T w e n t y S i d e d
Like I said this time last year, now that I get most of my income from Patreon, I feel the need to do a little accountability / disclosure. As of right now, just over 400 people are donating every month to keep this site goingNote that not all supporters are part of the Patreon. There are a small handful of people who prefer to use PayPal.. It seems good to talk about how things are going, what I’m planning, and how I think I’ve done.
I’m also going to talk a tiny bit about personal finances. This is usually taboo in our culture, but then our culture hasn’t adapted to a world where individuals make their living via crowdsourced donations.
Still, if you don’t want to read a bunch of personal stuff about money, give this post a pass.
So let’s start with the bad news…
The Bad News
I lost my Escapist gig this year. That was a nasty blow. We parted on agreeable terms. No hard feelings. This was just yet another gaming site going through downsizing, which has been going on for the better part of a decade.
My wife Heather has a job caring for a 94 year old woman. It’s a wonderful job and her employers are gracious, generous, thoughtful people. But still. 94 years old. This is not a job Heather can keep until retirement. We don’t have a plan for when this job ends. I certainly don’t make enough to support all of us on my own.
I’m not trying to get pity and I’m not trying to get you to give more. I don’t want to turn this blog into some insufferable Public Television-styled begfest.
- I want this site to be a fun, entertaining place to hang out, and constantly asking for donations would ruin that atmosphere. For me and you.
- Guilt is a terrible motivator anyway.
- I’m super-uncomfortable asking for money. I do it, but I don’t like it, and I certainly don’t want to do more of it.
- I have no proof, but I strongly suspect there’s a sharp falloff when asking for money. I imagine that a friendly reminder every month or so is probably harmless. Weekly is probably a little irritating and (I’m betting) only nets a tiny bit more money. Daily is obnoxious and might even result in a reduced readership and reduced donations. I only think this way because it’s how I respond to requests for money. I love to feel like I’m being generous. I hate feeling like I’m just paying them to shut up and leave me alone.
The most obvious way to make this job more secure is to try and grow my audience. That sort of endeavor requires caution. I just got done lambasting BioWare for a bunch of decisions that seemed calculated to reach out to a new, larger audience at the expense of their long-time fans. That sort of thing can easily blow up in your face. You might alienate your passionate, friendly, loyal fans and exchange them for a disinterested, entitled, rude, impersonal mobAnd good luck getting your original fans back if things don’t work out with the new audience.. Worse, you can kill the thing that made you want the job to begin with. Since I’m making exactly the site I want right now (aside from wishing I could get more done) any changes would involve making something I like less. And if I’m not enjoying this then what’s the point? I might as well stop bothering you and get a real job.
So to sum up: My living situation is a little on the untenable side. We have a nice arrangement now, but it can’t last forever. I don’t want to beg for more donations, and doing so probably wouldn’t have a very large impact on my income anyway. I wouldn’t mind having a larger audience, but I’m not willing to make any sweeping changes and it’s unreasonable to imagine a bunch of new people are going to show up for no reason.
That’s the bad news. Now let’s talk about…
The Good News
Last year I felt like my output was lacking. At the time I said:
I’m going to try to focus on getting back to the style of work I did a few years ago: Long-form, multi-part, deconstructionist nitpicking with the attitude that we nitpick because we love. The recent Fallout 3 analysis was the first of these. Mixed in with that should be some programming posts.
I’d say this was a solid success. My output is way up. The Mass Effect series is probably the most popular thing I’ve done since DM of the Rings, and the column is better than ever. I did the Mass Effect series, plus I kept up with the weekly column, plus I finished Good Robot, plus I managed to give everyone a few paragraphs of commentary on the Wed-Thu-Fri Spoiler Warning posts. Also, I uploaded more alleged music to my Soundcloud page, which entertained less than a hundred people but shut up I like making this stuff anyway.
The Mass Effect retrospective is being compiled into book form. Maybe that will sell.
Good Robot wasn’t a smash hit, but the income gave us a few months of breathing room.
The Final Fantasy X series is going over well.
We have about nine more months of old Let’s Plays to repost. Those are fun. I don’t know what I’ll do on Sundays when those run out.
I’m pretty confident that my problem is with audience discovery, not retention. I think I’ve got stuff here that people would enjoy if I could get them to read it. The problem is that it’s hard to get people to click on text articles these days. This is not because [insert popular cultural boogeymen here, usually millennials] are all senseless dullards who have lost appreciation for the written word. I think the problem is that the world is awash in unwanted words and think-pieces. Demand is as high as ever, but the signal-to-noise ratio is terrible and finding words that are worth your time is harder than ever. It’s really hard to convince someone, “No seriously, this one is different. Just read some of it.”
Our tools for discovering good videos are a lot better than our tools for discovering good text. Like, when someone shares a video on Twitter, you get a sexy thumbnail and a sense of what you’re in for:
Hehe @shamusyoung got namedropped in the new TUN video https://t.co/30CN77JXLa
— Rita No Mercy Wulf (@Varewulf) June 6, 2016
But a text article is usually just a title and a link. There’s less indication of what you’ll get if you click. Youtube has likes and view counts so you can tell if you’re about to see something popular, obscure, infamous.
