May Round Up

Welcome fellow boys/girls/others, delete as appropriate.

It's me again, though you've probably guessed that already given that I've done these for months now and despite my efforts to gain immortality or reincarnate as a newborn and live again, I still haven't - so it's still me, just to assuage any doubts.

May, also known as "Oh god he's still doing Game of Thrones?" month in which no one was surprised to learn I was once again doing more Game of Thrones. Alongside that, we saw the rise and fall of the great child of destiny Mountain Morbod, the end of the Steel Republic, and the long-overdue demise of Jilp (14, I think?). 

Oh, there was also that one-off video I did reviewing a game that I thought would be fun but ended up being ever so slightly less than not fun at all.

For the month of May 2019:

- 92 videos (1 up from April!)

- Approximately 3,700 minutes of video time uploaded! 

- In May, my content was watched for a total of 17.2 million minutes around the world, that means we've set two consecutive channel records in a row, beating last month by around 1 million minutes. That means a total of 32.8 years worth of my content was played around the world - this is the type of thing that keeps me up at night.

- Revenue spiked extremely high at the start of the Jilp series, but so did the views! Shame that it didn't have a super high retention rate - looking at the comments people wanted to see failure and frustration, and after the first semi-successful colony the numbers dropped off and never recovered (for once I'm punished for actually being semi-decent at games!)

- 5 sponsorships, all of which were declined, except for technically the video I did on Vambrace: Cold Soul, though I wasn't paid for this, they only provided the code.

The start of the month saw the fall of, statistically, the most popular series ever on the channel, and the rise of the second most popular series ever on the channel.

The former of course being Jilp Vondle. I spoke in last months round up about this series potentially being a flash in the pan, and though it wasn't exactly a flash, it certainly dropped off as expected. 

Episode 1 of Jilp's adventures currently sits at 90k views, not bad for a random series idea that I came up with initially to end Rimworld on and start a new series on the channel. By May 2nd, the series was pulling in the regular numbers, hovering at around 3600 views each. I very much expected this, but it was extremely interesting for me to learn quite how invested people were in the current story and wanted the campaign to thrive, yet simultaneously wanted there to be a constant threat of losing, without it actually happening. 

I already learnt from CK2 that no matter what happens I can't please everyone. Either I become immortal and irritate half the viewers who don't want to see the game be too easy, or I ignore it and everyone who wanted to see an overpowered character dominate stops watching and complains - just look at the Topbog series!

Basing an entire series on this core principle, in hindsight, was a horrible idea. We had the threat, and the stress, but this became fairly banal within a few episodes. At that stage, however, we had a flourishing colony that withstood against all odds, but of course, before long this got dull, and people wanted more of a challenge. Then the challenge arrived, and we lost. That's when everyone basically gave up on the series. 

The CK2 problem personified and condensed in a single Jilpy man.

And that's how my most popular series so far died out. Not with a big epic bang and everyone applauding for the adventure that got us there, but with it slowly fading away until we couldn't reach a compromise anymore.

As I alluded to earlier, that was quickly followed by the most popular series yet. After the failed "Winter's Wrath" series, I wanted to go back to Game of Thrones, not particularly to 'cash-in' on the hype and talk around the TV show, but because I felt those who were invested in the first series would be let down.

I went back to the drawing board and drew some extremely common and simple parallels between the most popular of my CK2 series; gods, ascension, and restorations. And in no time at all Storm King Borys Durrandon was born. 

This series, unlike Jilp, not only started popularly but actually grew in popularity and held. I was hugely surprised to see such massive numbers three weeks into the series, and it alone contributed to the channel jumping from 20k subs to 23k in such a short period of time. Having learnt my lesson from the Jilp series, I tried to speed up the ending of that series, knowing full well that whilst Game of Thrones is holding as strong at it is, it wouldn't be going anywhere.

