Channel Update & The State of the Video Log

Good morning everyone, Coury here. I meant to send out this update over the weekend, but I got sidetracked with a bunch of different family things - most notably the BLINK event here in Cincinnati.

It's been a little bit since a new episode has gone up and although I've addressed it during our livestreams, I'm not sure how many patrons watch that that. 

So, whats up?

Well, as you know, Try and I work as freelance videographers and editors outside of MLiG. As is often the case with working freelance, workloads are often a "feast or famine" situation. It just so happened that it was a big storm of different events and freelance work that made it difficult to get episodes done on time. 

In the past when that has happened, the other person usually picks up the slack and steps in to cover for the other. But this time, since Try is busy working on the "Modder Doc" we weren't able to do that. Then, travelling to Retroworld further complicated things... but the good news is that my freelance work all seems to be about wrapped up at this point, so I can focus all of my attention back on MLiG, and things will hopefully get back to normal-ish (knock on wood).

The new episode will be out this week and is looking to be a 45ish minute video on "games within games" where we look at emulated classics within sequels etc. I don't know how it got to be so long though. But its good to come back after a break like this with a nice length episode like this.

Since I'm responsible for episodes until Try is done with the Modder Doc, I'm gonna do my best to get to some heavily requested episodes before the year is out. "Arcade Gaming with Superguns" and "Dreamcast RGB" being the big, BIG ones. But I'd like to fit in some other popular subjects in between if possible - our Third Party Controllers episode did great for us around the holiday season last year, so I'd like to follow up with a first party controllers episode. Slot in a couple of Minis in between and I think we'll be in good shape. 

Current release plan for the Modder doc is to release over 5 consecutive weeks starting in early January - ideally starting on January 5th and finishing on Feb 2nd. We felt a good time to release would be after the Holidays are done, and people tend to take a bit of a break from making content on YT.

What about VideoLogs? October marked 1 year since we started doing the videologs and they've been a lot of fun to make. I think its safe to say that the MLiG Mini idea was possible because of the 1-2 punch of the weekly livestream & doing videologs that helped us get better at off the cuff discussion on camera. Based on numbers it seems as though around a third of our patrons watch the videologs, but that's absolutely about what we expected would happen when we started them. 

If you were among this group that enjoyed them, don't worry, they're not going anywhere - just changing a bit. 

I started to realize as time went on that many of the VLs were similar - us opening or looking at something with the camera affixed as a close up on the item in question. This went in contrast to how I originally envisioned them to be early on, but when you don't have a lot of time to put one together when you want to release later that day or the next day, you just go with something that seems doable. 

When I originally started the VLs, I envisioned something like a "variety show" where it was small little vignettes of us doing different things. You can see that in the first handful of videos, and I'd like to return to that approach... but its too much to make each week while balancing between making episodes, family, outside work and whatever else we have going on. 

So, MLiG Video Logs are going monthly - but they'll be more of a variety show that we wanted to do originally. We'll shoot different segments throughout the month and combine them into one large upload at the start of the month. We plan on having set segment names/subjects so we can plan out accordingly and don't feel like we need to come up with something on the spot. I'm not sure how long each one will be, but I'm sure they'll be significant. 

Alright, I'm done. Sorry for the wordy, drawn out post, but sometimes I can't help myself. Have a great day everyone, and thank you so much for the continued support!

Coury