Motivation and How it Affects Virtual Pet Site Owners by Mike Sadowski.
Hello everyone, I’m Mike Sadowski, a Guest Writer here for today’s blog post. If none of you know me (if you knew me you probably forgot about me years ago), I’m the former owner of GiroPets.net and the present owner of VirtuBots.com. Today I’m going to describe Motivation with Virtual Pet Site Owners and how it affects everyone that is playing the game.
I’m speaking from experience years back with GiroPets and from present experience with my new site VirtuBots. Please, don’t think that I’m using this space to advertise. I’m only here using these two sites in which I’ve worked on as examples, as I can relate to them the most, being that they are mine or once was mine.
I can start off by saying that motivation is a big key factor in how well a virtual pet site does. Years back when I had owned GiroPets (I sold it, let’s just get that out of the way), I was very motivated with keeping the site up to date all the time. I’d be on the site as much as I could during my evenings trying to improve it in some little way possible. And that was a good thing. I started GiroPets in the late part of 2002 as a private beta but opened up to the public in the early part of 2003, where I had a lot of energy and “drive” in my body to get the site to be a successful one.
It started off great, because I had done a lot of the framework for the site in private, only my eyes really saw it, but I later introduced some new people into the staff who gotten a look at what I had done too. I finally decided that I would open up and submit GiroPets over to TopWebGames.com (I don’t think Virtual Pet List even existed at the time. If it did, then I didn’t ever hear about it back then). That was where the success was started from.
I thought I had everything good, I had the registration working and I had forums. That was all that members could really do. I didn’t have any working games, and I didn’t even have the point system up yet. And I was flooded with a lot of things that I had to do. So that’s where my motivation came from. The amount of members who registered really got the ball moving, in my mind, that I had to do a lot of things and do it quick. Perhaps a little too quick.
I’m thinking “a little too quick” now because my programming was really flawed and wasn’t that good. It was probably because of the fact that I was new to it and didn’t know the proper way to approach it, and to check for every possible error or situation that a person might do on a webpage. I got things working, but they were really bad. So, later in time, I had reprogammed those pages into works of art, and made them better than before.
So, when I had all of these new registrations coming in, I realized that I had to keep these members returning to the site by keeping things up to date and making them “want” to come to the site to see what I had done for the day.
It’s really hard to try to take nothing and make it into something. That’s the problem that I’m facing right now with my new site VirtuBots. I’m not sure what kind of a direction that I’d like to take the site in, so I’m spawning things out in all different directions but I’m not sure on a set path yet. I haven’t popularized the site yet by submitting it to TopWebGames.com (that won’t be for awhile), but if I did, I think I’d find more motivation. That’s a bit of a problem for me because I’ve got a very busy offline life where I can’t be on the computer as much as I was before.
Just from that one occurance, where I submitted GiroPets to TopWebGames.com, spawned all of the motivation that I needed for a long time. It was because of the amount of people who were registering for the site in a day (if I remember correctly, I was averaging 20 new registrations a day), so I had to keep these new members, and avid senior members, returning to the site and making it fun for them with all of these new features.
My motivation slowed down after awhile, because I realized that I needed to develop a bit of a social life away from the computer. I think that was a bit of a mistake on my part for selling GiroPets because I haven’t really been that much different offline since the site had been sold. I find myself in the same sort of position as I was before. Didn’t really hang out with many friends or really do too much.
It’s still like that to this day. I love web design. I’m trying to get back into it with VirtuBots. I just need to find the motivation that I once had before. I need to find it from a different source because I don’t want all this to be affecting my life too much, because I have a very hectic schedule, with work (when I owned GiroPets I didn’t have a job, as I was too young for one). That adds a lot onto my shoulders. And plus I’m in college right now, which is overwhelming. I have very little time to myself now, so I need to figure out a way for me to find some motivation that works around all of that.
Essentially, what I’m saying is that motivation is and will always be a big part of making or breaking a virtual pet site. VirtuBots isn’t even officially “open”, I’m considering it as being in “Public Beta” right now. I haven’t submitted it to any search engines or taken the effort to really popularizing it yet. There’s no need to, because of the lack of features that it has. When it does get bigger and better, and when the audience is pulling in, I feel that I’ll have found my motivation over again.
- Mike.
