Letter from the Editor - Wrapping Up 2024

It’s the end of our first full year here at Second Wind so I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about the past 12 months, our plans for 2025, and what we’ve got lined up for you over the holiday break.

We’ve had an incredible first year here at Second Wind, let me start with that. We achieved over 40 MILLION views across our videos, livestreams, and podcasts. We will have just over 5 MILLION watch hours by the end of the year, and produced over 900 pieces of content between our premium videos, livestreams, podcasts, and columns here on Patreon.

This was funded by over 11,000 of you who have decided to join us on this adventure through paid subscriptions across YouTube, Twitch, and Patreon. For that we cannot thank you enough for allowing us to continue doing what we love – making things for a community that we truly enjoy making things for.

With The Escapist, we set out to rebuild the brand and build a community that exemplified the best of the gaming community. Focusing on creating works that are interesting, informative, and fun, and fostering a community that treated one another with respect, kindness, and a shared love of the hobbies that we enjoy every day.

We founded Second Wind on these same virtues, and I’m so proud of the team and the community for continuing that vision as we figured this whole thing out this year. Going straight from The Escapist to Second Wind was an immense amount of pressure for this team, especially with the roaring start we had right out of the gate. 

Maintaining that kind of momentum was always going to be impossible, which was a reality we planned for. Things weren’t perfect, and it’s important to acknowledge that. But as a team we have a mutual respect for one another to push each other to be the best that we can be, and that was put to the test this year. I’m thankful that we’ve built a team that has everyone’s best interest at heart, and as Editor-in-Chief, I couldn’t ask for a better group of people to be surrounded by every day of the week.

I personally had a very rocky year that was highly publicized, emotional, damaging to my name and I’ve often struggled with dealing with it. To the team that stood behind me not only when I was let go from The Escapist, but also through personal and professional struggles this year - you have my endless respect and appreciation for being there when I need it most.

And that goes for the community as well. Not only do you support the work we put out, but you support us as people too. You make sure that we aren’t overworking ourselves, or presenting ourselves in a way unbecoming of the brand and community we’ve built. You’re there for us as much as we try to be there for you. You remind us every day why we get up to do this job, and for that we’re grateful.

The online sphere around video games and entertainment can be dishearteningly negative and combative on an almost daily basis, but we don’t see that here, and we thank you for that. The entire Second Wind team is proud of this community, and we can’t wait to continue building it together in 2025.

Thank you to everyone on the Second Wind team for your hard work and dedication this year. From our full-time staff, to our freelance contributors, to our moderators on Discord, to our partners and sponsors. Second Wind wouldn't be possible without every single person that has contributed to it.

My best wishes to all of Second Wind and our community,

Nick Calandra

Editor-in-Chief

WHAT’S NEXT IN 2025

As we head into 2025, the goal with Second Wind is the same as when we started. Build a sustainable games media outlet with a high standard of quality across all of our work. While we have new things on the way, 2025 will be a year heavily focused on optimization for our shows, and revenue streams.

Transparently, the Patreon has clearly seen a sizable decrease since we began. Some of this was planned for, and some of it was not, and some of it was malicious. Right now the Patreon is at a lower point than we’d like it to be, but as we’ve said since the beginning we do not want to be, nor should we, be in a position where we rely on any single source of revenue to be sustainable. Ad rates shift, people’s income fluctuates, algorithms change, people come and go, and these are all factors that can affect our income every month. 

In our initial planning document for Second Wind, we never expected to even be close to the level that our Patreon was at, and so this year has been a lot of experimenting and learning. Finding shows that work or don’t, testing shorts, bigger projects, sponsors, merch, figuring out our baselines… you name it. We’ve never done this before, and there’s no right answer for how to run an independent media operation this large.

We have learned a lot this year just by putting in the work, and this team has always been very adaptable. While the Patreon may not be right where we want it at, we aren’t just going to sit on our hands and not do anything about it.

So here’s a few of the things we’re working on for the new year:

• We’re moving from Shark Robot as our merch provider to Don't Forget To Be Awesome – DFTBA, and focusing on higher quality designs and products moving forward.

  We’ve got three new shirt designs ready to launch the store with, and as soon as we have a date we will let you know. DFTBA also services international orders which we know a lot of you had issues with!
  
  As a reminder from the other post - any orders you put through Shark Robot are still going through and being taken care of! DFTBA is only for products we have not launched yet.

  

• As part of our initial strategy, we had always planned to take on Work for Hire projects to bring in an additional revenue stream. In 2024, thanks to your tremendous support, we didn’t need to start that just yet, but in 2025 we will be and have been planning ahead for those. This will be something separate from Second Wind entirely, while supporting the business at large.

• We will be reformatting Unpacked into more of a short-form discussion show that airs weekly so that I have more free time to focus on these additional revenue streams. The Archive will finally be getting more episodes, you can expect more one-off essays from a number of members of the team, our Animal Well Documentary, and of course… the long-awaited fourth season of Adventure is Nigh in February 2025. And some secret projects that we haven’t talked about yet.

• We’re planning on more collaborations in 2025 with different creators and communities to help expand our audience reach. If you’re a group or creator that would like to do something with us, feel free to reach out!

Things are looking good already for us with a number of sponsors already lined up for January, our new merch store being prepped for launch, and an absolutely stacked spring for games, movies, and TV shows.

We’re excited for the new year and confident in our ability to make Second Wind a sustainable outlet for ourselves. Of course, if you enjoy what we do here, you can help with this by continuing to support us on Patreon, joining us if you haven’t, or just sharing our work across social media when you enjoy something to help new people find our community!

CONTENT OVER BREAK

We have a few pieces left to go while we’re on break which includes the following:

• Adventure is Nigh - Season 2 Remaster finale on 12/21

• New Yahtzee Tries on 12/22

• New Battle Masters episode on 12/23

• New The Backdrop on 12/24

• [PATREON EXCLUSIVE] Director’s Commentary for Metal Gear Untold 12/24

• New Semi-Ramblomatic on 12/26

• New Design Delve episode on 12/27

• Our Favorite Games of the Year on 12/30

• Our Favorite Movies and TV of the Year on 12/31

• Yahtzee’s Best, Worst, and Blandest on 1/1/2025

We will also have some streams throughout the break and additional shorts we’ve prepared for you.

Thank you for your support this year, and we look forward to getting right back to work on January 6th, 2025. We hope you all enjoy your holidays with your friends and family and have a Happy New Year.

• The team at Second Wind