For over four years Twitch has served as a means of entertainment and livelihood for me. As with all things relating to a career, I would like to continue the forward progress that I have made for myself and build it into something even better. Twitch has been an amazing platform to help build the Magic community, and interact with it. While interaction with viewers is generally awesome, it is far from a perfect way to interact with people viewing my stream. While I consider my abilities at parsing through the thousands of lines of text every day very good, launching a website was the next logical step in furthering that interaction and communication.
To be honest I had no set vision of what NumotGaming.com was going to be; I just knew I wanted to make a site. As things progressed and I continued to discuss ideas with my friend, Roderick, we came to the conclusion that there wasn’t currently a great place for people to go should they want to learn to play Magic Online or learn how to stream Magic Online. One of my goals now is that NumotGaming.com becomes a place where my viewers can come interact with me, but also a place where anyone with even a basic interest in Magic Online can learn all the ins and outs of how to use the program, how to play Magic better, and how to get help when they need it.
A one-man site would be great, but after realizing just how extensive and layered my goals were I decided that getting addition content creation help from others would be a huge boon. AJ Sacher was one of the earliest Magic streamers, someone who loves to create content and wants to help others become better players. He has been a longtime advocate of creating an online presence for Magic on Twitch, and he seems like an ideal candidate to help push it to a bigger audience. AJ won’t be the only person contributing to the site. I fully expect a number of other streamers and professional Magic players will help produce content in the future.
But wait! There’s more. NumotGaming.com is not only going to be about streamers and professionals. I believe a number of my viewers have great ideas, yet have not had a decent platform to express themselves to the public. I am hoping that in the very near future you will be seeing fresh content from people you may have never heard of. People that are part of the Magic community that have something to say that I believe is worth sharing.
Of course, as with all things business, there are some financial goals to go along with content production. I’m happy to say that this new site is going to offer a number of items for sale in my store. Part of the initial site development was to create the NumotGaming brand. The process started by hiring an artist many Magic players are probably familiar with, Joseph Meehan, to create an amazing piece of artwork that the brand itself would be built around. His art inspired the NumotGaming logo, the incredible tokens we handed out at GP Oakland, the NumotGaming t-shirts worn throughout the event, and (in my opinion) best yet, the playmats featuring the full painting. Having already had a large number of people ask me to do shirts, among other products, I felt this was a great opportunity to be able to offer merchandise to the viewers while still staying connected to Magic.
Along with the sweet loot in my store, we are already working with another Magic artist, Lake Hurwitz, to design us some breathtaking subscriber only gifts. Over time my subscriber base has grown to an amazing number of people who have relentlessly supported me throughout my streaming career. Those subs have shown extreme dedication beyond anything I could have imagined and I would love to be able to show them my gratitude, especially the ones that are now nearing their THREE year sub mark. Their dedication and support is something worth being rewarded but I don’t just want to single them out alone, as I appreciate every sub. I will be working with Lake to develop multiple levels of rewards that will be used to thank my subscribers for everything they have helped me achieve.
FINALLY, I needed my own home on the internet. A Twitch channel and social media can only go so far. I produce a buttload (this is a unit of measurement, trust me) of content, answer a lot of questions, and try to engage with my audience as often as possible, but there just wasn’t an ideal place to pull all of this together until now. Over the course of the next few months I envision being able to tie all of my different related Magic activities into the hub that will be NumotGaming.com. Hopefully this answers some of the more immediate questions in regards to the future and this site. Big things are on the horizon, and I say “Hello Friend!” to everyone that helps to make it possible.
Your NumNumDumDum,
Kenji
