EDIT: Apologies about this one going late! I've been working on some other stuff for the channel, most likely going live in around 30 minutes from this post going live and completely missed the first scheduling on this post! Thanks to the patrons that let me know!
All of it is now left in - the tentacles, the body swapping, the horror of the depths of the imagination of the creator of the Dark World Video. Best of luck, because this time you'll need it.
Seriously 18+ this time.
Pleasenote: For real, this one is 18+, it contains incrediblyexplicit images that have been stolen from various internet websites by the developers of this mod. By popular request, I'm going to upload an uncensored version of the Dark World series here. They will premiere the same time as the Youtube release, so it's not so much of an early access thing, more of a patreon bonus.
All of it is now left in - the tentacles, the body swapping, the horror of the depths of the imagination of the creator of the Dark World Video. Best of luck, because this time you'll need it.
Seriously 18+ this time.
Pleasenote: For real, this one is 18+, it contains incrediblyexplicit images that have been stolen from various internet websites by the developers of this mod. By popular request, I'm going to upload an uncensored version of the Dark World series here. They will premiere the same time as the Youtube release, so it's not so much of an early access thing, more of a patreon bonus.
Starting tomorrow, we're ramping it up to 11, and going to make your Patreon bucks extremely well spent, mainly because I probably wont have a channel left by the end of it.
Also Patreon, can we have a chat about the scheduling button. Why the fuck is it a submenu of the publish button, can you see why that might be a pain in the arse if you click it and accidentally put a post for a video that isn't even live yet? Do you see patreon?
DO YOU SEE.
Pleasenote: For real, this one is 18+, it contains incrediblyexplicit images that have been stolen from various internet websites by the developers of this mod. By popular request, I'm going to upload an uncensored version of the Dark World series here. They will premiere the same time as the Youtube release, so it's not so much of an early access thing, more of a patreon bonus.
I accidentally set this live early because I'm a MORON. The video was still scheduled so it was just this lovely paragraph that you could have read, my bad.
Pleasenote: For real, this one is 18+, it contains incrediblyexplicit images that have been stolen from various internet websites by the developers of this mod. By popular request, I'm going to upload an uncensored version of the Dark World series here. They will premiere the same time as the Youtube release, so it's not so much of an early access thing, more of a patreon bonus.
EDIT: Sorry about the delay on this one, I had to render this video out five times before Youtube finally accepted it. The extra almost-two-hours meant I wanted to prioritise Rimworld first to avoid two series being delayed. Finally, it's not getting insta-clapped. For the future, I'll be looking for other platforms to host the uncensored version on.
Pleasenote: For real, this one is 18+, it contains incrediblyexplicit images that have been stolen from various internet websites by the developers of this mod. By popular request, I'm going to upload an uncensored version of the Dark World series here. They will premiere the same time as the Youtube release, so it's not so much of an early access thing, more of a patreon bonus.
Please note: For real, this one is 18+, it contains incredibly explicit images that have been stolen from various internet websites by the developers of this mod.
By popular request, I'm going to upload an uncensored version of the Dark World series here. They will premiere the same time as the Youtube release, so it's not so much of an early access thing, more of a patreon bonus.
Please note: For real, this one is 18+, it contains incredibly explicit images that have been stolen from various internet websites by the developers of this mod.
By popular request, I'm going to upload an uncensored version of the Dark World series here. They will premiere the same time as the Youtube release, so it's not so much of an early access thing, more of a patreon bonus.
After a gripping tale, and an even more gripping end, the battle Grandma series has come to an end having taken the title as the most successful series on the channel to date.
Firstly, a thank you goes out to all of the new Patrons who have backed since the Battle Grandma series - the support on it has been incredible to the extent that I'm having to look at redoing some of the Patreon systems to give more immediate communication and feedback. And of course a thank you has to go to the rest of the Patrons without which I'd have either closed the channel down, or we'd get videos once a week instead of many daily.
I posted last week about potentially changing the way end of episode shout-outs work. This was basically driven by the Youtube analytics showing a complete drop off towards the end of the episode, every episode, which apparently isn't a good look for the channel statistics. After hearing from a lot of you about how to go ahead with it, I feel a bit more comfortable changing the end card to hopefully be a bit quicker (especially for those watching playlists), but to also give a little extra to those who liked the end of video shout-outs.
One of the other big reasons for doing this is something that has bugged me for a while and that is accidentally shouting out someone who doesn't want it, or shouting out name someone that would prefer a different name/username used. I did drop last names from Patron shout-outs for new members, opting just to use a last initial instead, but there are those of you who don't want any at all, and me updating lists and shouting out the whole thing daily potentially means multiple shout-outs, before you can message me, when you didn't want any at all.
I am also planning on updating the tier lists with very large bold letters saying something along the lines of: I will use your first name on Patreon for shoutouts, please use a username/alias during sign up/on your profile if you would prefer that instead!
Changes going forward for the month of February:
- Top-tier shout-outs still on screen, but I'll shout out a random list of 5 generated people daily, I'll try and get every individual name shouted at least two - three times every four days (the maths really depends on the size of the list at the time).
- Regular shout-outs will go to fifteen a day, which I have been testing at the end of videos, aiming to have every individual shouted out at least twice - three times a week.
- Potentially also scrolling through ALL patron names in the credits. Downside to this is what I've talked about above, so this is still just a potential thing!
- 'Rimworld Name in Game' for $3 and up tiers so you can turn up as a raider and give me high-blood pressure
- 'Rimworld Colonist Name' for a tier I haven't decided on yet, generally we don't get too many colonists in series so I might have to be selective with this.
- CK2 House will become CK2 patriarch/matriarch, so a fully fleshed out character with backstory and traits (to some extent (I don't want to unbalance things!)) If you want to add this, so you're a bit more attached to a character in a series, if not, just a house name is still absolutely fine!
And some other planned things that I don't want to talk about yet because they moderators on Discord might kill me if I reveal it before we have a plan in place. But it's definitely potentially not Multiplayer mass sessions of CK2 (or other games) with Patron only/Patron early access to lobbies. Definitely not.
Finally an apology for those of you I am slow to reply to! I don't know if after you reach a certain tier on Patron, or have a certain amount of backers, that you stop being emailed for notifications and messages, but I have to manually check this page daily to find messages, notifications. I replied to everything last night only to find another 11 notifications when I woke up so it's busy on here - but don't get me wrong, that's only a good thing!
Overall, thank you. I have some strange plans coming up for CK2 series based on one of our other previous posts, so keep your eyes peeled.
Tales of your misdeeds are told from Shittle to Battle Grandma,
Recently I spoke with an ex-youtube channel manager who used to work with a large MCN, and I showed them my video retention rates. Overall things looked pretty good, until they pointed out a massive drop off consistently at the end of every single video to which they said: (direct quote) "That's not normal, that's gotta be a glitch or something".