Videos are a great way to rope new people in. And I think they’re more willing to read the words once they’ve seen a video. But like I said last year, video takes bloody ages. In the time it takes to make one video I could probably write three massive entries like this one. I don’t have the hours to spend on that. I want to make videos to attract people to read the blog, not make videos instead of the blog.
But!
My kids are old enough to get into audio / video editing, and a couple of them have the inclination and aptitude for it. So I’m working on doing some sort of collaboration where I can just do the writing and narration and offload the time-sucking editing onto an assistant. I have no idea if this will work, but it sounds like a fun project. Barring that, it should be educational. My hope is that I’ll be able to do a monthly video, Errant Signal style.
So that’s where your support is going. Thanks for giving. And if you don’t give, thanks for sharing the articles. And even if you don’t share the articles, thanks for reading. And if you don’t read, thanks for not slipping into my yard in the dead of night and egging my house.
Onward!
Footnotes:
[1] Note that not all supporters are part of the Patreon. There are a small handful of people who prefer to use PayPal.
[2] And good luck getting your original fans back if things don’t work out with the new audience.
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I wasn’t a poor student on a limited budget I would definitely be donating to your patreon. I really enjoy what you (and others) do here.
Yeah, one of the things I’m looking forward to when I (finally) find a job is getting on Patreon and throwing money at people.
Yeah, one of the things I'm looking forward to when I (finally) find a job is getting on Patreon and throwing eggs at people’s houses.
I’d donate to that cause.
That’s probably way more expensive than the Patreon-ing. For the money it’d cost me to get to Shamus’ house, egg it and get home, I could double his Patreon income for a month and a bit…
So actually Shamus needn’t be thankful for us not egging his house since that’s the most expensive of the options in the list. If a significant number of his readers did that, it’d show more commitment than the same number of people giving to his Patreon :)
I would have supported you but I was living paycheck to paycheck, and now I’ve lost my job so I’m now living unemployment payment to unemployment payment. When I have some money to spare, this is my first stop.
And this is yet another problem when everyone’s economies are FUBAR thanks to things I won’t mention here for fear of Shamus swinging the banhammer ;)
It hurts everyone because people have less money to spend on things they enjoy and that means creatives like us have a smaller pool of potential people willing to support us. That in turn means creatives end up unable to support themselves and have to search for other jobs… when there aren’t enough to go around in the first place. Vicious cycle ;_;
“As soon as we were old enough, our father sent us to work in the content mill…”
“I worked in the content mine for 26 hours a day, 9 days a week, and then we had to go home – uphill both ways – to a matchbox with the matches still inside, that we shared with Josh and Mumbles”
You are clearly lying liar. No way would a matchbox with the matches inside survive Mumbles and Josh for more than couple of minutes untill one of them lights the thing up.
Yeah, Josh would have burnt the matchbook down and Mumbles would teach crows to light their own fires to keep warm.
“You were lucky. My father sent us to work at 8 years old, liking and disliking videos, upvoting and retweeting 16 hours a day, and if we had time before going to sleep curled up in a damp rag, we might get the scraps of a meal of our old pulverized motherboards.”
8 years old?Ha!Lucky.By that time our father has been working us for 24 straight years,with no pay,commenting on youtube videos,flagging spam and spamming flags,even while we were asleep,in our wet cement beds,which we were molding with our bodies for a sculpture making company.
So, this basically: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo
I was going for a Charles Dickens/Elizabeth Haskell route, but yes, everyone else is doing The Four Yorkshiremen.
I knew what the link would be before I opened it.
Just goes to show what kind of erudite pedigree us twenty siders have.
The lowest kind.
Well you know what the obvious solution is: To put Like and Unlike buttons in the posts. ;)
Currently the only statistic available to the visitor is comments.
Hm… personally I dislike votes like that, I feel it cheapens the content, reducing it down to the point where real discussion is less likely because people simply hit a downvote button and move on instead of articulating ‘why’ they disliked something.
But vote buttons are also pretty much ubiquitous now… eh, I dunno, not sure I’d like having them on good quality articles like Shamus writes. Guess it’d be worth a trial run for a few months to see if they have an impact, and whether it’s positive or negative.
Trouble is, if the impact is negative, that could cost Shamus money and fans.
I agree and also suspect that vote buttons actually discourage (mildly, perhaps) actual interactions. One of the reasons I’m a Loyal Reader is that the commenting community is non-toxic and generally respectful, and I appreciate the work that goes into it on the hammer side of things, mostly invisibly. A simple like/dislike doesn’t ADD content or much value even to the host. “Well, I did something right; approval is at 96% instead of high 80s. I wonder what it was..” as opposed to a slew of comments saying “Yes! That Strawberry Shortcake/GI Joe mashup was hilarious!”
