What's my purpose?

Hey guys! Hope you are all having a fantastic weekend so far.

So as the title says, what is my purpose? That is, what is my channel all about? What goals do I have, what rules do I follow? It's a question I don't really have an answer to right away. Sure, I have a mix of ideas a concepts but nothing really ironed out or solidified. With this update I hope to change that.

I think really it's important to first go through the history of the channel. I started out of course only painting miniatures. Okay well technically it started out as a channel covering video games, pop culture/anime and anything else I enjoyed, but we're not going to talk about that :)

So I painted miniatures for a while and eventually the HATE Kickstarter started getting some pre-launch buzz. I realized looking on BGG that the only thing being discussed was the mature theme and not the game mechanics, which I thought were pretty cool like the savagery tokens, clan upgrades and scars, map buffs and more. So I made some videos explaining the game itself and it was my first "big" break, reaching 10,000 views.

Shortly after that came Nemesis which again I was excited about how they were running the campaign. They were doing votes, giving away an entire expansion and a bunch of other fun stuff I wanted to share. From then on I started focusing on both of my passions, Kickstarter board games and miniature painting.

Turns out the feedback I got from this was huge. People really enjoyed hearing my thoughts on Kickstarters I guess and that of course made me happy to know it was actually useful for others.

And then all of these Kickstarters I was backing finally started to arrive. I decided to do an unboxing because often there wouldn't be one and if there was it'd be really low quality and just a few minutes of people showing you just what was in the box. I felt if you are just going to do that then you could just show some pictures, video isn't really needed. So I unboxed them and commented about things I like or didn't like such as fake big box expansions, tray quality, etc.

Every so often I tried to do a review. This was the hardest part for me, to find a format I enjoyed doing that I felt played to my strengths. You'll notice even in my first ever review on Massive Darkness that I was big on having real game examples of my issues. But it was a huge hassle for me to film and I didn't care too much about explaining the game in detail and setting all of the various shots up. This caused me to not do it very often.

Now we're at today where again I've gotten a lot of positive feedback about my detailed reviews. First I just want to say that it's not on purpose. I don't just "do it for the camera" - I still to this day rant off camera to my poor wife about my distaste for plain dice or whatever else I come across. I also never consciously think I need to point out perspective differences on some game board art, I just kind of do it.

Over time I've at times tried to be more thorough in my painting of a single game, or about what Kickstarters are coming up and invariably people would pick up on my loss of interest almost every single time. If I wasn't passionate about something, either positive or negative I didn't enjoy filming it and the viewers didn't enjoy watching it as much.

Anyway, I've been doing reviews more now that I have a format that closer fits my tastes. I've also made a disclaimer to them that reads:

This is because as I got more and more into reviews and the larger my channel grew, the more I noticed all of the falsehood in the Youtube game coverage area. I've seen evidence of every single big time reviewer being more focused on personal gain than honesty. It's why I added this to the end of my channel:

I mean it about that honesty. Where some channels (I'll speak more about this in a future post) obviously act as a giant advertisement for these companies, I never allow myself to speak highly about a KS I don't believe in, or a game I'm reviewing. I think it's important for anyone that has an ounce of sway with consumers to not lie to them, even if it's just the omission of negatives.

So with all of that said, here's my channel's charter: I will always follow my passion. Whether that means speaking negatively about a game or Kickstarter, or painting miniatures from different games, every single video I produce and everything I say within them are my own, honest passions and opinions. I will keep it "real" and "down to Earth", always having a consumer focused mindset.

~I'll have an Oathsworn vote for you all shortly here on Patreon so be no the lookout for that :)