Turns out the Patreon shoutouts at the end of every video have done me a significant damage which I hadn't ever considered before - almost everyone turns off in the last few minutes of a video. If I upload a 30 minute video, and the end 3 minutes is me doing patreon shoutouts and rambling on, that's a pretty sizable drop off rate which is (apparently) going to impact my video statistics pretty massively. As far as Youtube are concerned, 10% of the duration of all of my videos go unwatched, and that's applies only to viewers that watch all the way through normally anyway, rather than just randomers who stumbled across the channel.
Now I'll be the first to admit, I have seriously no clue when it comes to retention rates, click through, and other buzz words Youtube Studio likes to throw around to make us feel like we have any semblance of control over our channels. And though I don't really care how aggressively promoted the channel is, I want to try and find a way to acknowledge the patrons more actively but maybe without a gigantic list of poor pronounced names.
Now I should point out up front, this is not me saying "I'M NEVER DOING SHOUT OUTS AGAIN." because that's absolutely not true. I just wanted to get feedback and suggestions from you guys, and maybe try a few different things to see how we can do things. I also wont be making any changes until the start of next month, so if the shout out is all you're here for then you can cancel as appropriate - I don't want people feeling like they're missing out!
So here's a bunch of ideas I would be up for testing - maybe one of these, or maybe all of them at once:
A) Randomise the Patreon list and read off a selection of names every day, aiming to read off the entire list once per week! B) Change the minimum shoutout tier, but add some extra rewards to the tier to make up for it (names added to Rimworld character pools, or CK2 cultures, before series start, so characters will naturally appear in game rather than me renaming) C) Credit scroll of the patrons every episode but only read a few names (in addition to option A)
More importantly, I want to know what you all think seeing as you guys are the ones most invested in the changes! Feel free to leave a comment here, or message me privately here or on discord if you fancy a one on one chat.
Hello Patrons new and old, and welcome to the year of 2020!
I asked a few days ago in the Patreon discord channel what sort of data and analytics from the channel people would be interested in seeing, and I thought I'd kick off this year with a big old information list so we have something to compare it to at the end of the year.
Luckily I still have the figures from exactly this time last year, so we can make some predictions as well based on the growth over 2019 -
Subscribers:
January 4th 2019 - 9,792 January 4th 2020 - 41,400 (approx.)
Total Views:
January 4th 2019 - 2,087,607 January 4th 2020 - 13,583,748
Top 5 videos:
1. Rimworld: Prepare to Die #1 (4th April 2019) - 129k views 2. CK2: Wanderer #1 (29th December 2019*) - 100.5k views 3. CK2 Game of Thrones: Last Storm King #1 (25th April 2019) - 80k views 4. Rimworld: Star Wars Syndicate #1 (28th February 2019) - 74.5k 5. Rimworld: Assimilation #1 (6th November 2019) - 72.8k
*I mean, it still counts, but holy shit.
Obviously the two big breakout surprise series there are CK2: Wanderer, and Rimworld: Assimilation. Neither of these series did I expect to blow up quite like they did.
Jilp, to some extent, I expected, given that I put the extra effort into the concept, the intro, and the modpack. However, with Assimilation, it was really only a test of certain mods that had flown under the radar, like the wave based survival or the end game of RimAtomics.
CK2 Wanderer I knew was a good idea, especially given that I rebooted the series before it had even began to play it. I've even had other big Youtubers reach out and tell me they're enjoying the series, which is always nice. I genuinely didn't believe that in 2020 any CK2 series other than the 'distorted face in the thumbnail memefest' style of content would ever pull in the amount of views the Wanderer series is, and now I find myself genuinely taking a step back and thinking of other similar scope concepts that I could apply.
_______________________
Now, I know I say "Without (the patrons) the channel wouldn't be possible in the first place" at the end of every episode, but even with the crazy end of year success, it still remains the absolute truth:
The image attached is taken only 20 minutes ago from the current channel analytics page. Despite the absolutely nuts success of the Wanderer series, and the other end of year success stories like Assimilation, because I took a small Christmas break, and because I was ill so missed one scheduled video, the Revenue is down by 22%.
I couldn't imagine, and feel extremely sorry for, any upcoming or small Youtuber who doesn't/cannot operate alternate funding like Patreon. We've had two of our top five most successful series of all time, yet still the revenue is down because I took a weak-long break.
I don't think it's even a case of "I couldn't do this without Patreon" anymore, it's a case of "I wouldn't do this without Patreon."
Okay, fine I still would do it, but I fully recognise how fortunate I am that I have such a supportive community. I don't have to worry about the monumental stress that would come with being forced to take a few days off, and not being able to pay rent suddenly, like certain Youtubers have to consider. It's only possible because of everyone here, and for that I am eternally grateful.
I still stand by what I said that one day I would love to be able to run the channel without Patreon, but with Youtube being the way it is... I guess we'll wait and see?
Anyway, thank you everyone for your continued support. A huge amount has been achieved this year as I hope I have proved, and I hope I continue to be worthy of your continued support going forward into 2020!
Tales of your misdeeds are told from Jilp to Extremely Deus Vult,
A little update post about what is going to be changing with Patreon rewards, behind the scenes stuff, and content changes!
Patreon Changes Happening Right NOW
Real names/Last names:
I know a lot of people have signed up for Patreon using their real names/last names, but a few people have asked me to adjust or change their name being shouted out for various reasons, but mainly because they don't want their full identity in every video, and that's absolutely acceptable, I would do the same thing.
Going forward, to help protect peoples identities, and give a little bit of extra privacy, if people have/do sign up using their full human name, I'll read out your first name followed by a letter for distinction, just in case a couple of people with the same name sign up. For example, if you signed up as John Snowy I'd shout you out as John S. That way if you suddenly realise "Oops, I didn't think it would be my actual name!" there's no real privacy concerns or other problems there.
If there are two people with the same first name and last initial, then everything is ruined and you should be ashamed. Genuinely though, I'll message whoever signs up last and ask them if there's a name they'd prefer me shout out, an alias/nickname/display name etc, or if they're fine going with their full name.
Hopefully this way everyone is happy, safe, and more importantly, anonymous.
How Things Are Now
Firstly, I want the Patreon rewards to be more consistent across the board, both with CK2 and Rimworld. Right now, I'm basing what I do on feedback that I've gotten before, changes I've tried to actively implement are as follows:
- Non-patrons felt alienated by the focus on Patreon houses in CK2 content, so I moved them over to the second channel and dedicated additional videos to doing Patron house overview.
- Patron houses/characters ruined the theme, or were immersion-breaking, in series that were a bit more historically focused (India, Julius Nepos Rome, Celtic etc), so I started asking for more themed names, though I'll admit I'm still very flexible on this one, especially in the fantasy series.
- Rimworld characters were pretty uneventful, generally, we were just sticking a name on a character we had already, and that was that. Whether they lived, died, or did anything special was more down to coincidence.
I don't want there to be a big divide between the regular viewer and Patron - I don't want it to feel like an exclusive club, however, I do feel like even the small rewards I offer are the least I can do for people supporting the channel.