Also, up/downvotes on comments automatically tend towards making arguments more hostile. Even if it’s ‘just a meaningless number’, it feels worse to have your comment downvoted than it does to just have a response that disagrees. (This is doubly true on Reddit, which tracks your total comment score)
It’s also an easy way to enforce echo chambers. The ‘correct’ opinion (by the standards of the echo chamber) gets upvoted and the ‘incorrect’ opinion gets downvoted, and the illogical part of people’s brains that makes them value internet points tells them “Don’t disagree – you don’t want to be downvoted, do you?” or “You know, if you say this, you could get some easy upvotes”
It’s just a weird quirk of human nature that for a lot of us, if there is a variable associated with us that we can make More Good, we’ll instinctively try to improve it even if doing so provides us no actual benefit beyond a bigger number.
On the positive side of voting on individual comments:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll-lia-FEIY
For this community I think just like buttons would be better than adding both like and dislike.
There have been times when I have found a comment hilarious and have wanted to say so, but didn’t really feel I had anything to add so writing a new comment seemed excessive.
However there haven’t really been any times when I have wanted to dislike anything and nor do I think Shamus should encourage his audience (us!) to start looking for things to dislike in other people’s comments.
+1
…
Then again, ordering by votes or likes can break the flow of a discussion, so that may not be the best thing. Just showing the number in a way that’s quickly understood while scrolling through seems better to me.
Might be good to have some sort of view count or the equivalent of a subscriber number somewhere around. As noted, the big thing is showing to new people how “obscure” this guy is. Plus avoiding the problems with a rating system. Like who I’m comparing against. I generally like what Shamus posts, but may not always agree with him or particularly like a piece of content.
I can identify with your struggles to get people reading, I find the same. Gets super demotivating after a while, and I don’t have the benefit of an existing readership thanks to another site like the Escapist or similar.
End of the day, 30,000+ words of good quality deconstruction (or fiction, I write both) means little if you can’t persuade people it’s worth their time.
Question for Shamus: You say you’re packaging up the Mass Effect series into book form to sell? What are the legalities surrounding that? I’m doing a similar series on Fallout 3 (though I’m doing something a bit different to yours) and never considered packaging it up as it stands, other than hoping to get support via Patreon.
I did consider taking the general concepts and ideas I’m using and making more of a general tip book out of it, but that would by necessity lead to removing all references to Fallout 3.
I mean sure, critique is basically legal (for a given value of legal…) under fair use, but I didn’t think that would extend to something like packaging up your ME series and selling it as a book. Any enlightenment on that would be very much appreciated :)
I Am Not A Lawyer, but this would be a work of long-form criticism. Such things have been written and published for films, music, novels, plays, and other media for decades. It is generally considered fair use, and the format is usually irrelevant. I’ll note that trademark law is something different than copyright, so these critical works usually include a bit of legal boilerplate on the title page or verso saying “Shootmans: The Shootening and all related characters and products are the property of Big Video Game Company” or somesuch.
Oh, and to avoid future headaches: If you’re using screenshots or pictures of box art, capture your own images as much as possible. If you want to use other people’s images, get their permission in writing first and give them credit.
Very interesting, thanks for the insight :) I’ll have a deeper look into long-form critique in that case, since my work falls under that category. Though since I’m not ‘just’ critiquing, I might be in murkier waters. But eh, if that’s the case I can always edit the work to bring it into line with whatever is necessary for it to be viable.
I actually have contact with an IP lawyer. I’ll direct him this way this evening and see if he has time to comment.
Sweet, thanks muchly :)
I am not sure what’s feasible for you, Shamus, but I would be more comfortable with something more transactional than a metaphorical tip jar like patreon. I may be in the minority. For example, I loved getting to buy a couple of copies of Good Robot. I would love some other way to make a more tangible purchase. A Twenty Sided tee shirt, for example. Maybe it says, “But what do they EAT?!” or something. Mousepads, mugs, that kind of thing. “Merch.” Maybe doing enough of that to help financially wouldn’t be worth the time or resources; I could understand that. But it’s easier for me to drop $20 on a tee shirt than $5 on a patreon pledge for 4 months. Not saying that I won’t ever pledge or that you should in any way ditch the patreon model. Just throwing out my own inclinations. I’d rather be a customer than a patron. Maybe just give some thought to adding a small scale transactional model?
I second that. It’d be easier for me to buy an (overpriced due to shipping) Tshirt for 20$+10$ shipping, then to add an extra 5$ to my pledge.
Man, I would LOVE being able to wear some Twentysided merch. Of course, as a ridiculously oversized human, I understand that it probably wouldn’t be financially feasible for Shamus to produce shirts in a 5X tall even if he did make them, but still. Even just some bumper stickers or something would be great.
I have no idea if the startup and production costs make this unfeasible, but I just want to add my vote to Jingleman’s here, Shamus. I would buy the SHIT out of merchandise for this site if you were able to make it.
Thirded!
An interesting post to read on this general subject:
http://monsterhunternation.com/2016/04/02/why-havent-i-gotten-my-patch-yet-its-been-2-weeks/
This illustrates quite well how difficult it is for one guy (or even a few working in their spare time) to send out merch. Shamus would probably need to hire someone to handle it on his behalf, assuming he still wanted time left over for actually writing.