Then, of course, I made the mistake of doing something brave and foolish in the form of Vambrace: Cold Soul. From the press release, the developer sent out, Vambrace: Cold Soul was touted as the spiritual successor to Darkest Dungeon, but improved with a cohesive story and captivating set of characters. What I didn't expect was babies first Darkest Dungeon hastily wrapped in an anime covering with about as much care and skill as me hastily wrapping my mum's otherwise forgotten birthday present. 

The gameplay was simple and uncompelling as if the developer had been asked to remake Darkest Dungeon from memory having played it once, drunk, two years ago. The story was the main, and unfortunately, the strongest part of the game, which did not all interest me, not just as a player, but as a content maker. 

I didn't say this in the video, I was willing to give the game a generous chance seeing as we had less than half an hour of "gameplay" under our belt, but had I recorded a second episode, I certainly wouldn't have been kind. I think the most damning part of it was no second episode at all (and of course me going back and removing #1 from the first episode!)

Should I have done my research better? Yes. Was I the only one to go into the game expecting far more than what I got? With, currently, a 57% rating on Steam, definitely not. 

The main issue for me was this is one of the few attempts at me going off of the beaten path and trying to diversify somewhat. For a content creator that is solely known, for one thing, that can be a very dangerous thing to do (does anyone remember Tobuscus?) and I needed to come out swinging. Unfortunately, this time around, the only thing swinging was the metaphorical Sword of Damocles over my very metaphorical channel success.

Overall though, genuinely not that much of a big deal. A swing and a miss. Plus I had some fun ripping on the game, and will definitely be trying that again in the future, just waiting for the right opportunity to present itself.

On the topic of diversification - channel changes. So starting this month, I'm cutting down to two series a day, and with the benefit of hindsight on my side, for an extremely good reason. 

Those of you who have been following the channel for long enough know about my dilemma - I need to put out three videos daily, normally, to be able to grow the channel and make any sort of measurable revenue from Youtube. The downside, of course, is that if my interest in the series starts to wane, it comes across in the videos as at that point they're very cut and dry; efficient and quick. I barely have time to think, let alone mod, or stream, or do any sort of decent channel management, I have to be extremely careful with my time.  

Secondly is the diminishing returns. If you upload more than three videos within a 24 hour period, Youtube won't promote one of those three videos. I was essentially rolling the dice every day on which upload people would see and be notified about, and it doesn't take a statistician to realise that if you have a series averaging 10k views an episode, a series averaging 6k views an episode, and a series averaging 3k views an episode, you cut the series with the lowest views and guarantee the continued success of the others. 

Luckily, thanks to the popularity of current series and the growth of the channel I talked about before, I felt I could take a risk and move series B, whether that be CK2/or another series voted on by you, the patrons, to the second channel. So I decided to put the Sload series on break, coinciding with my time away, and bring it back on the second channel (it's actually broken right now because of some mods updating to the current version of CK2, it will be back sometime!)

This was an experiment that was kind of like pulling off a plaster (band-aid for you freedom-speakers). Going in, I sort of knew what the result would be, but I really didn't want to see the answer. Now, having stopped the Sload series, the channel is actually performing better than before. Maybe it's a coincidence, maybe my theory about focusing the success only on two series held up, or maybe people are more willing to subscribe when they're not bombarded with so much content. Either way, it's great knowledge to be armed with, but really, really sucks that I worked myself so thin for what was essentially no bonus whatsoever. 

With that being said, I have high hopes for June, Game of Thrones is still holding strong, the new Rimworld series is going back to the old style and seems fairly popular, and more importantly, I'm only working on two series a day, so I restart work on related channel projects!

I've also started to get a team together for the Madworld mod - more news on that hopefully next round-up!

As always, thank you for your support. Because of you guys, I can take these risks, and actually afford to live while doing this strange, turbulent, and horribly uncertain job.

Maybe next time we check in, it might be at 25k subs - my first major milestone.

Your misdeeds are told from Jilp to Valyria,

Sam

Roll1D2Games