You may be wondering why the influx of affiliates, and what that is being used for. I’ll get to that, but first I’d like to back up and talk about how we got to where we are now.
Where it all began
LEOG all started with a few guys wanting to team up and play Destiny, and have a large enough group to raid. Destiny eventually wore off (for some of us), and we started playing other games, such as ARK: Survival Evolved, and a renaissance of Minecraft. We quickly figured out that both games were much better played on a hosted server, especially not the official servers for ARK. We could have pooled money and gone with a game service to host servers, but that requires a recurring payment, and we didn’t want to be tied to games just because we’re paying for hosting. We wanted to be free to jump in and out of games when we felt like it.
Enter CombFiltered (me). I already had a small server set up at home to tinker with (I’m a nerd like that). After wrapping my head around what this server hosting thing was all about, many far too late nights of messing with firewall and server settings, and tinkering with hardware, I was able to get a hosted server up for ARK on Xbox. This was shortly after ARK went Play Anywhere, so it was a Windows 10 virtual machine where I had to buy another copy of ARK, hand it way too much memory and hard drive space (16GB of RAM and 500GB of hard drive space!), and constantly deal with restarting the server when ARK would inexplicably crash. But it was so worth it, as a dedicated, private server was lightyears beyond the experience of an official server.
Then came Minecraft, The Forest, and a few others here and there. Some were easy peasy to set up (The Forest, albeit janky), others came with their own set of challenges (Minecraft and terrible server performance until I got stacks of add-ons and rebuilt everything). All of this takes a ton of time on my part and a steady stream of new hardware and upgrades for new and more game servers. Sure, I could shut servers down and start them up again as we jump in and out of games, but that creates even more work for me, and then gets more difficult as our group keeps growing. The desire is to keep servers up, keep hosting more as we play more games, and be able to support them without needing a recurring revenue, or asking for money from a subset of people every time we need to create a new game server.
Affiliation Bandwagon
The first affiliate was Brave, sometime in July 2019 I believe. A few of us got interested in cryptocurrencies, and I found out about Brave through this research. The Brave affiliate program provided a small stream of revenue to help with hardware to get us where we were now, mainly in adding more server memory (going from 48GB to 96GB) and storage (adding 2 1TB enterprise-grade SSDs, as my normal SSDs were choking on the virtual machine load). I spent hours upon hours scouring ebay for good enough deals that I could make it work, but the upgrades really helped.
Currently, I’ve reached the limits of my current server platform. That’s what really kicked all this into action. Instead of putting out an ask for some money (I hate doing that), I instead decided to get creative. Were we a big enough deal to score some affiliates? Could I reason with them that we as a group have enough of a base that we can send additional traffic and revenue their way, and enough so that they would be interested in partnering with LEOG? There was only one way to find out.
I started looking at places that I was already spending money. That led to Kinguin and quickly after CDKeys. After a few days of “I don’t think this is really going to provide enough to pay for a server,” I stumbled across the Amazon affiliate program. Signing up was much more involved, but we got approved nonetheless. I have one more in the works, but I’m always listening if anyone has ideas for places that fit our spending habits.
So, it has come to this
Instead of asking for your money, we’re just asking you to help us out by clicking through our links. Yes, affiliate means that we get a small percentage of your purchases as earnings. No, that doesn’t increase your price. No, I don’t know what you’re buying on Amazon though our links. It’s the way our affiliates pay us for sending traffic and sales their way instead of them spending more money on advertising and marketing. At times we’ll post deals that link through to our affiliates. If you’re making purchases otherwise, just visit our Affiliates page, click through, and make your purchases. We’ll be very grateful for the little amount you’re sending our way.