If you’re getting enough money through the sale of merch to hire someone, great. But if not, it has the potential to cause really serious problems, especially anything involving shipping overseas.
I have no idea if it actually works well, or how much of a cut is taken, by things like CafePress and the like. I think that’s the outfit that I ordered some sweet sweet Laundry merch from (yes, the C Stross Laundry series, links may or may not be at his website).
Admittedly, this guy has a day job that’s pulling 55 hours a week out of his schedule, but he’s also doing merchandise the hard way. Art up on Cafe Press or Zazzle is the easy way and you only pay for it by getting a small fraction of the purchase price of the item (that you’re not selling now anyway because you haven’t started yet).
I would avoid Cafepress for t shirts though. I have gotten a couple from them for Order of the Stick stuff and the printing on the shirts was almost completely gone after a few months.
My OOTS shirt still looks great* after a few years.
*if you disregard my optimism in selecting the size, which assumed that I’d only loose weight from the time of purchase forward… and the resulting fact that I don’t wear it too often. It gets two to three washes a year.
Time and effort would definitely be a concern, but for what it’s worth, here’s how I would approach the idea of merch:
I’d pick one item (let’s say tee shirt for this example) and do it as a limited edition or collector’s item. I’d figure out how many I needed to sell in one go to make it worth it, and then I would put it out there for pre-orders for a limited time (maybe 2-3 weeks), with the understanding that people will be charged and orders will be placed only if the pre-set minimum number of pre-orders happen, they will all ship out at once after the pre-orders are closed, and I’d never sell any more of that tee shirt after the pre-order period. I would only produce the number of shirts that got ordered (or as close to that as my vendor let me get away with).
That puts time pressure on it for the customer, increases perceived value due to the limited quantity, and it mitigates some of the trouble of inventory management and overhead that come with a true internet storefront. You do it as a one-shot, so it’s just an investment of one or two weekends (or however long; I admittedly don’t know what kind of time investment this would be). You can plan ahead for it, though; you wouldn’t have to keep up with an ongoing effort. If it’s successful, then you consider doing it again once or twice a year, as new tee shirt designs or product ideas come up. Otherwise, no big deal; you haven’t spent lots of resources setting up an infrastructure. If you wanted to get fancy, you could do a higher tier that is the same product but autographed, especially when you’re publishing a new book.
That’s my two cents. I don’t think you want to be in the merch business, Shamus, but maybe this is another avenue for some supplemental revenue that would appeal to some segment of your audience, like me. Either way, I appreciate the content you put out, and I plan to keep reading as long as you keep writing.
What he said.
I would actually love a shirt that asks what they eat, completely aside from considerations of supporting the Family Shamus, so double plus yes this.
I know a lot of webcomics use this model to make a living out of putting everything online for free. It might not be a bad idea for some additional monetization. And it gives another way for people to give you money that doesn’t need you to give people reminders.
Yeah, merchandise would be a cool idea. I’ve always wanted a nice mug for the office, but never saw any so far that really totally clicked without also being quite awkward having to explain all the time. A “But what do they EAT?” mug however would even be a fun joke for someone who doesn’t understand the reference to your writing. :)
WRT Merch. This is a tricky one.
On demand printing brings a trickle of income because you get a very small cut of printing. We have a store for Shamus on Zazzle, and he gets maybe $.20 on a purchase unless it is a huge purchase and even then it is only a couple bucks. ( Store here, has not been updated for a a few years or so, since DM of the Rings because it doesn’t make much, I usually take care of that end of things, and I have a full time job. Once we have enough income that I can quit doing outside work I will be able to help him be more productive- editing his books, publishing his books, making merchandise, and so on. He does the content, I do most of the other stuff.)
Getting stuff printed means having a pile of stuff and what doesn’t get sold sits around being stored, and not getting sold. This is also why we do print on demand books- so we don’t have books sitting around not getting sold and needing stored. Plus, you have to eat the cost of merch that doesn’t get sold.
Regardless, dropping $20 on a T-shirt is nice and all, except it doesn’t pay us the full $20. It pays $5-10 if we stock them (which means we had to pay previously to get them printed and are out the $10 it cost to print until that t-shirt sells – which is basically what happened with Sherwood Showdown, they had to get so many card games printed, and if we didn’t sell at least x, the creator of the game ate the cost. If we ever sell beyond the initial cost of sale, then we get paid a cut.
And if you drop $20 on a t-shirt on zazzle or any other print on demand service, we get about $1.70.
Maybe someday, if we have enough regular income we can do merch on the side, but right now it is a bit too much fuss with not enough payback.
What about a model where people pre-order the product and then you only print enough to cover the pre-orders? Like Kickstarter, but instead of a minimum amount of cash, you could have a minimum amount of orders before you go to print.
