Introducing Our Newest Initiative: Sacred Streaming

Hello, and good day to you! It’s me, Colin.

Today, I’m excited to reveal that Last Stand is undertaking a new initiative. We’re calling it Sacred Streaming, a different way for us to chat, play games, relate, and have fun. Our very first stream is live on YouTube at the time this letter publishes on Patreon, and we hope you’ll come join us.

In Classic Colin fashion, what we’re doing — and why — requires quite a lot of explanation, but to provide you with a TLDR for those who don’t like to read: We’ll be streaming each Monday afternoon (ET) moving forward, this programming will replace our conversational podcast Constellation on our schedule, and each stream will be its own thing; playing a game, or shooting the shit, or reacting to industry happenings, or whatever else. We’ll necessarily figure out quite a bit as we go along, and obviously, your input will be essential.

And if you miss a stream live, no worries. All of them will be here on Patreon (and only on Patreon) once they’re over. Every stream will be available for the $5+ tier in perpetuity, and you don’t need to do anything at all to receive them if you’re already at (or above) that tier. It’s all part of the existing package. One more time: Watch live for free, or grab the VOD here on Patreon.

Nothing else is changing. All of our other podcasts will all arrive on the exact schedule and at the exact cadence they do now. So Sacred Symbols, Sacred Symbols+, Defining Duke, Summon Sign, and Punching Up are completely unaffected. Fear not.

Now, for a far (far) deeper explanation…

Beginning just this past spring (and as noted a few times on various shows), I took the opportunity to sit down with everyone in Last Stand’s creator orbit for lengthy one-on-one conversations. What I wanted to ask each person we collaborate with was the following: How do you feel about our content? How do you feel about your own contributions? And where -- if anywhere -- do we go from here? Do we keep the status quo and continue to ride a good thing, or do we evolve, adapt, and adjust in order to try something new? I made it clear to each person that they should be candid and speak from the heart. “Don’t worry about me; just tell me what’s what.” These sessions allowed me to learn about my company in a deeper way than I ever have before.

Over a slew of conversations with more than a dozen individuals spanning many hours, I received an enormous amount of feedback, and honestly, most of it was extremely positive. It was heartening, actually, but perhaps not all that surprising, either. Last Stand is performing admirably because of the efforts of the very people I conferred with, the audience is as big as it’s ever been, and the listeners and viewers continue to deeply connect to what we do. We remain the biggest gaming media-related Patreon in the world, and it’s not always smart to fuck around with a good thing. And LSM isn’t a good thing; it’s a great thing. So why change at all? Reinventing the wheel is usually ill-advised.

But everyone had new and fun ideas, and once our conversations came to a close, I floated around the pool for a few afternoons and thought about what we might do. I specifically honed-in on separate conversations I had with Dustin and Chris, though. Unbeknownst to either of them at the time, they had similar feedback that connected with me, that we should open ourselves up to streaming. I found something worth pondering in all of the ideas everyone presented, in fact -- should we review games, or create a new content hub, or perhaps even spread our content more actively into associated industries, like film and TV? -- but this idea of streaming really resonated with me. After all, it’s something I used to do regularly, and the live programming I came up with and helped spearhead in my past was wildly successful. But it’s been like a decade, now. Is it something that I still want to do? As it turns out, the answer is yes.

Here’s how I came to this decision -- and why we’re moving forward with streaming -- in excruciating detail.

1.) I’m becoming bored, and I need to slightly shake up my professional life.

I started covering games professionally in 2002, when I just turned 18. Now that I’m 40 years old, I have dedicated more than half of my life to the industry, from my freshman year in college to today. (And when you consider that I started playing games in the late ‘80s and writing about them for fun in the mid-’90s, well, my whole existence has been caught up in this world.)

Now, this in and of itself isn’t a complaint. My participation has obviously always been voluntary. We’ve worked extremely hard and out-hustled an army of competitors to get to where we are, and I’m immensely proud of our accomplishments. But as anyone who has listened to or watched me over the years knows, I regularly talk about how fortunate and lucky I am, too, how the deep workaholism, skill, and knowledge I bring to the table only gets one so far, that none of it guarantees success, and that everything is ultimately left up to fate. And the truth is, fate has been beyond kind. I fully understand that. I’m grateful for the insane level of professional, financial, and personal security this entire journey has provided me, and wouldn’t trade it for anything. So please don’t mistake me. My gratitude is infinite.

