The Plan: Week of February 10th

BellularGaming

This’ll be an interesting week! Our video criticising the systematisation of World of Warcraft (which you’ll have seen up on Patreon a while back) will go live, along with a survey. The survey represents our first step into actively working to solicit community feedback in a measurable, scale friendly way. I’ll be sending it along to Blizzard, and hopefully my contacts there will help me hone in our questioning/approach.

The final episode of our Vanilla series will also launch! Again, that’s one you’ll have seen on Patreon yesterday. Things won’t end there of course, and as of the time of writing, all 4 The Burning Crusade scripts are in progress, with the first almost being finished. We’ve decided to take that expansion in 4 parts as it’ll allow for better pacing & episodes that aren’t duds. One problem with our approach to vanilla was patches like 1.8, which really didn’t add that much. Them not being mega exciting to watch led to decreased engagement in the series overall - a mistake we’re keen not to repeat in the future. 

As for future content, past Saturday’s news, we’re working on two more videos. The first is a postmortem on the corruption system. Blizzard said they wanted feedback, and that’s what we’re going to do! Like with the systemization video, we’re going to have a tie-in audience survey that’ll go back to Blizzard. As for lore, our next video is Medivh. It’d a tad early on in development to talk much, but it should hit Patreon by Friday & YouTube by Tuesday 17th February.

We very much are setting in for the long haul now that Battle for Azeroth has concluded. While there won’t be much on live, I do anticipate Shadowlands beta within a month - likely early march. It’ll be a pretty darn hardcore time… Hopefully I’ll be able to get another pair of hands in the office to help with B-Roll & some aspects of video marketing. Right now a lot of my ‘creative time’ has to go into video marketing, now that we publish 9 videos per week, and feel like it’s holding us back. …more on that one in the coming weeks!

Bellular News

This week should be characterised by things actually being smooth! Two posts ago I talked about our 6 videos per week process. Now that we’ve run that experiment for a few weeks, we’re beginning to see results. As of the time of writing this post, Monday’s video is done. Tuesday will be a roundup. We then have two videos in production for Wednesday & Thursday. Friday is roundup, Saturday is a deep dive on rising production costs. 

Right now our ‘evergreen’ videos are:

- American McGee & ‘toxic, entitled’ gamers. Yep, we’re diving into that discourse!

- Big wins for gamers in 2019. In spite of the news cycle, it was a fucking incredible year for games, goddamn. It’s staggering how much good stuff happened. We want to work more positivity into our content, and this video will be an example of that.

- Punishment & difficulty. This one is a pushback against some of the punishment discussion, and an exploration of the mixing of punishment & difficulty in games.

- Rising production costs. This video will explore how games have got more expensive to make, and how that might not be the best thing, especially for quantity & quality of content.

So, these are all ‘evergreen’ videos. That means that they, by default, get one of our weekly Report / Deep Dive slots. Should news happen, these videos are then bumped back to the next slot. Usually, if we have 3 evergreen video ready by the start of the week, 1-2 of them will end up being published. This allows us to build up a backlog that ensures consistent uploads, and that when there’s no news, we can work on deeper, idea driven content.

Evergreen videos are posted to Patreon as they’re created. We’re now ahead of schedule to the point where we’ll be able to have lots more early access content here!