How Things Will Be Going Forward
I'm planning on some additional little rewards for both CK2 and Rimworld, and I'll work with you all here, or over discord, if we do finally find a good third game to throw into the mix.
CK2 Changes:
- Access to CK2 mods I create ahead of the series release - consider this a beta-tester role, and I'll set this up as a separate channel on Discord for those of you who don't mind/don't want to be spoiled. I will emphasise this is not paying for mods, or access to, or customised mods. I imagine offering any sort of paid, exclusive mod for CK2 is against Paradox's policy, and if it's not then it absolutely should be.
My reasoning is that I trust the patron's feedback and opinions on the content ahead of time, before its general public release, because you are supporters of the channel and want it to be the best it can be. Giving everyone beta access is effectively the same as a full release, and giving it to a cherry-picked handful might have a lot of confirmation bias.
In the past viewers have had some incredible ideas I haven't thought about, or suggested some extremely good changes to previous mods. Hopefully, it'll step things up to new heights to have another set of eyes looking over these things!
To coincide with the fairness and non-exclusivity I talked about earlier, this will be available to every tier on Patreon. I'll use Discord for managing links and I'll also post links here as well for those of not in the chat room.
Rimworld Changes:
- Rimworld rewards have always been difficult, especially given we have the theming issue of CK2 but ramped up to eleven Rimworld - with the Robot series it's difficult to put any names in at all because of exactly this. We're a hive of Assimilators; seems a bit dissonant to have one called Bert, or xXitachi69Xx. My plan for Rimworld going forward is to ask Patrons what characters they want in the game, but not just in name.
I want full-on backstories, traits, stats etc (not too overpowered please!) and have the patrons show up in the game naturally, whether in trade caravans or as a fine human-leather hat. We might see you chased to the colony in an event, or in a crashed drop-pod. Either way, it should be a lot more impactful to have recurring characters, rather than just slapping a name on someone else.
This is achievable with some fancy mods that have sort-of recently hit the workshop, and I think overall its a much nicer, and more impactful reward, for those of you Patronising who don't watch CK2.
All of the changes mentioned above will be put into place starting January 1st!
Overall Changes:
- I'd love to go back to the monthly round-ups again on Patron. They've been put on hold as of late because of the massive amount of work three videos a day takes. During the month or so where I went back to two videos, it was pretty fun to explore other avenues like streaming, round up posts, mods like the Education/Focus/Traits mods, however when it comes to three videos a day, I have to spend all of my work time on just YouTube.
If I can find the time for these they will return, if not for the few of you interested, but for my own benefit. It was pretty nice comparing each month and seeing where things went wrong, or where they improved.
- More live-streams: I know I say this all the time, but it's so difficult to get time for these at all. Right now, we have a single office/computer room in our house, and in a short while my girlfriend will be writing her dissertation for university, so having me less than two foot away screaming about Mechanoids or Vikings is not very conducive to a good learning environment.
Next year though we're looking at moving out of the city centre to a cheaper area in exchange for an extra room, even if it's only small, for live-streaming/recording purposes. I don't discuss it very often, but the room I record in is the same room I spend most of my free time in, whether that's playing games, playing instruments, talking to friends over discord.
It can be pretty stifling to sit in the same room for upwards of 12 hours a day, which is something I'd have happily have done when I was 16, playing Oblivion for hours on end. But when its the same room I work in, and do my accounting in, at the same PC getting notifications about YouTube and the R1D2 discord on, there's no work-life balance, so an extra room would be pretty damn nice to have a dedicated work-room.
Anyway, after much rambling, I'll leave this one here for today. Thank you to everyone for your continued support of the channel, the next round of VIPs will be dished out soon - I'm gonna aim to do these every couple of months!
Have a happy Christmas/holidays, but if you're like me and don't give a shit about Christmas, wrap up warm and avoid getting frostbite, don't leave the house after 10pm and, please, please, don't answer the door when she knocks. Do not let her in.
Tales of your ho ho hos are told from Ireland to Cathay,
I haven't done one of these in a long, long, time. For that I can only apologise, I did want these to be a monthly thing but I've been a little distracted with a couple of things I'll discuss later below. I'm gonna try and keep this one short and sweet compared to my usual novel of text I do for these things, but I'll release a full channel stats update in a couple of days when I have some better numbers.
Today's content will be easily digestible in book form with a contents menu and various chapters for you to jump over to. That way if you're interested in a particular subject but none of the other garbage leading up to it, you can skip right over.
Chapter 1 - Health Related Issues
Chapter 2 - Discord Civil War
Chapter 3 - Upcoming Series Plans
Chapter 1:
Firstly, I'm actually ill. Not just coughing or common cold type ill, but I've been on medication for the past month now. I have another appointment in early September to see if I've improved at all, and I was planning on waiting until then for a more clear update for you guys, but they're having trouble fitting me in around all of the new patients moving to town (university starts soon).
To put it basically, my breathing is fucked. I'm on two different types of steroids just to be able to breathe half-decently on a day to day basis. Some people even noticed that I was a bit short of breath around the end of July in a lot of videos, which is what prompted me to get it looked at because I don't want it impacting the content at all.
The doctors couldn't actually narrow down what was wrong, they did the usual stethoscope/scan/breathing tube combo but found nothing significant besides my original suspicions of "my breathing is fucked". Suffice to say, videos are a little more strained as a result. I did try and reintroduce the third series again after I started on the medication (Star Wars Mount and Blade) but it did beat me around a fair amount.
Unfortunately, the revenue and the channel growth have dropped through the floor because I'm not sticking to my expected schedule of 3 videos daily, so youtube have dropped my rankings to compensate for it. It's not going to be long before I'm essentially forced to go back to the three daily videos before it has a significant impact on the channel.
Chapter 2:
Secondly, and I'm sure the majority of you have noticed, there have been one or two distractions on the Discord front that have proven to be a massive pain in the arse. The sensible ones of you who kept out of the Discord (but don't forget there are patron-only rooms!) won't know, but essentially over the past few weeks we've had incidents with a reoccurring group of people who have been incredibly persistent about avoiding bans to the extent that Discord themselves have stepped in now.
These guys aren't huge xenophobes or anything like that, they're not outright causing massive problems, but they do like toeing the line about what is and isn't acceptable in the server. It was a problem, but it was a manageable problem. They're a group of people who like to meme hard and challenge authority, but when it is an official Discord server linked directly to here, Twitch, and Youtube, I have to be very wary about what is and isn't permitted, because everything I allow to happen in that Discord reflects me.
There is another thing, to do with the problems in Discord, that I'm not technically supposed to discuss because of an embargo, but as this is a very gated community it shouldn't be a problem. I was contacted earlier in the month by a pretty big game developer, let's refer to them as PHQ Icelandic. I had a little back and forth with a dev there, but it was quickly stopped because of reasons I can't discuss but will paraphrase as 'community concerns'.