You still have to spend the time creating the design, researching companies, do a test run to check the quality, and so on. It still takes initial setup and cost which, considering my time is worth $20 at a minimum and any time Shamus takes away from content creation means less content creation, and the return on such a project would be minimal in the grand scheme of things. Granted if a enough of his audience wanted merch and wanted merch of the same sort so we could do a single, limited run of a single image it might be worth it, but really creating merch is more a small side project when one of us has some downtime and no projects lined up rather than a high priority. Once I no longer have a full time job this might be a project to bring in a bit more cash, but at the moment we have too many other projects going for it to be viable.
Glad I’m not the only one to want a t-shirt. Cafepress lost my business when they tried to charge too much for me to have a store. This was especially upsetting, because you are completely right about how much time it takes to set up a store, and that is time you’re effectively not being paid.
I do want to recommend http://www.redbubble.com/ to you guys though. Its service is good, the quality of the prints is fantastic, the shirts are a bit pricey (to your end-customer) but they are very high quality. Also there are a lot of products to choose from.
Best thing about it is there is no cost to the artist, and they are steadily adding products too.
Why not just set up an Amazon portal, every time some fan buys something from Amazon, you get a small cut. Cost neither you nor the fan any extra, and we all know people do spend a lot on Amazon, and they can help you at the same time.
I’m always hoping for another Let’s Play. Granted, MMOs have largely faded from cultural relevance, and most of them are so lazily designed that it may not even be interesting to poke fun at them….
I’d actually suggest making Stolen Pixels style comics again. The thing is that they’re very easy to share. Someone can post the entire comic on 9gag or Facebook (or, god help us, tumblr), it only takes a few seconds to read, and if people like it they might go looking for more. They’re an even lower investment of reader attention than a video. Sure, a lot of people will see them and never wind up coming back here, but it’s not like you get paid per person viewing your stuff when it’s posted here anyway.
As Daemian Lucifer might say:Shamoose needs to make dm of the hobbitses.
I wonder if the amount of time involved with either type of cartoon is prohibitive, though? Or even just the style of work – lots of faffing around with e.g. DVDs and whatnot. Perhaps not particularly enjoyable to work on – and that is an important factor, I reckon.
The resulting cartoons would be highly shareable, though! – and as the Patreon page says, it was DMotR: “which made [him] internet-famous.”
I think I brought this up myself a while ago, and I still think it’d be a pretty cool thing. There are some people which I’ve tried pointing at this site, and so far the biggest success was with someone who plowed through DMoTR, loved it, briefly skimmed the other content of this site, then went and read Darths & Droids and Girl Genius instead — although he’s a DM and prolific PC gamer and all.
Then again: I know that DM of the Hobbitses could not be a direct repetition of DMoTR, and I think that may be what’s keeping Shamus back, at least that’s what would bother me. It’d be too easy to just make the same jokes again, so I’m not angry it hasn’t happened yet.
… I just very much wish it would :)
Uh! Uh!!
I know someone who knows a lot about roleplaying and a huge amount of clichés and genuinely useful things about RPGs! And that person even has a very admirable sense of humor! And I suspect that Shamus might also know that person, based on their simultaneous appearance in some podcast or another… Wouldn’t that be a pretty cool thing to collaborate on?
Yeah, you still see Stolen Pixels stuff floating around all the time–the “videogames in heaven/hell” one in particular.
Dunno how much easier it is to make a comic than videos, though, if effort’s the problem. Plus, images have a tendency to lose their source very easily… watermarks get cropped off or covered by some other site’s watermark, etc.
Yepp, just be sure to include the URL to your site into the comic (like Dilbert does it between the frames, so it won’t get lost so easily if someone crops it badly). Many an image that went through various obscure sites ended up leading someone back to the source this way.
Yep, stolen Pixels would be my second favourite to return, right after DM of the Hobbit.
hey Shamus – it’s been a long time since I’ve commented, but you know I’ve been a regular reader of yours for what, a decade now?
I think you need to monetize your knowledge. Have you considered doing a seminar? Maybe an introduction to game programming – use the Procedural World as an example, or Good Robot, and have people start from scratch and gradually add complexity following the trajectory of your old posts. The basic model would be:
1. sign up phase. fee should be a couple hundred dollars, limit the class to ten people so you can a. devote enough personal time to helping the students and b. keeping it intimate enough for relevant and detailed feedback before you scale up.
2. create the curriculum. each weekly class would be one hour of demo lecture and then an assignment. Then have “office hours” on chat to help people with their assignments.
3. have students critique and debug each others’ work. Host the class on github so everything is open.
At the end, you will have a youtube series that can be monetized as well. You can repeat the thing every few months, using the pre-existing youtube lectures and letting people signup for the “office hours” and debug sessions.
As an example, Look at what Brian Sanderson is doing – his Youtube series on writing SF (his lecture at BYU). You could do much the same thing but charge. You should watch his series to get an idea of how he uses the lectures to teach teh didactic material and then the students have to go out and actually apply what they learned – he expects a 6 hour a week commitment.
Obviously you would need to vet your students for a certain level of technical prerequisite. Able to code in C, setup an IDE, etc. You can assign the IDE so everyone is on teh same page.
