FROM POLYGON TO MARILLION TO BOB DYLAN TO NEURODIVERISTY TO DIGI

Morning campers! Happy 80th Anniversary of VE Day Monday. 

I warn you now: this is going to be a long ramble. I’ve a lot to process, and that’s what this is. 

We’re both beyond knackered after last week. Sanja’s going through the footage right now, and says it looks great and is very funny. So, that’s nice. But man... I'm not used to being so physical over so many days. Felt like I did myself some good though.

I don’t know how many of you are up to date with video game industry news, but I happened to see that this past week both Polygon and Giant Bomb – two long-running sites I admit I’d never really read (though Polygon did write nice things about Digitiser The Show and Found Footage) – basically ground to a halt. 

Despite not reading them, I was, nevertheless, aware of both – which is a feat in and of itself, that speaks of their reach.

In both cases, staff have either left or been let go/driven away following the arrival of new owners. You know the drill: big company comes in with profit as the priority, and the people who have worked on and built the site are considered secondary to the bottom line. Now the market is flooded with loads of games journalists looking for work. Is there any out there? Will they all just become YouTubers now? Good luck to 'em.

For obvious reasons, I took an interest in all this and have been looking at the online reaction. It’s much what you expect – divided along tedious “culture war” lines.

What is becoming clear is that this is symptomatic not so much of games journalism specifically, as a wider fragmentation of the media we consume, and how we consume it. Everyone is potentially a creator now, everyone is potentially a journalist, a filmmaker, an animator… And even then, if you’re not… now AI is capable of making you one. 

If you don’t feel you’re being served by the media on offer then it’s likely you’ll be able to find media – even if it’s being put together by one person in their broom cupboard – that will speak to you directly, that seems specifically tailored to your interests. 

It’s why you see Doctor Who getting overnight ratings of a mere 1.5 million viewers; the niche-ification of everything. There are now anti-Doctor Who YouTube channels that have more people watching a single “anti-woke” video that was recorded in ten minutes with zero production values than watching an episode of actual Doctor Who. 

These are historic, tumultuous times, and everything is changing fast. Where does this end up? What will it do to us as a culture, as a society? I don’t like to think about it. But… I kind of have to, because it's tough out here.

I’M OUTTA THERE!

Marillion is the first example I can think of, in terms of a niche "brand" that managed to find a way to survive.

They'd been massive in the 80s, then pivoted - in a way - when their original lead singer left, they then became less proggy and more poppy for a bit, saw their audience diminish year by year for a while (and their first full-blooded return to prog after the backlash to their "pop" album did little to stem that exodus), but they eventually found a way to make the most of the audience that stuck with them while not compromising on the kind of music they want to make.

In terms of business strategy, they have been incredibly successful despite not being incredibly huge. Right now - for those in the know - Digi is at the This Strange Engine phase of its life, I think...

It’s part of why I’m no longer really pursuing TV work – because TV is on borrowed time. These huge content continents are breaking up, becoming to be submerged, and it’s going to continue to fragment into smaller and smaller islands. A sprawling archipelago of content, if you will.

I’m focused now on building something – through Fiverr and Digi – where I’m no longer reliant on big companies. Going back to TV would feel even less secure than what I’m doing now. 

But… after our recent Patreon exodus, we’re both struggling with where we're at.

Sorry to write about this again – please, if you don’t want to read it, just click away – but we’ve been wrestling with this for a year now, and we’re no closer to finding a solution. Digi is caught between where it is and where it was, and I feel I’ve made a lot of mistakes that I'm hopefully learning from. 

Some of those were unavoidable – taking too long with Digi Level 2 was kind of out of my hands – but I’ve written stuff on here, or expressed myself creatively, in ways that have clearly pushed away part of our audience. 

I messed up when it came to AI. I messed up when I explored subjects in a way that didn’t clearly align closely with the politics of certain long-term supporters. And I started making videos that weren’t merely just entertainment, but also strived to inform, because they were subjects that interested me.

To be a creator now, to survive and grow as one, it feels like you need to keep giving people exactly what they want and expect. Indeed, the current advice on YouTube – in order to grow – is to give the algorithm the same video over and over again. My brain, unfortunately, isn't wired for that kind of repetition. I need to evolve and keep pushing myself, and I need to feed my brain while doing it.

BOB DYLAN

Amusingly, we watched that Bob Dylan film ‘A Complete Unknown’ yesterday. It was okay. But… it covers the period when Dylan explored his own creativity by turning his back on acoustic folk and went electric – to great controversy among his existing audience. 

They show him at a folk festival where he upset the audience by playing a noisy acoustic set of brand new material, but the reaction was so volatile – “Judas!”… “Play Tamborine Man!” – that he was compelled to come back on at the end and play a couple of hits with just him and a guitar. The audience were satisfied.