So while that’s all true, it’s also true that I’m also kind of bored with the status quo. I’d argue I’m even becoming complacent in some ways, and that's kinda scary, because it’s not at all like me. I feel like my whole professional life is structured around waiting to research, write, record, and publish Sacred Symbols, do some other tasks, and then tend to all of the boring behind-the-scenes shit that makes LSM go (and that honestly occupies much of my time). I desperately need to shake things up, and provide myself with a renewed jolt of energy and purpose. The patterns have simply become too strong and remain too persistent.

As I’ve long said, I didn’t intend for Last Stand to become a real company. I know that’s a weird admission, but it’s true. I founded it back in 2017 first and foremost as a vehicle for myself, to continue my own work and make some money. But over the years, it has morphed into something radically different, a seven-figure behemoth (of sorts) that requires an enormous amount of my time, energy, and attention outside of the actual content. It all stresses me the fuck out, frankly, especially with so many people relying on me. I guess what I’m saying is, I need something new to look forward to, something to challenge myself with, something that freshens up the entire scenario for me. I need to remind myself why I started doing any of this to begin with. I think streaming -- and the inherent live zaniness and joy that comes along with it -- could be that change. An E-Tank, as it were.

2.) Dagan is no longer at our disposal, forcing us to make programming adjustments one way or the other.

I don’t mean to bury the lede for many of you, but -- yes -- my dear brother Dagan has moved on from Last Stand. It should go without saying that there’s no bad blood here. Far from it. Rather, Dagan has an exciting new job that offers him much-needed security in an uncertain market, and he’s fully occupied during the work week. That means no more Fridays to shoot the shit on Constellation, or other weekday opportunities to jump onto an episode of Sacred+ or Summon Sign at his discretion. He’s no longer on the traditional animator “do this assignment in your own time by the deadline” scenario that we built our long-time collaboration around beginning with KnockBack in ‘18, and without the ability to craft his own schedule, there’s no room for our content anymore. That’s the unfortunate reality.

You may be asking yourself, “well, Dagan has left LSM for work in the past and come back. What makes this different?” And the honest answer is, I don’t think it’s good for the product, the crew, and the audience to have people jumping in-and-out. What we do requires predictability, concrete scheduling, and rhythm. I also don’t think Dagan’s current situation is temporary. In fact, I’m fairly positive it isn’t, so planning for a resurgence is unwise. And that’s good. Excellent, even. His native industry has thrown curveball after curveball at him as he explores the back-end of his storied career, and he’s more than earned solid ground to stand on. I’m happy for him, and I hope you all are, too. I know he’s disappointed and saddened that he can no longer do our shows, but I also know that he has long had plans to do his own thing one day. If and when that time comes, rest assured we will make sure you know all about it, whether that’s his own podcast, video series, or whatever else. Whether or not you’ve seen the last of Dagan in the creator space is up to him, but I know where his heart is, and I feel like it’s safe to say he’ll return. Where, when, and how? It’s all currently unknown.

In the meantime, you can always keep up with Dagan on Twitter/X and Instagram, and I’m sure he’d love to hear from you. (I’ve asked him to keep quiet until we announced all of this stuff at once, so please forgive his conspicuous silence.)

3.) Constellation never quite became what I wanted it to be, and it’s not a show I personally want to host.

It’s important to acknowledge that Constellation has many fans, and I’m sure that the show going away isn’t great news to those people. So I wanted to take a moment to also explain where the whole idea came from, what I thought it would be, how it’s done for us, and why I think it’s time to put it on the shelf for something else.

Those who were there when Constellation launched may recall that it was originally conceived to record every-other-week, with a unique cadre of people, focusing on virtually any topics one could imagine, and perhaps running a couple (or a few, if necessary) hours. It quickly evolved into a weekly program that ended up taking far more of my (and others’) time than I had originally figured it would, all the while we were chasing diminishing returns. To confess: Constellation is the only show we’ve ever launched that didn’t either plateau or continue to grow after a meteoric launch period. It started strong, but has lost roughly half of its traffic in the succeeding couple-ish years on a by-episode basis. It doesn’t really seem to be working for us. In fact, I know it isn’t. So we’re gonna move on.