Anyway i am just brainnstorming here but I think its something you could make work. And would be a lot of fun. Let’s see if anyone else here seconds the idea – you probably will fill a ten-person quota easily in this thread alone.
The website you linked to got it wrong as well so I get why you made the mistake but his name is Brandon. Not Brian.
I was kind of hoping that was a typo. :P
Definitely, Shamus, if you can, do regular educational videos. If they are great (and I know you can do the analysis and text/explanation parts very well) you might end up among the still few good vidyagame educhannels alongside Errant Signal, Super Bunnyhop or Game Maker’s Toolkit. They all have decent numbers. Just remember to stick to one format or at max to 2-3 series (review, analysis, tech education for example) and have regular output.
Also, guys, I strongly believe you should start posting the Diecast on Youtube. The way TB does it with Cooptional Podcast. I like 3 podcasts (Diecast, bunnyhop’s TOVG and TB’s Cooptional) and just one (TB’s) is on YT. And I am constantly forgetting to check the nonYT ones because I have to step out of my YT subscription fueled comfort bubble and visit specific sites.
A) HEY HAVE YOU SEEN THIS SS REMAKE KS…oh, you have been notified 20,000 times already. Well booh. :P
B) Let’s hope the lady lives to be 120.
C) I’m not a Patreon user, have donated money in the past a few times, and I will again…Once my house loan goes through and I’m no longer drowning in debt :(
D) As others have said, merch would be a good idea; there are several options which will have various returns for various amount of effort – from Cafepress (upload an image, choose what items it can be pressed on, ???, profit) to manually making it yourself (and writing a 50-piece series on all the pitfalls of screen printing :-D ). If you go for an “easy” solution (for certain definitions of “easy”), it’d be quite possible to have separate merch available for Twentysided, Diecast, Spoiler Warning, even Good Robot, and split up accordingly).
E) I’m very happy with the way this site is for the moment, text-to-audio-to-video wise, quality wise, and amount of content wise. Please keep doing what you like best, because apparently, it’s also what I like best :D
“The Mass Effect retrospective is being compiled into book form. Maybe that will sell.”
Hopefully at least one copy to everyone who was in charge of what happened to Mass Effect.
I will gladly donate to that cause, as well as buying a copy for everyone who’s currently working on Andromeda.
This is a really fun idea. Just buy a dozen, slap them into a box, and mail them to BioWare?
“alleged music”
*actual music
Fixed for typo.
“My kids are old enough to get into audio / video editing”
Yay child labour!
You might want to try finding another press organ, if you’ve not already tried.
Would you make comics again? That’s sort of halfway between text and video.
Make and sell more Videao Games, using the overwhelming, planetary success of Good Robots?
Go to an actual physical local market, set up an empty stand between the vegetable and craft sellers, and deal in cultural criticism by the line?
“Yay child labor”
And actual marketable job-getting or college-getting-into experience. Actual projects seen through end to end with published results? And you’ve done this for how long? That’s like interview catnip.
Indeed it is, provided they like it and invest themselves in this activity.
Let not my failed attempt at humour diverts from the positive points of the situation.
How did this happen to be the default in the usa?And is that a thing for a bunch of countries in the west?I ask because its not a taboo in my country.I know exactly what my friends are making,they know exactly what Im making.My parents even shared this info with their friends,regardless of who made more or less.
Calvinistic modesty, as far as I can tell.
Not a clue why, also not in the US but here it seems to be less and less taboo for each generation. While my parents would probably never talk about personal finances, atleast not in any detail,
For me and my friends (in our 30s) it’s not that rare and for the people even younger it’s something they will happely talk about openly on facebook, bloggs and youtube with strangers and an audience.
It’s pretty taboo in the UK too.
Keeping income secret cuts down on the resentment you might feel towards someone who’s earning more than you even though they clearly don’t deserve it.
Pretty much this. I never tell even my best friends how much I make (unless they asked specifically for some reason) – it’s high enough for me to feel bad, even if they likely wouldn’t be jealous.
Same. I am ridiculously lucky to be paid as well as I am for an entry level job, and for a very long time, I felt that I didn’t deserve it, and felt guilty when I saw how much some of my (smarter and more hardworking) friends were struggling.
I’ve started to come around to “their jobs not paying them anything is not YOUR fault, and you’re not singlehandedly being the capitalist oppressor or whatever because you happen to make more money than them”, but it’s still a very uncomfortable topic for me.
Extra discomfort: my parents and older sister are all teachers; I make at least 150% more money than my dad. Which only goes to show how sad teachers’ salaries are in my state, but I digress.
Another part of the problem is that by having a culture that opposes sharing financial information we are perpetuating the situation where employers can underpay employees. After all your employer knows exactly how much your coworkers are making and therefore has a better idea of your earning potential than you do.
I’d say it’s part guilt/shame, but also part allowing you to keep your circle of friends and acquaintances regardless of income. It reduces the envy/competition between colleagues who might otherwise work against and not with one another.