Both Sanja and I looked at one another knowingly… in that we’ve sort of experienced our own little version of this – pivoting to the videos we’re making now to mixed reaction, and cries of “Where’s Gannon?”… “Do the one where you set your hair on fire!”. 

I joked that Dylan’s encore was his equivalent of coming out dressed as Beanus. With Gannon on Tamborine.

Don’t get me wrong: I love that people loved that stuff, I love silly Digi, I love Beanus, I love our characters, and they will appear again when they fit (again: Drong’s Challenge is the next thing we’re focusing on after the video we’re currently doing, and that’ll be full of all that). I've loved collaborating with Cheapshow (and Gannon and Eli are in Drong's Challenge!), though they cast a long, long shadow...

Plus the latest video will feature the return of Cheddarman (or, rather, Doggerman) – but that’s because it felt organic rather than shoe-horned in as a crowd-pleasing encore. 

When we were in Scarborough I read that Will Smith is going to be playing there later this year. Apparently, after he slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars, his brand has become so damaged that he has been forced to downsize where he plays. 

Admittedly, I’ve not slapped anyone (I mean, I’ve come close…), but our last major video – which we’re both nevertheless very proud of – seemed to sort of damaged the brand Digi had become, and pushed away a lot of stragglers. It was too serious and political for some, when people have come to see us as synonymous with silly and frivolous. It was an experiment, but we maybe got the balance wrong.

And you’re only really remembered for the last thing you did.

HENCEMEN

Hence Will Smith, hence Digi.

Even though we had Digi Level 2 just a couple of months back, even though our big cat vid late last year was full of characters and nonsense, even though every video we do has us being stupid and messing about to some degree, and even there’s more coming… It doesn't matter. Right now, in this moment, we know we've driven away part of the core audience we’ve always enjoyed. 

We’re in a frustrating position in that Digi is getting more views and subs than ever on average, but… our Patreon has been struggling for a while now. Part of that is probably because we make bigger, longer, more ambitious videos and can't get as many out as we used to.

However, Cheapshow is – in terms of reach – far smaller than we are, but their Patreon is outperforming us by a lot. That sort of nonsense is exactly what I’m talking about in terms of niche-ification – people find their thing that they love, that speaks to them, and they stick with it through thick and thin, so long as the creator keeps providing what they’ve come to love.

The downside of that for a creator – and I know from speaking to other creators who have managed to do this – is that you do have to keep serving up the same thing again and again and again. For some… that’s fine. Good for them! Genuinely. People love the comfort of familiarity. But for others (well... me) that can be a depressing existence. It can wear you down.

We’re aware that we’ve effectively betrayed a lot of trust by me following my creative instincts and my passions. The trouble is, I’m incapable of not following my creative instincts. I can’t force out something that feels fake. 

YOU AUT TO KNOW!

We recorded a Patreon video while we were away which might help to explain some of my inability to do what I don't really want to do. We'll share it with you soon.

In short, both of us have recently been questioning whether we “have” something other than ADHD, which might better explain why we’re the way we are. I’ve had a few people recently tell me I might be “autistic”, which has led to me questioning myself a lot. I know I’m not neurotypical - I mean, duh - but I’ve started to look at how much of how I am is just masking; learned behaviour. 

On the one hand, I don’t care one way or another: I am who I am. I mean, it’s not severe if I do have it - I mask well, if that is indeed what I'm doing - but there are things in life that I struggle with. My son is autistic, I have autistic friends, and I see their "autism" more as their personality rather than a label.

Obviously, I’m not talking about severe autism here, but the kind of autism my son has – where he can tell you absolutely anything about any animal, though finds working impossible. It’s not all he is. 

Weirdly, it dovetailed with an unexpected angle on the video we set out to make in Yorkshire, when an archeologist who gave us a tour of an Ice Age cave mentioned that neurodiversity isn’t a blanket “condition”, and perhaps shouldn’t always be seen as a “disorder”, but are actually traits that we evolved to survive.

The reason it gets labelled as a disability now is because those traits don’t work with the way our modern society is structured. We’d have all made great hunter-gatherers, basically, but stick us in an office or ask us to “adult” and it’s chaos.

But if getting a diagnosis means I have a clearer understanding of how my brain works then it might help me function better… 

I dunno.

But I mean, look at this big, oversharing, post I’m writing….

Anyway. Back to Digi. 

BIGGER THAN JESUS

From where we were - small audience, big Patreon - we now have a bigger audience, which has more casual viewers.

