As of this past weekend, Grouvee Gold is now only $10 a year!
I’ve said a couple different things in other forum threads about how I want to change how Grouvee Gold worked, but I didn’t really like any of the decisions I came up with. This seems like the simplest way to handle this.
If you don’t know, Grouvee Gold is a way for you to directly support the site. You pay $10, and I remove the ads for a year. It’s setup to be recurring, but it’s super easy to cancel once you sign up so you don’t get any surprise charges the following year.
My goal is to have Grouvee Gold pay for the site. If I could get enough people to buy Grouvee Gold, I could just get rid of ads. I think the ads suck and make the site look bad, but they pay for half of the server costs, so I can’t get rid of them.
If 1% of the people on the site chipped in for Grouvee Gold, the servers would be just about paid for. If 5% chipped in, I could spend a lot more time building features for the site. I’d be able to get a couple more servers to make everything faster and more reliable. I might also buy beer with some of that money.
I’m thinking about putting up a Wikipedia like banner across the site for a month to let people know about Gold a little more prominently. It’d be like a mini-fundraiser. I’d also be willing to do some kind of live stream event to raise money if people were into that. Anyone have any thoughts on that?
Thanks for the update. I have really enjoyed my time with Grouvee thus far, and am excited at the possibility that it can grow. I thought I’d offer my two cents here (as a non-Gold member).
Although I appreciate the way I can support YOU, I don’t feel that Grouvee “Gold” gives me enough features to justify the cost. It’s one thing if you started a fundraiser that simply said, “Hey I need server money, can you guys help?” It’s another thing to call it “Grouvee GOLD.” Naming it gold implies that there is some sort of benefit to it…and making the site ad-free isn’t something that I perceive as “valuable” enough for a Gold membership.
That makes perfect sense. I’ve been kind of disappointed with the number of people to sign up for Gold, but I’m sure it’s because most people feel the same way you do.
At this point, I feel like I should do one of two things, and I’d love to hear yours and anyone else’s thoughts on this.
I could start a Patreon and kind of call it what it is, a donation to keep the site running. I’d put in stretch goals to get rid of ads for everyone, restart the podcast, etc.
I could build more features and put them behind the Grouvee Gold paywall.
I don’t know what I could put behind the paywall that people would pay for. Maybe batch editing, more fields in the export files (only because @aqwelorr asked for it and he’s a Gold member ) , etc. What kind of stuff would you be willing to pay for?
Without going too much into it, I think it’s a good place to start out with the question, “What do we like about Grouvee?” Personally, I enjoy Grouvee for the following:
The ability to track the games I play
The ability to see the games my friends have played / are playing
Rating and reviewing
It feels small enough of a community that I feel like I can have good discussions
The challenge is going to be leaning into what Grouvee does well first and letting it fill in the hole it fills. I’m active on goodreads.com - a book tracking website connected through Amazon. I enjoy goodreads because it’s efficient and fills that niche for those who want it filled. Grouvee is the “Goodreads of VIdeo Games,” in my mind. I recommend looking into GoodReads to see the things they feature - that could be a good model going forward.
On top of that, I also see Grouvee as very much in its “early stages.” It has SUPER basic functionality right now - but it has already started doing well at what it hopes to do well. Some good next ideas, just mind-dumping -
is there a way to connect Grouvee to Achievement Tracking on Steam and consoles?
Grouvee appeals well to the logic-types, rational-types, “OCD types,” if you’d like to say that. How can we leverage that?
Grouvee achievements? Milestones? “You’ve now logged your 100th game!” or something like that.
It’s funny you mention Patreon. Your recent posts about changes to Gold and fund raising had me thinking that Patreon may be a good route to head down. I think placing additional features behind a paywall is not the best course of action. Unless we can really devise some features that would only appear to a “power user”, but I’m not super fond of that idea.
Fundraising is difficult. It’s hard to charge for a website, even a great one like Grouvee. I think that’s why most sites are supported through ads. I know I’m adding very little constructive to the conversation. I guess I’m thinking out loud. Patreon seems like a good idea to me because it is, in effect, like an investor source.
I appreciate that remark actually. Grouvee’s been around for almost 4 years now actually. I’ve purposely kept it very simple. That’s always been my idea. There are definitely more features that could be added while still keeping it simple, it’s just a matter of finding the time for them all.
Thanks again for the thoughts. If I did anything, it’d most likely be the Patreon route. I don’t quite know if it’s the right place for a site like Grouvee though. I’ll post here if I get something out there!
I kind of agree that the Patreon route makes sense with some milestones to encourage participation (maybe even let the community vote on the arrangement of milestones, e.g. is removing ads the first one or are there some commonly requested features that would be preferred?)
That said, I do actually like that Grouvee Gold gets rid of the ads for me. Why? I like to pull up Grouvee on my iPhone fairly frequently and dropping the ads reduces the clutter a lot (and makes the site faster). So I guess I’d be a little disappointed if the option I was given to the support the site left me with ads until the entire community reaches some milestone.
