We may be closer to breaking it wide open, than I thought.
First, I agree with your idea of keeping the membership free. I was thinking a lot about sources of revenue in the past couple of hours and even if we grow to 20,000 members by the spring/summer time frame, that still wouldn't amount to lot of monthly revenue.
Then I started considering how much revenue we could get by just licensing out the Strike Format to other tournament organizers. So maybe one could get 2-5% of the total tournament prize for that but since the large majority of tournaments have a prize pool under $20,000, that's not a lot of revenue either.
So where can the huge revenue come from in the next 3-6 months to blow this game wide open? I think it comes down to streaming videos.
We saw a hint of it the other day in your post about the amount of people watching the Overwatch stream, in excess of 3,500 viewers I think. That might not seem like at lot a first glance, but from my perspective, that's a huge first step.
It's not like Twitch is making all their ad revenue from any one player at a time. It's likely because they're making a little ad money from a lot of different streamers all streaming at the same time, 24 hours per day.
The interesting thing about that Overwatch stream was that it was pure game play if I recall correctly; it wasn't a Twitch stream? If that's the case, then it would imply that the GMER site is already set up to stream our own streams, without relying on a 3rd party.
Since we're heading towards the Mercenary System anyway, streaming would seem to be a critical element, along with chat, and everything else. It might mean the Mercenary System is getting much closer as well.
Since management seems to be quite clever in getting some top players to make Guides and Videos for the site, it seems like it would just take a small jump to be able to offer top players some money for them to stream some exclusive streams on the GG site as well, instead of always streaming on Twitch.
If if was our site that was suddenly hosting a lot of streamers, all getting several thousand views, then suddenly we should put us in position to immediately attract real ad revenue to pay for it.
Maybe we'll become the next streaming game channel, and then add the Mercenary System right on top of it!!
Okay, I really don't know; I'm just speculating and looking for more feedback. But that Overwatch stream was a very encouraging new direction for me as I got to thinking about it more.
