June 21, 2012
This letter is for our community that has helped us grow our world to where it is today. It is to review what we have accomplished in the last year and to look forward to the future at where we are going. On June 15th, 2012, Onverse turned three years old! It seems crazy to think that it has been so long. I guess time really does fly when you are busy, and busy we have been!
Past[]
In just the last 12 months, our tiny, indie development team has been able to churn out a lot of changes and additions to Onverse. If you are new since our last Birthday, here is what we’ve accomplished..
- The Enchanted Forest built.
- Enchanted Land Plots and Estates built.
- Multi-person Mounts Introduced.
- Scarlet’s Secret Quest Released.
- Vehicles Introduced with Tangerine Coast.
- Prepaid VIP introduced.
- Winter Wonderland – North Pole event.
- Jackpot Treasures introduced.
- Elemental Adventure Areas introduced.
- Domo arrives.
- Trials Treasures introduced.
- Prom is held.
- Ancient Cultures: Egypt released.
- Metroview Deluxe Penthouses built.
..And that is only pulling from 14 of our 26 updates over the year. That’s a consistent average of an update every other week full of new, meaningful content every time! I don’t believe there is another virtual world game out there, big multi-million dollar company or not, that has pumped out that kind of content for a free game over the last year.
Present[]
As a company, we’ve never been blessed with money. We’ve done everything you see above with 4 employees, a bunch of volunteers and a budget less than 5% of what some big name companies out there have invested in their success. I bet a lot of you didn’t know that, eh?
As you well know, the past 5 years has been a rough time economically for everyone. Many companies have fallen under this pressure or were unable to adapt to the new landscape. I’m proud to say that regardless of not having the resources of big companies, Onverse is still here, still growing and still pumping out quality content for the best community out there! We have over 400,000 registered users and had over 75,000 visitors just in the last 30 days! That may be small in big-budget terms, but for a small indie studio it’s very good and growing every day.
This brings us to current primary focus - managing this growth. There are two aspects of this that have become necessary to focus on to solidify our foundation for this growth. One of them is the load times it takes to get from place to place within the game, the other is the simple fact that our servers are beginning to feel the strain of the growing community (as you have seen recently with some of the server fixes we have been doing). Both of these we have actually been working towards for quite some time as we knew they would be coming sooner rather than later. They have not been easy things to fix, but they are drawing closer to fruition.
In the past few weeks and throughout the Anniversary weekend, we have been having Cash Coin sales for 100% bonuses. Guess what? You just helped us to afford the new hardware necessary to expand our servers and to pay for the engineering involved to build a new system of routing our game more efficiently! We appreciate every single one of your purchases and make sure that everything we make is spent wisely towards the success of our company. Pat yourselves on the back once again. Thank you!
The other focus for our company right now is to get support from other companies, investors, advisors, affiliates, family and friends to help us grow even more. One thing I know is that nobody has ever become successful on their own. Making contacts and doing business is leading to more opportunities to get ourselves to a level where we can bring you as much Shop, Play and Chat as you can handle. Stay tuned!
Future[]
Looking ahead, Onverse has our best days yet to come. As we grow, we will be able to invest more time into both improving the current mechanics and systems in Onverse, as well as expanding into new areas and game features. We have countless ideas of our own and many suggestions from our forum and feedback email. We intend to keep pushing hard to be the best virtual world out there and feature-by-feature, we are getting there.
We hope you stick with us and enjoy our efforts, after all Onverse was built for you. We care about our company very much and love what we do, but none of it would be possible if you weren’t there to be reading this right now!
Thank you so much for all of your support, feedback and ideas. Stay strong with us!
Sincerely,
Steve Pierce
CEO – Onverse, LLC