For a crowdfunded endeavor like ours, you may wonder why the traffic even matters, especially with a show as affordable to create as Constellation, arguably our cheapest production. But it’s not about money, at least not directly. You have to understand that the real estate we choose to occupy with each show represents an opportunity cost as well. It’s why for us to stream, something needs to go, because doing more isn’t the answer. We have to work smarter and deploy the best possible programming into the pockets of time we have, and then hope for the best cumulative outcomes. Those pockets, as I’ve come to learn, cannot exceed one item a day, at least not for our audience and not in our space. Anything else is unreasonable, and a waste of assets and resources. With Sacred Symbols and Sacred Symbols+ alone accounting for more than half of our combined audio and video traffic, it’s thus obvious that another Sacred-related show is a surer bet. It’s what a majority of the audience is here for. Maybe we should just lean into it after trying a litany of experiments (most of them admittedly successful). So we are!

I don’t want to shy away from other factors, however, because I haven’t yet fully addressed the two assertions above, that the show didn’t quite come together, and that it’s not something I wanted to host. On a personal note, Micah became very concerned when Constellation started sucking up more and more of my time, especially on Fridays when I’m already maximally taxed from a week of work. And she was right, and I appreciated her being wifely in this regard, so I started to try and get away from the show. But the audience didn’t like that, forcing me to do it as much as my schedule would allow. It started to become something I simply didn’t look forward to doing. I never looked at recording as a chore before, and that creeping feeling left me unsettled. I promised her I would work less (a major reason why we put the perpetual second episode of Sacred+ on the shelf), but over the years, I’ve only worked more. I need to follow through on a promise, to Micah and to myself, that I won’t overdo it and work myself to death.

Likewise, when it comes to the content itself, I honestly wanted Constellation to be more focused on news and current happenings, with candid conversations about challenging issues. It’s not to say that I didn’t want to talk about, like, cold cuts and my favorite color or something. I did. That shit’s fun, and funny, and exactly the kind of texture Constellation required most weeks. But the show also needed more serious, somber, and real topics to truly thrive, and we ran into two problems here. The first is that most of the rest of the crew had no interest in doing any of that, which is their prerogative, and I’m not mad about it at all. The other is that I don’t think the audience was as receptive to these notions as I had hoped. People will mistake this as me not liking being attacked over politics, but I’d argue that’s an especially odd assertion, particularly in today’s environment where many of my opinions very much constitute the American mainstream. Rather, I didn’t like the venom and vitriol it brought out of our audience towards other hosts, and especially towards each other. It was making things unnecessarily hostile, divisive, and unwelcoming, all of the things I don’t want for LSM and our community. So it’s best we put it all back on the shelf, while resting assured that politics, current events, and so on will always come up on the various shows as they pertain to the subject matter at hand (economics, labor, history, pertinent social issues, etc).

In an environment that has become so toxified and unrecognizable, with even creators themselves dividing and subdividing their own audiences for reasons unknown, I want to make sure we’re actively doing the exact opposite: Making a welcome place for just about everyone. We’ll all have our own opinions, feelings, and thoughts -- that’s literally vital to the health of what we do when we speak into a microphone -- but we need to prevail against this idea that people should be attacked, dismissed, or sidelined for differences of opinion, and I’d be lying if I didn’t bring up the way some of you have treated each other as a (though not the) deciding factor here.

4.) I want my people to work less and lean into what we do best.

I know it wouldn’t work for every industry or company, but I’m a believer in the four-day work week, and I want to fully maximize the amount of free and open time my people have. I spent years slaving away for bosses that underpaid me and couldn’t care less about the cost in time that came along with such a lifestyle. I am actively trying to do the exact opposite, by paying people more-than-fairly for as little of their time as is reasonable, and saying it all out in the open. Am I crazy for doing this? Perhaps, but this mantra has worked fairly well so far, and I want to bring it to the next level.

Constellation was always recorded on Fridays, to be published on Mondays. This forced us to have three or four people ready to record Friday afternoons, before unleashing Dustin on the production side, late on Fridays, to get everything edited, rendered, uploaded, and prepped. Now, we can by-and-large turn Fridays off completely, further maximize everyone’s rest and relaxation, and have them even more prepared, more excited, and more willing to do the other content during the preceding weekdays. Or, at least, that’s the idea.

