Channel Update: Patreon, The Alliance, and Feedback.

Howdy if you couldn't tell from the title, this is a sequel to the video I made back in December. I got a ton of feedback from that video, which is great and a lot has happened since then. I'm gonna start with the big news first, explain what's happening and why, and then move down from there.

If you're concerned about the next review video, don't worry - it'll be in a week or two. So let's get started. Alright I know some of you are really concerned by this so I'm gonna go through it in detail. Back in December I had a lot of reasons not to open up any kind of viewer funding thing.

My reasoning was the videos didn't cost a lot to make and I needed time more than anything. Well, I don't see it as often these days, I've seen people abuse viewer funding. Basically people who open the floodgates for money, but then they appear to work less and just don't update people.

I don't want to take money from people if I know I can't do the most with it. Additionaly I didn't know what extras I could offer people that wouldn't take a lot of time to do. Rewards like suggesting content or answering questions are stuff I've always done for free and I'm not gonna pay all that off.

I'd rather spend my time on stuff that everyone gets to see. Focusing on gold accounts' secret content would be stupid. People would get hurt. I needed a lot of time to think this over and I also needed to know that I would be able to have more time to actually follow through on what I had.

Ideally I would have waited another month or two, but I have to do it now. I'm going to be going through another move soon. While YouTube is fun to do, It's never been my main focus. I haven't had a dedicated office or workspace to do any of this in.

I've had some people be in shock when I tell them I do this with only one monitor. That's because I physically can't fit two monitors on my desk. The same problem arises for capture card setups of older console games. I just have a space problem. So now is the perfect time to finally get a home office setup.

Working more efficiently is my main focus after staying alive. Ideally, I could focus more on YouTube stuff while still doing some contract work on the side. We need to avoid a resume gap or a internet reviewer resume gap. So I'm opening up three sources for here.

Two have relations so I'll start with the easy one. The tip jar or people who don't want to bother with Patreon. I've had some people tell me to just open a Pay Pal so people can tip without having a deal with anything else. That's open now. It's the email I used to answer viewer mail.

I'm assuming it works, but I haven't tried it yet. It'll be fine. There was one guy who anonymously sent me a Cracker Barrel gift card. I do like Cracker Barrell, so that was thoughtful, but you don't have to do that. Still, thank you. I made the most of it.

Two, the Patreon. I've carefully crafted this after looking other at people's Patreon. A lot of them are a formula of "one dollar gets you a thank-you" and "five dollars gets you access to a patreon feed of updates and progress reports and all that good stuff".

I've invented a bold new technology I called "$2 gets you the stuff". There will be updates on what I'm working and the occasional poll. After all, if you're paying me then you should know what I'm doing. Sometimes I make videos I'll make a bit that goes on too long or something else that won't fit in the video.

Sometimes I put them on YouTube secretly. I've shown some on Twitter but stuff like this is a perfect fit for the Patreon feed. There also will be giveaways of any digital copy of the game I received for free or early. I'll explain why not in point three.

Five dollars means you get a golden discord role. It's just the role. There's no secret chat or anything. I never had a Something Awful account or any of those paid forums, so having one of my own would be kind of hypocritical. The big tier is the $9 tier.

This is all the stuff from before but now your name is in the credits of the game review videos. This is the highest because I don't expect that many people will give me nine dollars. So the credits might look less like a war memorial. If miracles happen and it does end up that way, I still think it's a win.

I'm willing to change the last minute or so of a video if it means I could get out more videos. It's a no-brainer. I plan on giving the top six to eleven donators a special producer credit. But it's symbolic. Giving me more money does not equal project influence.

Sorry. That's it. I don't have anything else to offer beyond that. I've started getting so much mail that I need to have special mail days just to go through them all. Managing prizes on top of that means less time working on videos. So that's the Patreon.

I have kept it simple. Finally, the Powerful Alliance. I've long recommended GOG over Steam for old games and it's getting worse. Some of the older games that Steam sells aren't properly patched or worse. Well, Shogo on GOG had problems, at least it was functional.