Now, this could mean the Youtube comments section, but I'm doubtful given that no Youtuber has control over the comments section short of handpicking each and every comment. I'm almost certain from the implications that they were referring to the previous-public all-access Discord room I have linked in every single video. A fair assumption.
Ergo, I go on a banning spree with all associated troublemaker accounts, they don't like it, and create alt accounts and can bypass every single method of stopping them (phone verification, IP banning, ranked chat rooms) causing a massive headache. The most logical thing I could do, in my eyes, was to unban their original accounts, accounts we recognise and know, rather than scrutinising every account that joined the server. Restrict what they could access, and just not discuss it.
There is no war in Ba Sing Se.
Regulars in the server, and moderators, definitely disagreed with this plan, but it did work. The alts stopped, the bans stopped, the trouble wasn't nearly as bad as before (most likely because it was as much hassle for them as it was for us) and they still get a tiny shrivelled slice of the pie.
My take on it was that imagine if you were relatively new to the channel, relatively new to the content, and you see a public Discord with Mr Streamer himself. You join the server. Which is better - banning, mutes, warns, alt accounts popping up OR the occasional off-colour comment by someone who is told to stop? I think I know which community looks more appealing to me.
Now as of this week, Discord themselves have stepped in and have seriously cracked down on the people behind the accounts. I have no idea why Discord stepped in, I'm operating under the assumption that it was too many reports against their IPs, or they've been causing problems on another server. Whatever it is, their alts are seemingly banned within no time at all and for once its nothing to do with us.
Chapter 3:
The past few months have been a pretty prosperous time for the CK2 modding scene. Not only have the Paradox updates slowed down (thank god!) but a lot of major overhaul mods are finally catching up to the current version of the game. I've got some plans for a new series that I thought I would float out and see what sort of interest each one gathered. Drop me a message on Discord, or here but it is a lot slower for me to get if you have any good plans or ideas for CK2 especially.
Here are some ideas in order of how likely they are to appear, I'll elaborate on more details below -
- Peaceful Lord of Tibet - Satanic Cannibal Kings - Madworld III - Game of Thrones: Ifequevron - Papal Conspiracy Names pending by the way.
Peaceful Lord of Tibet is intended to be a pretty big spin on the CK2 system. Ideally, we'll play as the lord of Tibet, or a lord in Tibet, or a lord somewhere in northern India, flip through the various Dharmic religions, something we've never done before, and never push a claim or go to war to benefit the current ruler. This means we're limited to familial claims, marriage claims, realm shattering intrigue, maybe even China (legitimately this time!), with the ultimate goal being become the Samrat Chakravartin. I've already got the achievement for doing it, so we'll be playing with mods, most likely CK2+ and a bunch of other little additions.
Satanic Cannibal Kings sort of came about when I realised 'Hang on a minute, this is the second very holy and very just playthrough we're doing" during the Gods on Earth series. Between that and the Last Karling, we've explored a huge amount of Christianity, but never the opposite. I want to work on a modpack, and my own personal mod, that makes playing an evil character a lot more interesting - right now I'm thinking of adding a dedicated 'Satanic' religion, given that the closest thing is the Messalian heresy, which barely counts. Then adding some of the more morally questionable mods, like Cannibal Kings, to give a bit more flavour. Should be high risk, high reward, with a lot more intrigue than the usual playthrough.
Madworld III is highly confidential.
Game of Thrones Ifequevron is going to be another mod of my own brewing based on some very loose lore from the Game of Thrones Worldbook. The Infequevron are a lost fantasy race of forest walkers, kin to the children of the forest, who carved trees, dug tunnels and were made extinct following a war with Ibben. And that is genuinely all we know about them. Now there are other bits of lore, the whole thing is very spotty, but one that interested me was that Leaf, the last surviving child of the Forest, said that all the other children fled "into the earth". My current idea based on this single line of dialogue is to introduce a Tolkienian Dwarf-life race as the Ifequevron, who are extremely vengeful, I guess somewhat akin to the Children of the Forest depicted in the show, with the White Walkers being their invention.
Papal Conspiracy needs a lot more time in the oven, but there is a very good mod called Papal... something...? (I've actually completely forgotten, and can't find it, chances are its massively out of date) but it essentially allows you to play as the Pope, but unlike in Gods on Earth, the systems worth and are intended for the player to have control over. Things like demands from Coronated Kings, Canonisation and Beatification, and the College of Cardinals. I have no clue what the Endgame for that would be, maybe have a line of Popes all from the same dynasty and focus all the gameplay on bastards getting elected into the college of cardinals whilst simultaneously getting them land in Holy Wars from tactical excommunications?
Rimworld I have some other stuff in the works, but nothing major right now. The Tiberium mod is close to reaching a playable state, which will offer another unique challenge scenario but this time with some benefits if played correctly, unlike the Zombieland mod which is just always horrible zombies trying to eat us. I'd love to be able to build a Rimworld zoo also, that would be very cool.
And I think that just about covers it! I know I said I wasn't going to write too much but I figured here would be the best place to discuss the upcoming series ideas seeing as you guys make it possible in the first place. Big thanks to everyone who has supported me and the channel. I actually get offers for sponsorship (and even MCNs which is a massive no-no) on a very frequent basis, and luckily I don't have to even think about it at this point.
I apologise again for the slightly reduced content load and fully understand if you want to adjust your pledge to reflect that. Hopefully, I should have some health improvements soon!
Tales of your misdeeds are known from Portland to Mallorca,
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.
Hello friends, welcome to the roundup of the month of April.
Last month I called March a "5 Star Month" - if that's true then April, by comparison, would be a 7-8 star month. I've really tried increasing the production quality this time around, and I think it's paid off pretty significantly. Rimworld blew up, CK2 Game of Thrones continues blowing up, and the new CK2 series seems like it's doing well also!
For the month of April 2019:
- 91 videos (2 less than last month (Blame Imperator Rome))
- Approximately 3,640 minutes of video time uploaded! (We had some slightly longer running videos)
- In April, my content was watched for a total of 16.3 million minutes around the world - by far the highest it's ever been (10 million last month). To put that into perspective, the channel wasted 30 years of mankind's time.
- Revenue was... well I honestly don't know because Youtube lost all the data! This wasn't just me, luckily, but a lot of creators have reported their earnings just disappearing. Suffice to say, without Patreon, I'd be probably looking for a new job about now.
- 3 sponsorships, all of which I once again declined due to the nature of them - One, in particular, was very noteworthy, I'll be talking about that in detail later!
This month has been, without a shadow of a doubt, the best month the channel has ever had on Youtube. Now I know I say that every single month, but in retrospect, that's exactly what I want to be saying every month. Not out of braggadociousness or Logan Paul-esc ambition, but because if the channel isn't constantly outperforming last month then that's a clear sign the content needs to change. But, luckily, things are still on the up and up, so that indicates to me that I'm doing something right!