And at the minute – in purely business terms – it’s not making up for the hit we’ve taken on Patreon. A few years ago it wouldn’t have mattered, because I earned enough from my day job that Patreon was just a lovely bonus, but Digi is part of our income now, for better or worse. We struggle, frankly.

So, what do we do? Well, I guess we stay firm and keep following the creative instincts. I honestly can’t do anything else.

We just have to have faith that the quality of the content we’re making will win out eventually and Patreon will grow again, and that when Drong’s Challenge comes around people will see we’re still making stuff that’s just pure stupidity. There's still a big dopamine hit that comes from creating stuff that I'm proud of, even if it's hard when that gets rejected. Digi Level 2 - for all its controversy and delays - I'm very proud of. I gave it my all, especially those last two episodes. We believe in what we're doing, even when it isn't always received as we'd like.

I know it would seem, on paper, that satisfying those we've driven away would be a simple matter of us setting up a camera, sitting behind the desk or table, and doing what we used to do, but I’m not where I was a few years ago. I’ve been through too much, experienced too many massive, profound, life events - some good, much of it bad - that the thought of doing the old stuff just gives me a knot of anxiety. Genuinely.

I think about it, and I just don’t have the capacity to do that. Not least because it would ring false, and – for better or worse – I can’t be anything other than me. Not anymore. I’m still me - just showing more of the real me. I've lost some of that capacity to mask and act the clown 24-7 as a by-product of life dragging me through a serious of increasingly prickly hedges. 

THE FUNNY BOI

I posted to the upper tiers the other week about how being 'The Funny One" is something I developed to feel accepted. Well, since then - as if to underline the point - I've had one of my sisters tell me at length how funny she always found me, and how hilarious Beanus is. And we visited my mum last week, and I jokingly asked her which of her children was her favourite. Even with dementia she diplomatically avoided the question, but said: "You've always made me laugh".

(Side note: another of my sisters said to me of note,"Well, we all know you're autistic - look at how you used to collect Smurfs!")

So, those of you who just want funny Biffo... you're not alone. I get it from my family too! That's where it came from, I guess.

But that's a lot of pressure at my age - to keep being that, and suppressing all the other sides of me. It's not like I'm actively avoiding funny stuff - trust me, the Yorkshire video is our funniest for a while - more that I'm just trying to be the more rounded, more real, more me version more often, to share other sides of who I am, my passions and interests. To finally give myself the permission to be who I am; funny, serious, opinionated, thoughtful, stupid... all of it.

And yeah, I get why many people want for me to just do the daft stuff - especially now, we all need an escape, and not have to think.

But I'd be lying if I said that it didn't hurt when people reject the other parts of who I am, when we get comments saying our new content is "ass", or just wanting us to collab with other funny people. That's why we're both so stuck on this subject - it goes deep.

"Just keep doing the one where you set your hair on fire!"

BITE THE BULLET

We keep asking ourselves if we should just bite the bullet and start a new channel (with the same kind of content we’re making now) – give YouTube the chance to push us out to a fresh audience with none of the baggage, and none of the comments we get about the old stuff.

Right now, the algorithm is clearly very confused as to what our audience is, and I don’t blame it. I mean, we’ve confused our audience, even if the pivot felt gradual and organic to us.

But ripping off that Band-Aid and starting afresh is hard when we’re a channel that grew in the past year more than it did in the previous three, and when so many of you are here because of what we used to do.

We never had a niche before, and that limited us – and continues to do so to a degree. But we are left with clear signs of growth in one area – on YouTube – and contraction elsewhere – Patreon. 

This ultimately comes down to whether I see Digi as a business or as an outlet for myself as some sort of artist (in a non-wanky way, hopefully). As my earnings from the day job shrunk, that line has become blurred out of necessity. So, with all of this we feel stuck really, and this search for a solution will continue - I just hope we find it before we lose everyone on here!

We’re beyond grateful to those of you who have continued to stick by us – we know we’re not giving all of you exactly what you want – but we so appreciate you supporting our creative instincts. I don't make my content in a vacuum; it's a product of who and where I am.

By sharing in it, it's a journey that we're all in together, and it means everything to Sanja and I that so many of you are still willing to come with us. We feel blessed to have you. All the more so now that we've lost some of you along the way.

We try to give back as much as possible by making the best videos we can, by sharing that journey here through blog posts and exclusive videos, and through things like Biffo's Brain. The bottom line is that you are our niche. We want to make you happy - but we have to just keep trying to do that with the resources we have (which includes what we're driven to do).

Hopefully over time more people will continue to see the worth in it, and that we're still us. It's all we can do for now - just stay firm and hope that we remain more Dylan than Katy Perry.

Paul

PS. Biffo's Brain and Writer's Club; now that we're home, stay tuned for a Ghost Hunt day trip update.