God of War, Upcoming Videos, Witcher, Moving, and Youtube

That's a big title!

First thing's first: I mentioned before that I was working on another video for this month--on some Super Nintendo games. This has NOT been cancelled but it has been postponed until after the video on God of War. There are some potentially boring details about that below. Feel free to skip them if you don't care.

The video is on Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia, and Terranigma. If your reaction to that is "what the hell are those?" then you understand already why the video has been postponed.

I've learned a fair bit about how YouTube works this past year. Part of that is how channels are rated on their engagement--both in view count and watch minutes relative to video length. Unfortunately I made a fairly big mistake by making the April Fool's video and then the Minit Review directly afterward. These are good videos that I'm happy with. The T-Rex Runner only took me about a day to make. Minit took a few more than that. Short production times and good finished videos, but they're not what my audience wants from the channel. So while those who did watch them enjoyed them, many decided to skip watching and wait for the next big video on a recognizable game.

This brings up another "game" -- working within YouTube's algorithm that I'm fairly sure not even they have full control of anymore. Have you ever seen a channel with millions and millions of subscribers but only a few thousand views on their recent uploads? This is what happens when engagement drops. It's reasoned away by people not unsubbing when they don't want to watch content anymore so YouTube has to do it for them in a way. Channels can go into a stalemate position from this or, even worse, a decay spiral to nothing despite having high sub numbers.

The channel is not in any danger of this happening just yet--at least I hope not. But this is something I need to factor in with the order of releases so that the channel never dips below an engagement threshold and people stop getting notified when new videos go up. To be clear about this: money isn't the issue, it's about the channel staying healthy and in a state of growth so that it doesn't die. I don't think there's a way to climb out of that hole once it's started but I could be wrong. YouTube doesn't make any of this public. I'd rather not risk it.

A video on three relatively obscure older games (one of which wasn't even released in the United States) after the T-Rex Runner and Minit videos is not a good idea. So even though I'm in the late stages of production for this video I'm going to put it on hold, do the God of War video and possibly one other after that, and then finish it up. If you've been watching the streams then you'll know I've been hitting that pretty hard. That's my usual rate of work only this time it was done publicly.

The other things I want to speak about are the Witcher video, the Automata video, and moving. Odyssey was a huge disruption for the channel. If I can focus on videos I can usually get them done quickly (see Subnautica) but Odyssey was a massive load of work. I think I have too many videos being juggled right now and I'd like to focus fire them all down, ignore new releases, and then wipe the slate clean after the big Witcher, Automata, and Horizon projects are done.

The problem is that I don't want to start something of that scale before we move. Especially the Witcher series. We could be moving as soon as next month. Or we're hoping it'll be July at the latest. When we do move the Witcher will be top priority and, whether or not I can find a way to make at least one small video to bridge that production time, that'll be where my work hours will be going. Lili and I have discussed the idea of doing weekly production updates here on Patreon with brief lists of how many hours have gone into each game and so on for the Witcher trilogy. I think that's a good idea but it may take some of the magic out of producing it for some people. I guess we'll see. Those posts should be easy to ignore anyway.

So to recap. I've pushed the SNES video back for reasons stated above. God of War is the next big video for the channel. If we move soon then I'll be finishing the SNES video and then entering Witcher time. If we move a little later then there'll be something else, possibly Automata, before we move and Witcher videos begin. I swear that I will do everything within my power to make them happen this year even if it means other projects are delayed. I'm tired of waiting for the right time and trying to move to a new home has been riddled with so many delays and problems that I wish I had just started it months ago. But most of that is done now.

As always I hope that's acceptable or, at least, understandable.

Thank you.