Series A had a rocky start this month. We began with the Game of Thrones White Walker campaign, which I thought would be perfect - a unique, never before seen, start with a recognisable cast and crew that ties nicely into the release of Game of Thrones Season 8. Unfortunately, it was a little too ambitious and I expected a little too much of the game. The White Walkers did nothing, posed no threat, and then the AI managed to mop them up before we'd even so much as managed to get off of Essos. At that stage, when it was simply us VS Aztecs for the dozenth time, I thought that was a good place to head back to the drawing board and try again.
I thought back on what had been successful in the past. I knew I still wanted to do Game of Thrones seeing as it was a massive talking point and would hopefully perform pretty well - plus it's my favourite CK2 total conversion mod. There is a clear trend amongst most of the Game of Thrones series - the weird/wacky parts of the SOIAF universe but whilst also having that good character base. Topbog worked because he was a good character, the other subsequent series worked also because of Topbog. My hunch was that the Storm Kings, or any of the weirder Westerosi stuff, would work quite well because you have the character from the show coupled with the regular CK2 mediaeval feudal gameplay.
Rimworld started out extremely strong, but I think at this point people are as sick of Jilp as I am. Understandable really, considering it is a series built around frustration. Unfortunately, it's gotten to the point where the frustration for the audience has grown to the point that the payoffs really aren't worth the wait, hence why for May I'm renaming it the "Final Jilp" so that there are more stakes to it other than simply starting again. Plus, even if the whole marketing ploy doesn't work, it means we can move on to something a little different instead.
One thing I've been pretty adamant about doing this month is the fancy intros to each series. It's a pretty common trend whereby the first episode gets 50% of the views of the whole series (Jilp Ep.1 is at something like 80k right now), then subsequent episodes drop off more and more until it stabilises to a relatively decent level. So I thought that making the first episode as high value and interesting as possible would hopefully give the series a little more a retention rate.
Now, maybe the episodes have just been better overall, maybe the algorithm has just been favouring my content a little more as of late, or maybe the intros actually worked. Either way, one of the biggest things I wanted to draw attention to was the gigantic subscriber gain over a relatively short period of time. With Youtube, it's all well and good gaining a 1000 subs a month, the problem is by the time the next 1000 subs have rolled in, the previous 1000 subs have stopped watching considerably. But, 25% of the current channels subscriber base subscribed during last month, taking up to 20k. Getting that many, so quickly, is generally better for the channel than gaining say 2.5k over two months, but ending up with the same viewers overall. The analytics and algorithms are going to love seeing such a massive boost and in turn, it may even lead to bigger boosts in the future. With that all said, subscribers really don't matter on Youtube in 2019, they only care about watch time and views.
I mentioned earlier I wanted to talk about one particular sponsor that came through, technically it began last month and really became a problem only yesterday. I won't mention this particular sponsors name, I have done before, but seeing as this is a permanent post, I'll do it to be fair and ambiguous to them - I'm not here to make enemies though I'm pretty damn sure that they are.
A particular unnamed company emailed me last month asking if I was interested in partnering with their app/website which allows "influencers" to have a dedicated phone that fans can call - fans are charged at $3 a MINUTE to be able to talk to you, and you and the company split the money. Now I'm sure if you're a Pogan Laul, a Pake Jaul, a Loezella or whoever else is massive on Youtube, and a corporate shill, this would be an absolute gold mine. As someone who considers myself to have some, vague, morals and an understanding of the Streisand Effect, I was appalled by such a damn stupid idea. Luckily, my audience is smart enough to recognise a scam, but for some of the aforementioned Youtubers who have very young and impressional audiences, it seems like an absolute ethical nightmare.
I didn't reply to their original email - and I try and reply to all sponsors to keep a modicum of professionality to the channel and to discuss with them why I wouldn't do it. Takes very little time, and keeps me in their good books, especially as companies that work with "influences" are incredibly interlinked and will almost certainly share around blacklisted Youtubers.
Having not replied, in hindsight, as a bad idea. This nameless company apparently took my absolute radio silence as a "Yes" and went about setting up a page on their website dedicated to me, my channel, and offering my fans a way to get in contact, all I needed to do was set things up on my end and I was ready to go! Suffice to say I politely asked them to get fucked and explained why their website is a garbage idea.
Attached to this post are the emails back and forth, with name and identifying points redacted.
So that was an interesting experience. I especially liked the part where they justified using me on their website as "free publicity".
Another company got in touch with me asking if I wanted to promote their gaming headset range, and said I could give the products away to the audience. Honestly, that tempted me - I get nothing out of it besides a chance to look professional and appeal to sponsors, and in return for a fairly garbage video the audience gets some free, budget but okay looking, peripherals. Unfortunately, after not replying for a couple of days, they emailed me multiple times asking how much money I wanted to promote them, at which point I decided against it. I know that the headsets weren't going to be good, but someone would appreciate getting a free headset if they don't have an alternative. A video, that is a radical departure from my usual stuff, in which I accept a low payment to lie on camera, that will be met with (hopefully!) disappointment from the community is not really on my list of things to do.
It's a shame that the minutia of online business is fairly shady, backhanded, and exploitative, but outside of all that the month has been great. I don't need to worry about that garbage thanks to the generosity of you guys on here, and I can only feel sorry for YouTubers out there who out of desperation, frustration, or greed, feel the need to cosy up to these companies and take their fans for a ride.
On a positive note, the Patreon campaign has never been better than before. We've finally gotten past the full-time goal! Yes, I have been doing youtube at full time for some time now on a pretty small amount, however, this value means that I can do Youtube without worrying about whether the revenue I will get will be enough to live. As I said before, thanks to you guys I'm not forced into sponsorships, or eight ads per video, unlike certain other famous, ex-gaming, Youtubers. We can just keep doing what we're doing and enjoy the ride.
On the subject of Patreon goals, as a little extra incentive for the both of us, I added a PO Box, only because the Discord asked for it (I actually got the PO Box before we hit the goal because people seemed to want it that badly). I don't imagine to get much/anything from people through the PO Box, nor do I expect to 'break-even' on it or anything like that. All I expect out of it is a bit of fun and hopefully some garbage videos that will hopefully be happening very very soon.
As usual, thanks for all your support. Let's see whether we can double our monthly subs again, huh?
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,
The Karling playthrough has come to an end so it's time to vote on the replacement. I had planned on doing After the End as I'd seen the community trending towards it, but seeing as we're doing two series now, might as well have an exclusively patreon-guided one!
Last month I announced I'd be doing these as a stats roundup, a retrospective look back at what the last month consisted of, and a bit of personal reflection on the pros and cons of the content that came out last month.
For the month of February 2019:
Notice: February is the shortest month, and I only have data right now between January 31st and February 27th.
- 60 videos. (Not bad for the shortest month!)
- Around 2038 minutes, or 34 hours, of content.
- In February, my content was watched for a total of 4.3 million minutes, which is a crazy 8.3 years of mankind's time wasted!
- Revenue was very average, however, towards the end of the month it was the lowest it has ever been since the channel started which is why I've made some changes. I'll discuss this below!