There are two other reasons I want to exclude Fridays from our normal schedules, and I’d be loath not to bring them up here. The first is that I want everyone to be able to focus on their other content, too. For some of our hosts, LSM is their main (or most important) gig; for others, it’s a side-hustle. Either way, I know what doing my own thing on the side did for my career trajectory, and it’s my honest dream that all of our hosts ultimately graduate from Last Stand one day, wildly successful without me, killing it on their own. Giving this kind of runway to predictably dedicate to whatever else could bear fruit for each person under our umbrella.

I also know that Friday makes a good day to swap in-and-out if schedules demand it. For instance, the reason there aren’t way more Sacred x Duke episodes is because we had such a limited window to record; either Mondays or Tuesdays. And with five people, someone is almost always busy. But what if we, say, offered up a Friday recording in return for a Monday or Tuesday, and got to a four-day work week in reverse? What if we activated that free day -- as needed -- to do more of the content you want to see, instead of merely doing what we can to the best of our ability in the more limited time allotted? I like the flexibility this gives us from this perspective, and with a more pliable and moldable schedule will come better content. Or so I hope.

5.) I have (good?) ideas that I think will be best-executed in the streaming format.

Earlier this year, I brought back my long-dormant video essay series Side Quest, and more will come later this year (I’ve already written or partially-written like three new ones). But I have a ton of other ideas I want to explore, too, some of which I’ve been bandying around behind the scenes for years. But as I considered these various ideas, I realized they could all very easily fit into our new streaming format, and in fact, they may shine best there.

So here are some subseries I’ll almost certainly be pursuing as Sacred Streaming finds its footing, with other ideas in the hopper and more certainly to be envisioned:

• Trophy Advisor - This is an idea I’ve wanted to chase for a few years, now, and originally figured it could be a good, limited Let’s Play-style series. But it would be even easier -- and more fun and dynamic -- if we streamed it. Some of you might recall this Trophy Advisor term, as it’s a really useful feature on one of my very favorite websites, PSNProfiles. The Trophy Advisor functionality shows you which Trophies one has missed in the titles they’ve played, but that are still easiest to get. I have this fantasy that I can slowly whittle down the list, largely on PS3, and explore some old games all-the-while.

• PlayStation Obscura - This is another one I’ve been throwing around behind-the-scenes, especially as I’ve become far more interested in doing retro-related PlayStation content. Sony’s gaming brand is a staggering 30 years old and counting, after all, and as I’ve noted on Sacred Symbols, it could all go away tomorrow and I’d still have many lifetimes worth of content on my hands by simply looking backwards. I see this as an exploration of the more obscure and unknown PlayStation fare from the past, some of it now being published on PSN, but much of it locked away on old hardware. If only we could go through past titles together. Maybe we can!

• Sacred Studies - With three-plus decades of fodder -- a lot of it on video -- it would be interesting to go back and revisit classic moments from PlayStation’s past, reacting (as it were) as we go. Countless E3 conferences, Gamescom showcases, TGS appearances. Tons of random interviews, interstitials, commercials, and other marketing materials. It seems the deeper you go into YouTube alone, the crazier the finds can be. What’s stopping us from studying where PlayStation has been, and seeing what it means for where it’s going?

• The Sacred League - Of course! We’ve been (too) slowly working on how to bring this whole thing back, and frankly, Sacred Streaming is the vehicle we’ve been waiting for. It all makes perfect sense, and I would expect to see this once-abandoned and long-simmering idea pop-up sooner rather than later.

• Industry Events and Happenings (Not A Name) - While we’re going to be focusing on doing live content on Mondays, it doesn’t necessarily preclude us from spreading the field. I would fully expect that, moving forward, we will either live stream major PlayStation-related and third party events, or have some sort of post-show streaming component going over the festivities. This is something literally thousands of you have asked for over the years, and I think we can deliver.

Well, I think that about covers my unnecessarily extensive thoughts. I hope you’re with us on this change -- I feel like you will be -- but I also understand completely if this isn’t for some of you. Nonetheless, we thank all of you for your continued support, and we look forward to seeing you in the streaming world, and on all of our other podcasts, too.

And be sure to watch the first stream if you haven’t already, since we’ll go into all of this information in greater (?) detail, and undoubtedly take some listener inquiries along the way that will better allow us to get into the finer details.

With love and appreciation, -Colin