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Story behind PocketCon
Some of you have asked the question why is Gaia starting on yet another new project. Why not only focus on Gaia Online? Why now, and what is even PocketCon anyways?
Well the story behind PocketCon started when we returned to Gaia back in 2016. As a company, Gaia had been creatively driven with ideas inside Gaia Online and out. While I spent my time focused on Gaia, other founders had been working on partnerships and external opportunities. It's the expectation that we had within our team, as well as our current investors going in. As a result, there were other services such as Lucky Live and Pop Square that Gaia was involved in.
Though why do we as a company want to focus on anything other than Gaia Online? There are two main reasons. First, as a company we wish to continue being creative and trying out new ideas with no limitations. Second, it makes business sense for us as a company to have more than one revenue source. Having multiple sources of revenue is important for a few things:
- obviously it lowers the risk and pressure for income. While cost for a company such as salary is very consistent, income fluctuates because some items might not sell as well, or a theme our supporters don't like. Having more than one source of revenue ensure that we as a company do not have to push as hard on GCash items in Gaia just to make ends meet.
- having multiple teams or products create shared resources. For example, our cost every month such as rent, server cost, slary for professionals such as accounting can now be shared between teams. If there is another team sharing the cost, then suddenly the GaiaOnline team will have numerous expenses cut by half, leaving more resources to hire programmers or artists to maintain and build new features, or maybe to simply have less pressure for revenue which results in less announcements around.
- shared technologies is also another aspect that is helpful. Currently with our resources, we simply don't have the man power to design systems from the ground up, and to take advantage of brand new tools and technologies. If we have funding for a new team working on a new product, then suddenly we will have a second team that develops new framework and tools that in turn can be used by GaiaOnline once they're ready. A better search engine, recommendation system, chat system, or a better forum/messaging system are all things that we can potentially take advantage of.
At the end of the day. Business reasons aside, I want to focus back on the creative aspect. Many of our team members had been working on Gaia Online for more than 10 years. Although we all love Gaia, for our engineers or artists, being able to work on different things after many years is something that comes naturally. Having more projects allow Gaia staffs to learn and try new things, and new opportunities open up for new staff members to work on Gaia Online itself.
Exploring these options gives Gaia as a company the money and resources we wouldn't have otherwise. In turns it will allow our teams to better serve the Gaia audience. We know that the current status quo doesn't give us much resources to improve all the things we want to do, that's why we're working hard to change that.
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