The Bigfoot Networks' Guild Partners Program Launches!

While I normally don’t make a point of posting up actual work-related stuff – then again, I’ve not made much of a point to post up anything lately, sorry! – I am definitely making an exception for this one. I’m pretty happy to say that our new Guild Partners program, my little pet project, is officially launched!

Bigfoot Networks has been sponsoring professional eSports teams for quite a while now. If you aren’t familiar with eSports, they’re basically professional gaming teams that often make a living just by gaming in major tournaments as professional players (or athletes if you will). However, most gamers aren’t actually part of an eSports team – in fact, a very, very small amount are. So, I wanted to do something that would allow us to interact with more with gamers of a wider variety – ie: people who are in guilds and clans for a variety of online games.

The program basically has us advertising the teams that partner up with us on our site in a variety of ways, as well as getting them involved in some events as well. The idea is to help get the teams more well known, draw in new recruits, as well as to have a lot of fun. Of course, it does also help us get our name out better as well.

The program officially launched this past Friday, but I’ve already received a number of applications – and from some pretty large groups, too. I’m excited to see how this goes.

Basically it boils down to this: I had a job that I really didn’t like. There was nothing wrong with the company or anything, but it just wasn’t the position for me. I had very little work to do – which actually benefited this site, but I’d rather be engaged with my work. That was something I very much was not. I hate being bored and I hate not having something to keep me busy. I was actually strongly considering heading back to college and grabbing a PhD in Information Sciences, and finding myself a nice research position, either at a University or at some epic company. That would have been along the lines of what I wanted to do with my life, although not exactly it.

Of course, to do grad school, I’d need some money first. I’d also have to go through the application process which would take around a year. That would be a problem though, because after a while I realized a major problem: I wasn’t going to keep my job. Now, I didn’t do a bad job, mind you. However, I didn’t have enough work. Things took to long for management to approve, so I was often stuck waiting around until I could move forward on my project. Management realized that and, in a recession – or ever for that matter – you don’t pay someone to sit around doing nothing, because you don’t have enough work for them. Thus, I was let go.

This as a problem, because I had little in the way of savings. I lost most of my money trying to get that one job, so it was a pretty rough place to be in. I saw it coming for a while, but just didn’t have any luck turning anything up.  The greater problem was that I had a year long lease to sign and no way to pay for it if I didn’t get something pronto. I also didn’t have many places to turn, with my family in a major financial crisis over all.

This could probably have quickly turned into a pretty depressive story, except that I’m apparently retardedly lucky, so I get to provide a happy ending (for now at least). I received a call from a company that I had applied to, and interviewed with, shortly before I got the other job, Bigfoot Networks, the creators of the Killer NIC gaming network card. It was for a Community Manager position. They called me up and asked if I was still interested – and I said yes! Absolutely! It took a few phone interviews, but then I was offered the position on a contractual basis (which will grow into full-time).

It’s weird, you know? I was in what felt like the worst place in my life. I was stuck, had no where to go, no way to get out of my situation, and nothing was working out. It was stressful as hell. Then, out of the blue, my dream job just showed up and was dropped on my lap.

Go figure.

This will have some affects on this blog though. I’ve not started posting here before, because I wanted to really focus on this position for a while. It also involves me blogging over on the company blog, too – which is still small right now, but I have… high hopes for, let us say. I don’t want to let this site die, though. Luckily, I think I can continue to blog there and blog here just fine, too. Over time, I’ll port some more game news over there, but I’m going to still talk an awful lot about major news from the game industry here, like I did before. I’ll also happily discuss hardware, too. Most importantly of all, I get to talk about community management as a professional in the field instead of just some random dude. Woo!

So, yeah. I’ll try to get the place runnin’ smoothly again.