- 3 sponsorship offers (Including one very dodgy MCN offer) all of which I declined for not lining up with the channel!
Channel Changes:
Revenue has never been the primary focus of the channel, it's always been about producing sustainable and good quality content that covers a lot of bases to help channel growth - and acting under the assumption that the revenue would grow with it. Unfortunately, this has proven over the past 2 - 3 months not to be the case at all. Although subscribers and views have been steadily climbing, the revenue has always sat around an average amount; Patreon still accounts for far more than Youtube!
So, I've got some great news for all of you Patrons. For the foreseeable future, you're going to be getting three videos a day. Now I've tried this in the past and the response was mixed, with a lot of people wanting quality over quantity. I agree with this fully, but I honestly don't believe that having a third series will impact the quality of the other series, mostly because I'm the type of person that works on a bell curve i.e. if I only made one video a day it would probably be fairly poor because I'm not as committed, I'm not in the right frame of mind, and I'm not warmed up. Three videos definitely push the limit and stretch me as thin as possible without, I believe, affecting the quality too much.
The other issue with three videos a day was that one series frequently derived from the other. In the past, I had two simultaneous CK2 series that were so similar I was constantly getting confused between my goals, and I think the audience was suffering from the same issue. To combat this I've tried to implement and elucidate to the audience, a very clear line between the two CK2 series, which I've imaginatively called Series A and Series B.
Series A is the content people have come to expect from the channel - somewhat tongue-in-cheek, fantasy, fast-paced, moderately edited themed series. Examples of this would be the El-Rang series, Warhammer, and the current Dwemer mod.
Series B was inspired by my market research into what the largest CK2 Youtubers produced. These series tended to be a lot more grounded, they were rarely edited, and a bit more meticulous. This series will feature your more realistic mods: CK2+, HIP, WTWSMS.
From a creators perspective - I find not editing videos extremely lazy, I also find that it adds a lot more pressure to the commentary; you have to remain constantly entertaining even if nothing is happening on the screen, which I personally find either disingenuous or just simply dull depending on the creator. Although I'll be doing less editing as a stylistic choice, I don't think I have the chops to carry a series purely on my dashing wit and charm, so I am going to place entertainment over style when I think it's necessary.
As for the audience communication factor; every episode has specific branding appearing at the start, along with an indication in the title, and an additional line in the description explaining the purpose of each series. This is predominantly for occasional or entirely new viewers who may find that the alternate series suits their viewing habits a bit more, but more importantly helps to draw that hard division between the two series, so that they should be more enjoyable to both watch, rather than having to pick one series to commit to.
Retrospective Review:
For the content itself, weaknesses that I alluded to during last months round up definitely came true this time around. I speculated that having three series of the same mod (Game of Thrones) would throw a spanner in the works, particularly for those who have little to no interest in the Game of Thrones world. In hindsight, I would have definitely cut out the middle series, the series I personally consider the weakest.
In the future if we ever have a continuation campaign (which is what I'm officially calling it now - "Mega Campaign" confused too many people into thinking it was a traditional Paradox Mega Campaign flowing from CK2 to EU4 etc) then I'll be sure to put a hard limit of only two series within the same modpack to ensure that viewers with no interest in the world are catered to. This was also one of the reasons for introducing a second campaign running simultaneously; it gives those who aren't interested in, for example, Game of Thrones, something else to hopefully enjoy and stick around on the channel.
As for Rimworld - I've always had mixed feelings on it. Originally it was supposed to be the Patreon series for a short while, but it attracted a lot of viewers who wouldn't otherwise have any interest in the channel. It has also been going on for so long now that if I cancelled it I would expect to see a significant decline in subscriber numbers. Rimworld is a safe, but not lucrative series.
I have learned the hard way that attempting to completely reshuffle the game is a fairly poor idea unless you are gaining something significant about it. Rimworld has always been a sci-fi game, despite having a "Tribal" playstyle. I feel that by limiting a series so massively with the Medieval Rim modpack I put together, it suffered quite significantly, as Medieval Rim definitely did not add enough to make up for content that was lost. This time around I'm focusing on reshuffling gameplay in a way that complements what is already there - the Star Wars modpack.
Next month I might end up doing a full comparison between the Bonnet Bigly Medieval series and the recent Star Wars modpack to see if my theory holds any water.
I have very, very high hopes for March. The Dwemer mod is something I've been personally touting for quite some time, so it going live was particularly high pressure. Introducing a second CK2 series is something I'm going to be keeping a very close eye on, and I am fully prepared to axe it in a heartbeat if I feel it'll impact the overall channel quality. Finally, we have Star Wars in Rimworld, a beloved franchise in the perfect setting for it.
If you're still reading then randomly share a horse fact in the discord general chat to confuse and baffle them.
To all of you who have patronised - thank you. You're keeping the channel alive and the community going. Hopefully, you deem the channel worthy of another month of support. Especially when you're getting a third more content ;)
Actually, I just remembered - I am going to be making more of an active effort this month to get into Twitch streaming. I'm most likely not going to be doing any CK2 or Rimworld on Stream because it's just far too much for me. I have been compiling a short list of games that I'm going to be playing on Stream though, so keep an eye on discord!
Hope you all enjoy the content and I'll swing by next month with another wall of self-aggrandising ego-stroking.
Tales of your misdeeds are told from Tamriel to Coruscant,
I've decided to start a new end of month summary of the channel to better inform you guys about what you've help support for this month, and to help lay it out in black and white for you all to decide if supporting for another month is right for you, plus it'll also be a nice way of comparing the performance of the channel on a monthly basis.
For the month of January 2019:
- 69 videos.
- Which is around 2415 minutes, or 40.25 hours, of content.
- In January, my content was watched for a total of 5,226,782 minutes, which is a whopping 9 years 342 days! (Yes, I've double checked it!)
- Revenue was horrible, and yes, I promise to be fully transparent with this, if we have good months, I will let you all know. Unfortunately, I can't give specifics because of Youtube policy.
- 2 sponsorship offers, both of which I declined for not aligning with the channel!
And I'll try and end these with my own personal retrospective views on the strengths and weaknesses of January for the month!
We had a very Game of Thrones heavy month, which was a double-edged sword in a lot of respects. The actual content of the series I thought was fairly good, most of which is provided by the mod, but the characters and stories we got out of it was definitely more than the usual CK2 campaign, the starting locations and goal for the series definitely helped a lot.
From an analytical perspective, there were three bonuses to having a three-part long-campaign set in a specific world.
Firstly, it meant that we could have returning audiences from the first Game of Thrones campaign that we played several months ago. I've found from experience that groups tend to gravitate into two camps with Crusader Kings, a realism camp, and a fantasy camp, with the fantasy camp being much more prominent - look at Paradox's weird DLC additions (animal kingdoms, immortality, dark magic etc). As strange as it sounds we've erred on the side of realism as of late. Between the first Game of Thrones series and this one, we've had Julius Nepos, the Holy Fury Throog Campaign, After the End, etc, all of which have been fairly magic free, and fairly grounded in a realistic background.