All that said, I’m happy to support Grouvee through whatever option you end up with
Final other thought: have you considered taking source contributions for site features? Maybe I’m the only one interested in this, in which case it might make more sense to take the discussion offline on email or something, but I could make some time to work on features for the site. I’m happy to stick with client tweaks like the shelf filtering but some things like batch shelf editing might be a little difficult or inefficient that route. Just thought I’d mention this while we’re talking about contributions to the site.
If I did it, I’d remove ads for anyone who was a Patreon supporter. I was thinking that I’d remove the ads for everyone else at a certain milestone. Maybe that’s unfair and a little counter productive, but I dislike the ads enough to think about it.
I went gold because i like grouvee and i use grouvee, i dont want site to stop! the fact i use it was incentive enough. tbh i am quite okay with the way grouvee is, and its worth the small fee of supporting it in the hopes it doesnt dissappear from the net.
access to a cheat sheet & tips section ‘how to use this site like a grouvee pro’ (all the tricks peter knows… even though i feel it should be free! )
certain admin-like priviledges like adding stuff not in the database (that would of course also help you out.)
seeing what is ‘trending’ (people are playing, wishlisting, backlogging or status-posting about)
certain admin-like privildges of seeing hidden stuff. like users that are playing what games, who added what to their list, etc. this could be some work but i thought i would mention it because I for one find that this site is VERY useful for discovering relevant content but that it’s more or less an afterthought and seems quite untapped. make some of that deliveralbe and that is certainly worth a pro membership! there might be a divide on who wants that sort of thing but i certainly would.
newsfeed controls/filters (site is small enough currently this isnt much of an issue)
Private Gold chatroom or PM abilities might bring some to take the plunge. (not all agree. but some social element would be nice, we do tend to talk to each other after all, and some have mentioned it before)
monthly tournaments, cash entries with redeemable rewards of some sort. game of the month could be based on whatever is ‘trending’
the ability to SEE what is trending and VOTE for what you want the monthly tourney to be for.
wishlist giveaway. Not sure if you would want to do it but a gold drawing of random member of something in their backlog or wishlist would be cool, but doesnt seem like it would increase gold memberships. If someone could find a way to do this to adress backlog, it would be especially cool too imo lol this could also tie in with the monthly tourney as a redeemble.
at the least, i think a chat room could be the most feasible, maybe it would get some results? it’s an opt in approach rather than a forced feature. i have mixed feelings on the tournaments. mostly because i have no skill, i cheat and well… i’m not alone
second thing down the social road i can think of is badges like the stuff made for the forum. its feasible but would be work to do it for every little game. i could care less about stuff like that but i know it means a lot for people to get achievements. haha. Gold tournament medals would be a pretty cool achievement though. nothing like winning the monthly and letting all know… forever. It would also present gold membership to be fun and make people want to sign up for a shot at the gold medal.
Some pretty solid ideas. A dedicated chat/forum room is also one I think some people may enjoy. I also think fund raising events like game-a-thons and potentially tournaments are a fun idea. I mentioned something similar to @peter. I think that there are a lot of great ideas being put forth by members and I am definitely onboard.
Just a simple thought: Letterboxd is similar to Grouvee in spirit (I actually found Grouvee by googling “Letterboxd for games” :D) and they have some nice options for the paying users that I think could translate well here or at least be an inspiration.
Which features of Letterboxd Pro are you thinking of? Import, filtering, year in review? I think Grouvee has some decent shelf filtering functions, and there is currently a Steam import function (in case you were not aware of those). Are there specific aspects of what Letterboxd offers that you are interested in, that could potentially add to what is already built into Grouvee, or is absent from Grouvee altogether?
Well, for example, the year in review thing is really nice.
Maybe another thing could be adding more features (if it makes sense) related to the integration with Steam and also adding integration with other similar services, like GOG or Origin.
On a side/unrelated note, I have to say I’m a big fan of how letterboxd is organized in terms of feed and social stuff. The way I open the site and I instantly see a bunch of popular reviews/lists and how I can interact with other people. So I’d like to see more of that here, but that’s probably not good for a “Gold” discussion, sorry.
Since I already went OT: is it possible to link a list of my reviews to a person who is not logged in on Grouvee? It doesn’t seem so (not with this link anyway: Track your game collection and backlog with Grouvee ) but maybe I’m missing something.
I’ll get to all the other points a little later today, but you can get to all of your data on your profile page. Your reviews are at giopep’s reviews on Grouvee
Grouvee does provide front page filtering that may address some of what you are looking for (and perhaps this is what @peter will elaborate on further later). On the main Grouvee site you should see the following at the top of your feed:
By default you see all content/activity on Grouvee. However you can use those buttons to filter reviews, statuses, comments, or any combination of the three. You can also click on the blue button on the left to filter all updates versus updates from your friends. So if you want to view and respond to reviews or status updates posted only by your friends, you can do so. And interacting with people can be done right from the main page, allowing you to like reviews and respond to comments. Other than thumbnails that show new lists posted by friends on the Letterboxd site, Grouvee appears to have a basic main page feed that is very similar to Letterboxd. That is my experience, at least. I apologize if some of these features are already known to you, but I thought I should highlight them just in case they present the types of features and options you are looking for.
) , etc. What kind of stuff would you be willing to pay for?
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