My family is somewhat mixed in this regard. Some members will just plain out go and ask others how much they make, then state their own income, which is usually higher than the other person’s. That’s really a good way to end a conversation: “How much do you make, 40k? Isn’t that less then your previous one? Well, my new job pays me 85k. I really like it, and we’re buying a house next year”.
Well, thanks for pointing that out…
I think that maybe in some places or some circles of friends people are sensitive enough not to use that tone but for most people I know (including myself) it’s really hard to talk about income and not sound like you’re trying to either impress others or whine about your financial situation.
Well,since you got most people dragged in with DM of the rings,maybe its time you do Hobbit of the rings *hinthintnudgenudge*
EDIT:Damn you ninja MichaelGC!
Sorry! :p Another possibility – just spitballin’ here: DM of the Avengerers?
To overthink the last sentence of this article, “Thanks for reading” always struck me as a strange thing to say. You put in effort to create content, and your audience consumes the content for their enjoyment, we’re the ones who should be thanking you.
I guess it’s just one of those illogical social conventions, like how the question “How’s it going?” is rarely meant to ascertain how it is going, and is really just a synonym for “Hello”.
Anyway, you make good content, thanks Shamus.
It really is weird when a content creator thanks their audience.Though at least it makes more sense when the content is free than when its being sold.
I agree with Ninety-Three that there can be element of: “no-no, thankyou to it, but I don’t think it’s too strange. You have cases like Totalbiscuit, where watching one of his vids directly makes him money (a tiny amount per view, of course).
I’m not creative myself, but it’s natural (if not guaranteed) that a creator would like to have an audience. If you’re saying something, mostly you’d want at least someone to hear it. So, we are actually providing something to the creator which that creator wants, and thus it’s not too odd to be thanked for that.
And of course it’s then very nice when we can just send additional thanks straight back! Win-win.
I don’t find it that strange. I’ve got a personal blog myself, and I know what I’m putting up there is not of critical importance to anyone, it’s just weird things that amuse me enough to expend the effort to write them up. I’m always flattered when someone finds it interesting enough to spend the time to read.
I (as an aspiring, as it were) writer would say that it’s a bit of both. There’s enjoyment to be had by the writing. But there’s also enjoyment to be had, knowing that people read and appreciate what you’re doing.
I suspect that if there’d been a massive audience appreciation for “uphill stone rolling”, a Sisyphean task may not be all that horrible (hm, maybe there’s a YouTube niche for that…).
If and when I’m writing, the thing I like most is not getting paid for it but finding that people actually enjoy reading the results. I mean, why do people comment here? Can’t be for money. Hoping to spread their own wisdom? Possibly. Interacting with people and hoping that somebody thinks the message is interesting? At least in my case.
So “thanks for reading” makes total sense to me.
(Also: Competing with others and “winning” discussions etc… yeah, probably some of that, too)
Personally, I comment mostly as a form of Rubber Duck Debugging. Having to express my opinions for an audience helps me develop and understand them better. Plus, it can foment edifying discussions.
But I recognize that I’m an atypical internet user, I’m also the sort of person who genuinely doesn’t understand the point of Like/Upvote buttons. Are you supposed to upvote because you want to reward the poster with worthless internet points? Because you want it to be sorted higher in the ranking algorithm so that more people will see it?
I think that you are correct about video content bringing in more eyes.
However, I personally prefer written words over video. When I google a random topic I will always click on the links to written articles first, even if I have to go to page 2 or 3 to find them. I vastly prefer text over video. Not sure if that is a personal idiosyncrasy, or just due to the fact that I reached adulthood before the internet was common.
I also prefer to read than to watch the equivalent as a video.
I don’t mind short videos, but when reading I can listen to music, and I can process everything at my own pace.
Also, I really enjoyed your long-form essays on Fallout 3 and Mass Effect 3, and I really hope you’ll do more of those (there must be plenty of good examples for you to pick from!).
I feel the same way. Part of it for me is that I’m a fast reader, so I can generally skim an article much faster than I can watch a video.
Also, I’ll sometimes read Shamus’ articles at work… it’s a whole lot more difficult to disguise that when I’m watching a video. Don’t tell my boss, okay? :P
I generally avoid videos like the plague, whether I am searching google, reading news websites, or seeking entertainment like twenty sided. Similarly with podcasts. Reading is where the action is baby. And comics. In both cases obviously they need to be entertaining but Shamus is pretty darn good at that!
Shamus has to go his own way on this. However I feel it is also important to tell Shamus how we feel as he is not a mind-reader (or at least he is playing it close to his chest if he is!), particularly those of us who are on Patreon (BTW, it was a good idea to mention Patreon in this post, I had to replace my credit card last month and only just realised I hadn’t updated the details on Patreon, fixed now, sorry about that :-( ).
From my point of view I already find it slightly frustrating that so much of Shamus’s content is podcasts or video, neither of which I view. I really appreciate that Shamus has recently been making efforts to write interesting commentary to go with the videos/podcasts but it isn’t quite the same when you aren’t actually watching/listening to the material!
So that would be a firm vote against transferring more writing time to video time. Just one vote though. I may be in a tiny minority…
I’m with you. I don’t watch videos or listen to podcast (hearing issues, I need subtitles anyway.) It irks me when content is video or podcast when I prefer reading any day.