Remember when I said you could buy F.E.A.R.
1 and its expansions for 10 bucks on Steam? Not anymore. Now you have to buy the whole series for nearly 60 bucks. On the other side, They still have that deal, but there's more. Vangers, a nearly impenetrable game, doesn't have a manual on Steam.

GOG has a manual. Things like this are constants. Steam just seems indifferent to it all. So an alliance is being formed. GOG will be giving me an affiliate link for games or for their store. So if you were gonna get something anyways, it helps me out a little.

Plus, they don't have to inject into the middle of the videos like those awful, awful sponsorships. I never understood why large youtubers took those offers until I started getting the mails myself. This is just the last two weeks and they offer a lot of money.

But my integrity is no good if I start trying to sell people Skinner box mobile games, which brings me to my next point: I do buy new games from time to time, but it's a rarity. There's even a few this year I'm interested in doing videos on. Some developers and PR people have come to me, offering me free games or early access to games.

I get that it's an accepted thing, but for me, it's starting to move into dangerous ethics territory. So any game I get for free and/or early, I'm buying a full price copy and giving it to a backer on Patreon. I think it's too easy to ignore flaws in games if you didn't have to shell out money for it.

So I'm gonna prevent that entirely. As I said before this won't be often, but it's something to keep in mind. I'm doing my best to dodge lot of issues that come with funding like this. So the last big thing to address is how funding will affect the review videos.

I'd like to work on them more and not change them too dramatically. I'm not gonna start buying green screens or professional camera crews or anything like that. Being compelled to radically change your videos based on funding seems like a mistake to me.

I'm gonna experiment in other areas, but I know what you came for. I figured that if people want to actually pay me for this, they'll figure out how on their own, and I don't need to shove it all over the videos. Money can give me a better workspace and equipment, audio engineers, translators and caption authors.

Editors no, I'm staying as the editor forever If you saw the video title and felt dread, I hope I've eased your concerns a bit. Even if this crashes and burns spectacularly I still want to be making videos. My schedules gotten too hectic and my sleep cycles too awful.

Either my pace on video making had to slow way, way down or I had to do an alternative. That's where we are. So if you pay me to do this then thanks, I really appreciate it. if you don't want to or don't have money to spare, don't worry about it. Just keep enjoying the videos.

So now I need some unrelated feedback. When it comes to the list of games, I know there are some that will take a lot longer than the other ones Answer my mail so I know what people want to see. I realize that working on a longer video can leave a gap in uploads and people don't like that, especially if it's for a game that they don't like to look over, they don't find interesting.

I've had people suggest doing quickfire reviews of games that are smaller, but that'd be hard to measure out. I thought sunless sea and dark wood would be shorter games, But I was very wrong. Besides being bad at estimating project time, it'd would also mean I'd have to look at a game and say, okay.

Do I want to make a normal video or a bargain bin video? I'm kind of already the bargain bin. So I've thought of a compromise: Mod videos. I don't think I need to be as critical of mods, since they're mainly passion projects. It'd be less reviews and more like mod spotlights.

Especially when we're in the age of Steam Workshop where sometimes modders aren't acknowledged besides a comment saying "please update". I've gotten to talk to a few mod creators and it's kind of like meeting celebrities for me, so I can make videos talking about mods and how they change the base game without focusing too hard on the negatives.

I'd also like to interview mod creators and have some snippets put in the video. If the funding goes well, I could take the raw audio files and send them off to an audio engineer. They could then edit it down into a mod creator interview and I wouldn't have to spend any time on it.

I'd probably make a second channel purely for interviews, so I don't spam people with them. I'm still thinking of ways I could play around with this, so if you have any ideas, please let me know because this is experimenting for me. I've also not forgotten "how to make a youtube video" video.

It'll likely be late summer to early fall. You can comment on this video or email me but basically I want to know what you want to know. I've had great questions, but the larger the sample the more I could gauge what people are lacking in. I don't know if it's starting from scratch or editing tips or figuring out how YouTube itself works.

So let me know about that. So if you made it this far, thanks for watching. I know an update video isn't the most riveting thing to see but a better one will be coming soon. Keep an eye out for it because YouTube is once again changing how subscriptions work.