The second strength was definitely the retention that it bought around; once someone was hooked on the fable of Topbog Spoff, seeing him return of the course of several series would have been an attraction to the series itself, regardless of whether or not Topbog was the main star of the show.
Finally, and in my opinion the best reason, the soft reboots meant a spike in new people being interested in watching the campaign, whereas before they may have not cared. Interested in Game of Thrones but not interested in Asshai? Well good news, in a couple of weeks we'll launch a part two series about Corsairs, which might be more interesting. It's true of Youtube that whenever I launch a new series, the first few episodes are always the most popular, with a sharp decline after that. So logically, and I've sort of proven it to myself with this series, having lots of shorter series would see more of those spikes of new people interested in the content. The change in branding and art definitely help attract new people (and maybe the tags too?)
I've learned a couple of things with some of these series, things which I am planning on doing differently in the future.
The Gogossos series I felt was the weakest of the Topbog Trilogy, even taking into account that there have been very few episodes of the Valyria playthrough. This I blame on a fairly weak and uninteresting start, coupled with my own attempt to reinvigorate it by adding my own mods into the mix. Whilst the modding itself isn't necessarily a bad idea, CK2 is very, very fragile when it comes to adding new mods to a preexisting game, and I ended up spending a lot of time and effort trying to make things compatible rather than focusing on making the series more engaging.
The Rimworld Medieval series was also fairly weak at the start. The unfortunate truth of it is simply going from a series of unlimited power and resources (Genetic Rim) to a completely barebones fight for survival with Bonnet Bigly was probably unappealing to those who were just interested in the strange and weird mods out there that really let you push the boundaries of Rimworld. I've toyed around with the idea of having a prebuilt, albeit very small, village so that we can dive straight into the mods rather than having to dedicate a significant amount of time to generic Rimworld setup.
Overall, I feel January was a fairly successful month for the channel. The smaller, but interconnected, series format might become a regular of the channel The higher audience retention rates tell me that the viewers enjoy it too, and it's good for channel growth so it seems beneficial all round! The revenue was crappy, and the channel is still far from self-sustaining (with the lion's share of revenue still coming from Patreon) but I've heard from many, many other creators that January is terrible for ad-revenue, so hopefully we'll have a better measure of things next month.
If you read all of that you're a true superfan, or just want to get your money's worth. Either way, thank you for your time, and thank you for your support, without which we'd have shut down a long long time ago.
It's time for a new series to be decided on, Avatar will be coming to an end later today (26/11) so the new episode will come out the day after, giving you guys 24 hours to get your votes in!
A summary is at the bottom for those of you who don't want to read everything.
Twitch has recently announced their VIP program which allows streamers to give out unique rolls, loyalty badges etc to their viewers. I figure who else deserves it more than the people who actually keep the channel alive and well.
I'll be adding the Twitch VIP reward to all the $5 and up patreon tiers, plus this will be a permanent thing so you won't lose it if you stop backing over here! Think of it as a permanent show of thanks for supporting the channel.
The downside is there is no direct Patreon/Twitch integration yet, and I doubt there ever will be, so for those of you who want to claim your badge send me a message here on Patreon with your twitch name and I'll manually assign it.
I shouldn't need to point this out, but obviously, the badges are me giving you a thank you for supporting the channel, you're not "buying a badge" or anything along those lines. The badges don't give you any special privileges and the usual Twitch chat rules apply and badges can be revoked in very extreme circumstances. (I'm almost certain I don't have to say this but I'm covering my back in case of Twitch changing their policies surrounding the VIP system)
I also have a public list of the on-going Patreon rewards such as Houses/Names, we're getting the point in the Holy Fury campaign where I'm about to start adding them so if you haven't claimed them yet or joined the Discord channel please let me know so we can get you set up!
Thank you all for your continued support of the channel, it means more now than ever before as Youtube revenue is now at the lowest it has ever been despite the channel pulling in the same figures and Youtube's new automatic mid-roll ads on everything. Hopefully it clears up soon, but it genuinely wouldn't be able to continue without your support.
Tales of your misdeeds are told from Ireland to Cathay,
Sam.
Summary: New Twitch VIP system that I am giving to Patrons $5 and up, message me to claim, more thanks, Youtube revenue non-existent, you have saved the channel.
This is the first behind the scenes style video, hopefully, I'm not completely terrible at giving commentary that isn't about holy wars and war crimes.
This video shows my entire process from raw recording to finished Youtube video. I tried to include some useful stuff for those of you interested in starting your own Youtube channel, like thumbnails, export settings, or Youtube specific gubbins, so if you're not interested in the start-finish of the process, then hopefully you'll learn something from it!
If there's anything wrong or out of place in the video let me know and I'll nuke it from orbit and make it again.
Thanks for your support, hopefully, this is a good start on me giving you all something back, and if you want to see anything like this in the future or have any specific video requests I'm pretty handy when it comes to tech so I'll be more than happy to help you out.
Tales of your misdeeds are told from Ireland to Cathay,
To make sure we're on the same page, I'm updating the public google document with the Patreon rewards, that way if something is missing you guys can let me know. I've gone over all of the Patreon and Discord messages but some might have slipped through, and I don't want to miss anyone out.
At the end of the document is the end of video shoutouts. I know some people didn't want a shoutout so those names have been removed, please let me know if your name is on there and you'd like it removed, or if you name has been missed off!
The first patreon behind the scenes video should be up later this week. I had to edit out a little bit after I'd uploaded it because the audio spiked, so I'll make sure it's to a decent quality and post it here!
Thanks for your support everyone, means more to me than ever now that Youtube monetisation is completely unpredictable.
We're coming to the end of the Madworld series (unfortunately it's mostly down to the instability and crashing within the modpack). I'm working on a new completely seperate Madworld total conversion rather than a modpack build on other mods. But during the time it's going to take me to have this mod in a playable condition I want to know what comes next!
I have an update video for you all today, not hugely important, just some reflection on Patreon, Youtube, Twitch revenue, and some content ideas for the future!
You guys voted, and the winner was Rimworld! I didn't to mention anything or influence the vote, but this was my favourite suggestion out of all of them, I have a good amount of time played (400 hours!) and it's a great story based game where we can rename poor characters, not unlike CK2!
To start things off I'm going to do a series on the basics, sort of a tutorial style let's play for a couple of episodes. I figured that way everyone knows what's happening and I can get to grips with the new features they've added since the last patch.
If it goes well, after that I'll carry on with a few mods and come up with a fun idea for a playthrough (which you're all more that welcome to suggest to me on here or discord!)
Right now I'm teasing the idea of building our own zoo/jurassic park, or going completely the opposite route and building an arena and having characters named after Patrons/Subscribers fight to the death in. I hope it'll be pretty entertaining either way.
As always, thank you for your support. I never expected to hit the part time goal so quickly, not to mention actually exceeding it. Hopefully you feel that between Youtube, Twitch, and the series here, your faith was well placed.
