Second Wind - Q1 2025 Financial Report + Upcoming Plans

Hey folks!

It's that time again for another one of our quarterly reports. Financial breakdown is in the image above, and below we'll go into it in a bit more detail, as well as our upcoming plans for Second Wind.

Bit longer report than usual so enjoy the read!

/ REPORT BREAKDOWN

I'm very happy to report for Q1 2025 that we've made good on pretty much all of our goals we had for the start of the year.

We reduced our costs to account for the change of Patreon income from last year, we have had strong sponsor performance, we got the DFTBA store up and running, and Lost and Found has been going very well for us despite only starting up a couple months ago.

We completed our work on The Darkest Files, and we're about to wrap up work on The Horror at Highrook. We took on The Darkest Files pro bono to get our foot in the door and give ourselves a case study to work with, and The Horror at Highrook is our first paid client.

That game will be released on May 1st, and you'll see our work attached to that for launch.

We're also about to close a deal for a much bigger project as well that we can't disclose right now, but we're damn excited about it.

We've been able to get our margin close to back to breaking even and with the work we have incoming for Lost and Found and sponsors for Q2, we should be back to being profitable.

However, we as a team decided to take pay cuts across our entire team for Q2 to make sure we're not straddling that line going forward. I do want to be clear that we took this step as a cautionary measure, and not because of any dire circumstances. The decision was made as a team due to the current economic climate and the volatility of both the games industry and our own Patreon exit reports.

We're expecting sponsors to be quieter for Q2 with all the current financial uncertainty in the US. We also saw a big uptick in people's exit surveys indicating job loss, reducing subscriptions to plan for potential financial hardship and so on.

Yahtzee and I took the biggest pay cuts as we promised we would at the start of Second Wind, and nobody from the team was let go with these pay cuts. Everybody is OK here.

Overall, everything is going in the right direction for us as evidenced in the report attached above and Patreon has stabilized for the most part which of course helps us plan ahead for the future.

/ UPCOMING PLANS + PATREON GOAL - $45,000 / month

For Q2 we're going to be very busy. I won't share all of our plans here as we'll have a fun channel update video to share in early May, but we've got a lot cooking.

To kick things off though we're giving ourselves the goal of getting our Patreon back up to $45,000 a month. This amount would essentially make sure we're covering our base costs every month between Patreon, YouTube ad revenue, and sponsorships.

The other money we pull in from merchandise, work for hire projects and anything else we do will help keep replenishing our war chest to keep us secure for the long haul.

We'll be making a big push on our Patreon for the next couple months including giving it a visual refresh, some additional promotion on our channel, and doing some event streams to drive interest.

We've been working on adding a lot of extra value to the Patreon over the last few months, including bringing ad-free videos down to the $5 tier.

Here's some of the new things we've been doing exclusively for Patreon:

• Monthly Yahtzee Lore video (next up: Sonic)

• Podcast interview series from Nick (Tonda Ros and Abubakar Salim out now, and more on the way)

• Monthly experimental video from a different member of the team

• NEW At the $10 tier we'll be adding in a new fun group video each month. First look at these in our upcoming channel update.

For the public we've been working on some new stuff as well quietly:

• New pilot for a potential video series from Jess Hoops. First look coming in our channel update.

• New pilot for a potential video series from Jenna Stoeber. First look coming in our channel update.

• Pre-production on a new Adventure is Nigh one-shot campaign. First look coming in our channel update.

• Regular video essays from Marty Sliva.

• Recently launched Discovery Queue with good feedback so far.

For some general things we're planning for May and beyond:

• Fun collaboration event streams with other independent games media outlets.

• The return of Game Night streams + more focus on community events.

• Taking a look at our weekly streaming schedule and refreshing some things + new ideas.

• Our annual Second Wind fundraising stream event in June.

Hopefully that gives you a good overview of where everything is at right now. The team is doing well, and we're excited about all the different things we're working on.

As always, we're super appreciative of all the support you've given us. We love making this stuff as much as you love watching it and hanging with us on streams.

I also want to give a personal shout out to the team for all the hard work they've put in this year already and working together to overcome some early challenges for the company. No other group I'd rather be working with every day of the week.

Thanks for reading this update and any feedback you have is welcome below.

Nick Calandra, Editor-in-Chief