March - 5 Star Month

Welcome friends and Patrons to the massively late March roundup.

I normally have these out within the first week of the month, but this one is extremely late and I'm very sorry - you'll see why in a second! This has been a super high workload month, probably the most stressful, busy, and rewarding month the channel has ever had; it has definitely paid off.

March featured mostly the Karling HIP series, the Dwemer Contingency mod, and the end of the weakest Rimworld series, but the rise of the strongest.

I'll start things off as I normally do with some general stats and then talk about what went well, things I did differently, and changes!

For the month of March 2019:  

- 93 videos (33 more than last month!)

- Approximately 3,255 minutes watched, or 54 hours of content!

-  In March, my content was watched for a total of 10.13 million minutes, that's over double last month, and equals 19 years of mankind's time wasted!

- Revenue was better than ever (still less than a minimum wage job) but thanks to you guys I can afford to, the most important part is that it's growing!

- 5 sponsorships, including one company that offered to send me hardware to review! I did decline them all though on the grounds of them not making much sense with the regular content.

Overall, things have been hectic, insanely busy, and difficult to manage, but we made it through another month of content! I want to talk a lot about specific series, in particular, my predictions for April, and some afterthoughts on the changes to the channel I planned last month,

First things first, the Dwemer Contingency. A series almost a year in the making, having been announced a few months after the end of the first-ever series on the channel, was obviously very popular. For me, however, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a horrible experience. I love the Elder Scrolls, that should be obvious, and the Elder Kings mod kicked off the channel so will always have a special place there, but researching, modding quite extensive mechanics into the game, recording, editing, exporting, and uploading is horribly time-consuming. Some days I would have to work through the night and not sleep at all just to have the story content ready for the next day, and occasionally something would break mid-recording that didn't break during testing, or even worse was when paradox dropped the Wonder's Update and broke just about everything!

Personally, it really distanced me from the series, as I was constantly focused on the behind the scenes stuff. I was so wrapped up in the technical aspects that I think the natural gameplay and story progression suffered massively. This was no small mod like the El-Rang add-ons - we had full on societies, culture, religion, and two portrait changes! For my own benefit, and for the benefit of maintaining the surprise and suspense that is core to CK2, I definitely won't be doing a modding/let's play series like that again in the future. Don't worry though, I will still be working on mods like that in the background, but where the pressure is off and I can focus on making it as polished as possible. 

As for the HIP series (Series B), I still love the idea of a second series that is completely different from the first series. Many people mentioned that they weren't watching Series A, the Dwemer series, but really enjoyed series B, and for a long while Series B was actually far more viewed! This is definitely going to be a permanent feature for the time being, though after next month I may have an update regarding this!

The Star Wars Rimworld series was a massive disappointment. Rimworld has never done as well as CK2 on the channel, and how it performs is entirely down to the content and how it's executed. I assumed, wrongly, that a Star Wars Rimworld playthrough would be popular as the settings for both matched fairly well, and there were some popular mods. Unfortunately, it failed because of what I think were two primary reasons; firstly, the Star Wars mod wasn't particularly fleshed out beyond some weapons, armour, and force powers, and secondly there was a distinct lack of threat to the series, the mod was horribly unbalanced and there was no threat at all.

By the end of the series, I was definitely trying to find a logical way for it to end, and though I'd originally planned on destroying some of the other factions as part of the story, there was so little challenge that I just ended it prematurely. This series, coupled with the past few, is what drove me to create the current Rimworld series - Prepare to Die, and play a much more difficult, survival-based mod pack.

Whilst we're on the subject of the new Rimworld series, I have huge hopes for April. The new Rimworld series is quickly becoming one of the most viewed series on the channel with episode 1 having picked up tens of thousands of views in around a week. As an added bonus, the content is very easy for me to produce because of the nature of it. I can't reload, I can't reverse things, and every actions matter, so I've not been editing, it's just sit down, hit the record button, and pray that the content and the gameplay goes well. Fortunately, it seems to have. The analytics are insanely good, better than I would have ever imagined. And that brings me onto my final point.

Last months roundup, and across discord and youtube, I mentioned that I may be trialling a reduction of content, back down to two series daily rather than three. A combination of the Dwemer mod sucking up all of my personal and work time, and the Star Wars Rimworld series performing very poorly led me to be completely burnt out and left me feeling that the content was the lowest quality it had ever been. I was actually very close to cancelling Rimworld for a time being judged by the poor performance of the Star Wars series and my god am I glad I didn't. 

For now, the three series a day will continue. As I said before, I am no longer doing the modding/let's play hybrid series, as it's a horrible amount of work. That, coupled with the fact that Rimworld only takes around an hour and a half to have finished (taking into account recording, upload time, and video metadata editing) I think that it's possible to balance three series a day and having some free time outside of Youtube to detach and not completely burn myself out and ruin the content. 

Because I have a little extra time, I'm also bringing back streaming. We had a Jerry King stream not so long ago, and I intend on doing more difficult, dumb game ideas on Twitch seeing as that is apparently all the platform is good for.

I should also thank all of you for bearing with me the past few days as well. My parents came to visit from the other side of the country for longer than I was expecting or had prepared for, so the videos had to go unedited for a couple of days to ensure they would definitely be released on time. I don't think the content suffered too much but I feel guilty for not maintaining my quality standards.

Thank you for your continued faith and loyalty in the channel, you guys make all of this possible. As we all know, unfortunately, we now live in a time where Youtube don't give back to creators as much as they used to, and copyright is becoming more and more strict, but thanks to you all I don't have to worry about that and can put in these absurd hours and work I do.

And judging by the stats I have open on my other monitor, we are not slowing down yet. 2019 might just be the year of Roll1D2Games.

Tales of your misdeeds are told from King's Landing to Gotland,

Sam.