Based on the discussions we've had in discord, I want to know what you guys are interested in for the Patreon series! Your votes here will help me make of list of games we'll play for the Patreon series, don't worry if your choice doesn't win the poll, I'll get around to all of the most popular ones eventually!
I'm back from my time away and I've began the process of fixing my technical issues, the parts to fix my PC should arrive tomororw morning and then it's full steam ahead.
The next part of the Madworld series is starting later today, and that means you all get to a name a house that will take its place in the new series.
Not only this but I'm going to be trialing province naming as well. Rather than doing the subscriber house giveaways, regular subscribers will be able to name a province we conquer. As I've found in previous Madworld and Game of Thrones episodes, subscriber houses tended to have not a huge amount of impact or die out pretty quickly, with a couple of exceptions.
Plus renaming a province has absolutely no impact on game balance at all, where as having powerful custom vassal characters definitely influenced the game (House Popeye - Game of Thrones mod).
To try and give back to you guys, I'm going to be adding a system which correlates CK2 tiers to Patreon tiers. At the $3 tier, I'm going to let Patrons name a Castle/City/Temple level holding. At the $5 tier you can name a province. $10 gets a duchy, and $15+ gets a kingdom name.
I don't want people thinking "I'm not giving X dollars for a Kingdom!". These aren't meant as incentives for people to patronise at particular tiers, these are meant to be a pretty fun little bonuses as thanks for helping support the channel.
>>> PLEASE MESSAGE ME WITH YOUR CUSTOM NAMES <<<
As patreon only offers one-time or monthly tracking options for rewards, rather than per-series as I'm doing things, it's going to make this hell to track. I also know that a lot of you have messaged saying you don't want shoutouts or discord, so rather than me chase down and bother every single one of you, drop me a message on discord with your castle/temple/city/province/duchy/kingdom/house name and I'll create my own seperate method of tracking it. If you change your mind, or want it changed in between series, message me again!
I check Patreon messages everyday so it's the best method of letting me know if something got lost between Patreon and myself.
Tales of your misdeeds are told from Ireland to Cathay,
I'll start this with some great news, which some of you know already, as of the 28th of August the channel became FULLY monetised. This means that between the overwhelming generosity of everyone here, and the small, but helpful amount, of ad revenue the videos will generate themselves, I'm able to do this almost full time.
I never had any delusions of becoming a Logan Paul; turning Youtube into some cash cow to be exploited. All I wanted to do was be able to pay my bills and keep making content, and that's very much almost a reality at this point. In July it was looking more and more like I'd have to leave university, which I have had to at this stage, and go into full time work to support myself, sacrificing the channel in the progress. Now the goal of the channel, and the time I put into it, being self-sustaining is very close.
Thank you everyone for helping. You encouraged me to not give up on something that I thought was valueless. Something that's taken up a huge amount of time, that we've grown a community around, and that I've grown pretty attached to.
That being said, my work load is pretty hindered right now.
I'm going to be travelling for just over a week starting today. I've been working pretty tirelessly to ensure that content is ready in advance (It's 5am as I write this!) so that in theory you wouldn't even notice I'm gone. I don't like pre-recording content because I feel like the subscriber/comment interaction is part of the channel experience, but as the alternative was leaving the channel barren, letting down patrons, subscribers, and youtube algorithms alike, I had an obligation which I feel I've fulfilled to some extent, and almost died in the process!
I feel as Patrons I also owe you all an apology. I have approximately 8 hours of content prerecorded, however, most of the days will only have 1 video rather than the usual 2 daily. Unfortunately, just to get this reduced amount of content available in advance has taken a lot of time, and a lot of work in a very short window. Those of you in the discord chat room will know some of the reasons behind this, but for the rest of you;
I've had a pretty major technical issue which has been a bump in the road. 8gb of my pcs ram failed pretty spectacularly during a recording session, which is a problem by itself as my ability to multitask is nonexistant at this stage. Whereas I would normally render a video/upload a video/record a video all simultaneously, it's now borderline impossible.
There other issue with this is that after speaking to the manufacturer for a replacement, they want the product returned as I bought it. That means both the working and broken ram sticks need to be returned, and it could take up to two weeks to receive a replacement, if it even falls under warranty. This means I could be without a working pc at all for nearly two weeks. Luckily my girlfriend has offered me her pc in the meantime, which is a huge help, but might take some adjustment and time to setup the software I need.
You have my word that I'm exploring every option available to ensure there won't be a single day without content.
To try and make up for this huge mess caused by Corsa- sorry, computer component manufacturing brand, I'm currently getting feedback in the discord chat for the Patreon early series which I'll finalise the day I get home! Feel free to submit any suggestions for games (CK2 or otherwise) you guys would like to see. I have a voting system in discord, and I'll also set one up for those of you here who don't have Discord. If you'd like to suggest a game for me to play and for everyone to vote on feel free to send me a message either here or within one of the discord chat rooms so I can add it to the list!
Thank you for reading. Thank you for your support. And thank you for watching! I'm about to get a 6am train to visit extended family for far too long, when I'd much rather be at home playing CK2 instead.
(For those of you who aren't in the discord channel and would like to join please get in touch with me here and I'll either myself or my moderators will get you setup in the right channels!)
Sam
Ps. I apologise for any grammar, spelling, punctuation, or rambling. I haven't slept in two days and I feel like I've done a good job considering.
I'm getting ready to start a new series to take over from Game of Thrones. I've asked around the Patreon discord and mentioned it in some videos, so I've got a pretty good idea what people want to see. You guys can vote on what series we see first. I'll get around to doing all of these eventually so don't worry if your choice isn't the winner, this most like just going to be the order they come out in!
Wow, this was unexpected. When I was considering putting this page up, it was under the assumption that it'd be a very slow burn, a few dollars here and there, and eventually it would help out a lot when it came to running the channel. I didn't expect that overnight I'd be more or less halfway to one of the major goals of the patreon. Even now I'm no longer running the channel at a loss, which a huge relief just by itself.
As for the specific backer rewards, a lot of you messaged me saying that you don't want a shoutout (maybe for privacy, maybe because you don't want me butchering your name!) so I've added to the tier list to message me if you don't want shoutouts for future backers also.
As for the other patreon rewards (voting on a new series, shoutouts, discord access) I'll be starting those at the beggining of next week just to give those few who haven't yet had chance to back some time to get their pledge in, and for those of you who don't want shoutouts etc to send me a message clarifying.
Those of you with your discord and patreon accounts connected will have automatically been added to the discord chat room which we'll be using for series ideas, mod feedback, and general chat. If you don't want to be added to the discord, send me a message and I'll mark you off the list, if I don't hear from you soon, I'll send you a mesasge asking if you want access.
Again, thank you everyone for backing. It's still a bit strange having so much support, I never expected it. I'll keep working on new rewards for Patrons as we go, by which I mean I'll go and steal ideas from other peoples Patreons!
