So I Took a Sponsorship, DISCUSSION

Hello everyone,

As of two days ago I am officially a SELL OUT.

Though I have bravely resisted three offers from Shade: Ladow Regends, various other mobile garbage, and even Paradox themselves with HOI:4, I caved, and took their offer on the Crusader Kings III Ruler Design campaign.
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So for those who don't know, I recently worked with Paradox for TWO videos. One promoting the free update on my channel, and one to act as a Ruler Designer tutorial on theirs.

Honestly, I had planned on covering the Ruler Designer anyway, they just offered to pay me definitely do it, which I was going to, but they definitely wanted it to happen. So honestly why not - I even told them "I was planning on doing this as a video anyway" (this actually happened) but they just paid me regardless. 

The only thing I did want to do, if it is to be a sponsored video, was to make it mine. I didn't want a cookie cutter checklist of points I cover as meekly as possible just to get paid. I wanted it to have a place and tie in to what we were already doing, and the Battle of Crowns mod (stupid) tied perfectly into that. I was able to use it to tick all the boxes for Paradox and get you guys to provide some characters to me to add to the horrible mod, as a nice community thing we can work on together.

(As a quick note I added about 20 characters to Western Europe today, so we're really filling out the world, but my god they are seriously hideous)

Ultimately, Crusader Kings built this channel, and was the cornerstone content for the best part of a year and has only taken a backseat in the past week or so because I was working on my stupid mod, and didn't really have any series ideas.

From a moral standpoint, I wasn't even selling anything, and neither were Paradox. It was a free update and they just really wanted me to help encourage people to play the game, so I had no problems with that in the least. 

Now with the aforementioned Hearts of Iron campaign they offered me I ultimately decided against it, because that was me promoting a DLC for a game I hadn't played before and couldn't even begin to explain what it offered or changed, so I didn't feel right about that one.

Overall it was a video I was already going to do that they paid me to promote a free update that CK3 players got anyway, and the success of CK3 directly correlates to the success of the channel so it was win-win-win.
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Now the other video I did was actually pretty good for the channel. For those who don't know they asked me to script/voice/edit a video for their own channel, which had a pretty hefty time limit on it - as far as I understand the influencer manager I spoke to was given the request from the community team pretty last minute, so I was to believe I had around 16 hours to plan, script, record, get b-reel, edit, upload, have them review, makes changes, and then upload again.

This is madness, especially as that day I had Rimworld, Zomboid, and Oblivion on the second channel to record, edit, upload, but the opportunity was pretty good for me as a creator.

It was nice to get paid, especially this close to Christmas and tax season, but ultimately this was a way of me showing to Paradox, and other companies too, that I can actually be professional and hit a hell of deadline whilst also hitting all of my own deadlines too. It was a big opportunity to break out of the "that one guy that makes the funny meme" format and be Mr Games Journalist.

So I took it, even though for a few days it was hell on earth going to bed at 5am after recording my own stuff, only to then wake up at 7am just to make sure I didn't miss any communications with them, and to ensure the content I made got a thumbs-up.

The best part is now I have a video, on a corporate channel, to point to and say "see, I can refrain from war crimes for 30 seconds".

There was also a great delay in the making of that video where they asked me to edit out a part where I said cunt - to stress, I didn't say cunt, but I did say the word 'Akan'. I can only assume that somewhere during the line of an English guy saying a West African word for an American guy representing a Swedish studio it was a bit lost in translation.

That video is a great example of a sponsorship I'm more than happy to do in the future - it doesn't detract from my own channel by randomly slotting a sales pitch in between regular content, and it shows I'm capable of working to the standards of a fairly high tier games publisher!
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Now I wanted to talk about this stuff here to get your feedback - you are the ones who sponsor the channel on a day to day basis, and enable me to work on the ever changing and terrifying platform that is Youtube.

What did you think of the sponsored content? Are you strictly 100% against it? I just want to hear some general feedback for the future so I know, if another offer like this comes through, that I can accept it with conditions or ignore entirely.
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As a quick note, I'll be starting a Patreon poll again soon, with some more info on the channel schedule and why things are a bit different in a separate post so I don't make this too overburdened with junk.

Thank you for reading this 4am round-up. Apologies if it wasn't very coherent - Elise is writing an essay and I'm staying awake in solidarity because I am nice like that.

As always, thank you for the support, you guys keep the channel safely afloat in the face of Youtube's horrible policy and monetisation changes.

Tales of your misdeeds are told from Paradox's own Youtube channel to Hefty Shoveler,

Sam
Roll1D2Games
Mr Streamer