We have lots of new things in the works now following our first recruitment drive of 2020 and the official active launch of our gaming community in Discord. We can no longer be the butt of jokes about the Gaming Network with no gaming haha. Starting with World War Z and Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition and expanding into Ubisoft games, Division 2 Warlords of New York and Anno 1800. In particular most of the new members have come in from World War Z and it will forever be considered the "founding" game of Balance, we hope to support it for as long as possible and hope that the game has a similar longevity and ongoing new content support to Payday 2 going into the future. We also had our first ever live streamed game of Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition where Munly pulled off a surprise win against our ambassador and pro-gamer/streamer Freya Fox aka Janelle Kao despite almost giving away the win at mid-game. The highlight clip can be watched HERE (not below) and you can check out more of Freya's twitch channel below. It's been so much fun with all the new faces that we've taken literally forever to get around to posting this.
On the front page, our regular followers will note that we also have added an events section with a follow up webinar on remote work with Kaam.Work from last week (whose clients are thriving on well paying, silicon valley level remote work currently) and the announcement of a "Pros vs Joes" event which may be ongoing where our paid members will have a chance (possibly of a life time) to play e-sports tournament finalists and professionals and see how they stack up to the pros. We're kicking this off with Gesports of course, our in-house fighting game esports team founded and managed by co-founder Godric Johnson (also known as G4m3-H0p) on Discord. Some additional details since we posted the news, we'll have a soft cap of 200 entrants to start with and we're looking at around 2 to 3 weeks of qualifying tournaments and brackets leading up to final bracket with the pros with his players and any possible prizes still TBD and the fighting games being both Tekken 7 and Street Fighter V. All events will be done in conjunction with the WHO (World Health Organization's) #PlayApartTogether campaign to keep folks home and safe during this time of Corona. We'll reannounce the events once we lock down
Outside of gaming, we have a LOT of exciting news. We've partnered with one of our future operators, Lazy Nerds Designs to offer gamer customized masks.. some samples you can see above using sample licensed IP. Cotton masks are available now but we also have *medical grade* and N95 certified masks coming including some very innovative designs and materials from SE Asia that make the standard 3M N95 masks seem very dull and old fashioned. These can be further customized by Lazy Nerds and we'll be working on some exclusively licensed products with our developer friends in the weeks to come. Cotton masks will be available shortly in the meantime. We also have the beginnings of our e-learning and e-books offerings in the works also in the coming weeks and hopefully some of these available community wide or as prizes in time for Pros vs Joes.
Lastly... pun fully intended that largely only Latino's would appreciate.. what happens to Balance in the time of Corona(virus)? :D * in reference to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's - Love in the time of Cholera
Contrary to a lot of new member belief, Balance wasn't founded as a response to Coronavirus or to take advantage of the quarantine period. We actually started off in October 2019 with a plan to largely bootstrap off of VR sales while we raised capital and built the gaming community over time. Coronavirus of course.. punched us all in the face but Skyworth especially since they were in the epiccenter in China and they are still not fully back up to speed yet. However the virus also pushes more deeply into the realm of remote-friendly, knowledge workers in terms of our demographic outreach which ignores those of you who can't transition to remote work as naturally. We will be gearing our membership site as well as offers and prizes more towards e-learning than before and hopefully with both enough gaming goodies and benefits that will support and encourage everyone to not just survive but thrive during this period. For us UBI (universal basic income) or at least #emergencyUBI is the only solution and the key to stability. We're encouraging everyone to still aim for a Balance, not game all day i.e. 14 hrs/day proclaiming your status as "quarantine" as some of our members do because this is a time we can also use to pursue other things or improve ourselves otherwise without having had the chance previously before. Gaming should be a social outlet going forwards even though most of us would prefer to be lazy and game all day. We're fully remote well before all this and we intend to keep things as a fully #remotework organization going forwards including anything we may be hiring for and regardless of Covid-19 or not we would like to see it
Also.. if any potential investors are reading this. Things are going slowly because we're still bootstrapping off of unscalable dev work in probably what should be a time of greatest opportunity for us especially if UBI can stabilize the world. We're talking to many of you already and we know it's also an extremely challenging time to raise new funds right now also. However if you are scouring for deals or at least lining them up for May onwards when it's apparent the "health curve" won't be turning any time soon, please get in touch via email or better yet... our discord and start doing some early diligence. We won't be going anywhere and we're in a position to scale quickly and thrive from all this and we believe others can as well.