know if it would be a positive.

An increase in traffic might help if we relied upon advertising revenue - but we haven't had banners in ages.

Hopefully it will attract some quality people... and it will all even out.

I have doubts, but I too like their enthusiasm.

[Scarface]

Reading the PM makes it sound like some glorious connection between members of the gaming community and suitable forums..... but perhaps this is just taking the time to put our forum name on a list somewhere.

I am under no illusion that this is exactly that, the value of the exposure comes from the amount of other forums on that list, if we are one among a hundred the exposure is minimal, but alternatively if we are one of few the exposure is better.

If we did indeed receive enough of a boost in users, that an additional server might be necessary.

What would that do to the overall quality of our discussion?

If this simply means a raise in epic lolz, and TyPiNg lyKe ThIs,
I don't know if it would be a positive.

An increase in traffic might help if we relied upon advertising revenue - but we haven't had banners in ages.

Hopefully it will attract some quality people... and it will all even out.

I have doubts, but I too like their enthusiasm.

We have google ads at the bottom of every page, but I think those are a relic of the nemesis days and he is probably getting paid for them, i keep meaning to get rid of them or replace them with something of our own.

The likelihood of having to use an additional server on the basis of increased traffic is highly unlikely, the server we are on is extremely robust and is free hosting so we would not take them up on their offer of free hosting.

To weed out the quality posters you have to put up with the "Lolz crowd", it's a universal constant as unavoidable as taxes, death, and phats' stupidity.

[Eldandoerino]

Sounds good to me if it's legit then go for it, i use a local lan gaming forum and the quality of posters on there varies as some are young but on the whole its a solid bunch of people all interested in gaming.

[Revolver-Ocelot]

Does seem like a pretty good idea if it's not a con somehow, I don't see how we could not benefit from it.

[Eldandoerino]

Yea we have spent so long berating new members and bickering(myself included in this) with each other that we are grinding to a halt we desperately need new members so why not.

[Alexandros]

Sounds good but I wouldn't trust companies I've never heard of who actively seek me out. Particularly ones that can't spell. Probably it is ok but just a personal opinion.

[Scarface]

What's the danger?

[Talmon]

What's the danger?

The only one I can think of, would be "contractual" use of their server resulting in a hostile takeover.

[samengland]

Hi guys,

Just noticed this thread.
What would that do to the overall quality of our discussion?

If this simply means a raise in epic lolz, and TyPiNg lyKe ThIs,
I don't know if it would be a positive.

We are aiming to make IGFP sites exactly the opposite of this.

iVirtuaForums.com is a gaming forum we ran from 2006 a while back, not part of our business model and not directly part of the LAN Centres run by us :)

I am Managing Director/Founder of the company and my colleage Jamie Taylor is Operations Director - we will be running two LAN centres in the UK by early 2009 :)

Our overall aim is to have a few independent, that is independent, gaming forums marketed together in our gaming centres and eventually as a networked group, so that we can provide real competition to the larger, usually corporately owned forums like IGN and Eurogamer - focusing on the merits of independent forums (personal touches, specialisation, and better discussion quality especially for the gaming industry itself)

Also, just a note, there wouldn't be any big "contracts" involved and the majority of users would not be under 18, the kind of LAN centres we run a very different, clean, almost "professional" environments.

Scarface if you have any further questions/issues to raise or would actually like to join our project, then I am more than happy to answer these in public, or via my email address.

Me and Jay Taylor are at the InternetWorld Conference this week also as VIPs, so if you are in London (Earls Court, West London 30th April - 2nd May) then you can meet us there.

[Scarface]

I was hoping you would reply in this manner, thank you for the response.

I will contact you shortly with our decision, thank you for your patience.

-Jason

[QuizMaster]

See? That's what I'm on about. Personal.

[30111987]

Sounds like the sort of affiliate GG has had in the past with the likes of ps2replay

Not over keen on getting too involved (particularly using iVirtual servers) but general affiliation and some help with the design and would be helpful.