Ahah! We can be a tiny minority that includes at least one person of influence then ;-).
Hey,she has to live with the guy,thats difficult enough.Dont force her to read his stuff as well.
I have recently been rereading your System Shock book, and I thought at the time that it would make a great movie. With the remake and rerelease, etc. sparking interest in the IP, you might be able to sell an adaptation.
P.S.–I support your Patreon, and I love your long-form articles!
If only there were a way to sort out the legalities around publishing the story – GOG are pushing a revamped Kickstarter System Shock. Maybe there is a way to find out how they overcame the legals (as well as persuading them to publish Good Robot too)?
GOG (actually Night Dive Studios) own the rights to System Shock. So Shamus would probably have to get some kind of publishing deal with them or something (I’m no lawyer, so the particulars are beyond me).
Im not sure that the rights to a video game cover books set in that world.
Afaik the official books for games like Bioshock and Borderlands all had to be licensed by the developers/publishers, depending on who held the rights.
Have you ever considered doing some more analytical Twitch plays (without the crew)? They should not take too much time and might broaden reach.
Aye, he has talked about that as an option before – most amusingly!:
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=30199
(It’s in the ‘Amplitude’ section on that page.)
“I'm working on doing some sort of collaboration where I can just do the writing and narration and offload the time-sucking editing onto an assistant.”
I know of at least one patreon funded Youtuber who has an editor, and it seems to work out pretty well. And judging by the pledge goals of other Patreon campaigns, many video creators seem to be looking into this.
As for video being a good way to attract new readers, you’re probably in a good position to judge that with Spoiler Warning. Do people only discover the show via this site, or do people also find it through Youtube alone? And if they do, do the viewers then turn into readers of the blog, or do they stick to the videos?
I hate giving to Patreon, twitch subs and the like, it’s just not something I do. I prefer having a real product for money spent, which is why I’ve been waiting for quite a while to buy Good Robot. I don’t know your process, and even though it’s not my favourite game, I can guarantee I will always buy and play games you make. Maybe there’s a way to make games faster, cheaper, maybe it’s not a feasible long term income, but in any case, it’s how I personally like to support the blog.
Maybe give Unity3d a shot.
The Mass Effect series as a book.
Sold
I love your stuff man, keep going with the good work.
Hey, Shamus. I’ve read your articles for quite a while, and always enjoyed them a lot. One thing that might be lowering your readership, possibly, is something with how your blocklist works.
Back when I lived in Brazil, I could never access your website though certain internet providers. No matter what browser, it just gave me an error message to the tune of “you don’t have permission to access this page”. I might be off, it’s a long while since I had that message. I also tried using other computers and confirmed that it was a matter of internet providers. If I was getting my internet from company “A” I could access your website fine, same computer but using company “B” it would always give me an error message.
Now, this does not affect me since I moved to a different country, and I have no idea how many people would be affected by the same issue as me. Honestly, I have no idea even what the problem is, much less how to solve it. But I felt you should at least know about it. I know it stopped me from reading you for a while, and maybe some other people out there might be in the same boat right now? This was all a while back, I have no idea if it’s still even an issue anymore.
Food for thought. Good luck with the website, keep on writing! It’s always a joy to read your thoughts on games, the universe and everything else.
I think it’s safe to assume that Shamus had your provider blocked for spam. He’s mentioned in the comments before that he’s had to blacklist many providers over the years since all they seemed to send him was spam. One time he tried to approve some of the older ones again, and the spam came back. He’s worried about it affecting readers, but it’s either a few blocked readers or mountains of spam.
“The Mass Effect retrospective is being compiled into book form. Mayb”
SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY.
I mean, I will be buying that. I will definitely and for certain be buying that.
Heather, are you a nurse or CNA? If so, nevermind. If not, becoming a CNA would be a way to transition into caregiving as a stable job, and an LPN certification is a good paying promotion in the field for not that much education.
The nonemergency transport side of EMS is also not nearly as stressful as the 911 side*. I was working for a transport ambulance company over the last year, and I wouldn’t consider it particularly stressful caregiving work. EMT-Basic is also a thing that doesn’t take a whole lot of education.
*Personally loved the 911 side, just kept getting fired :P
Nope and have no intention. I kind of hate the medical industry with a very strong passion. I am actually a former special ed teacher (will never go back there either– too much paperwork, not enough working with kids which is why I became one). I don’t like institutionalized anything, not school, not health care, none. So I avoid it as much as possible. The whole point of my current job is keeping her at home if at all possible for as long as possible. Currently that means 2-3 caretakers on full time, 12 hr a day, and 1 over night.
I am actually a professional artist/illustrator (working on second children’s book in a series of at least 3 at the moment (first one here) AND full-time Girl Friday for Shamus. The caretaker job just pays the bills. But thank you for the suggestion.
Ok. I understand. Thank you for responding; and I agree somewhat; the inside of nursing facilities are not a pleasant place, least of all for the residents.
*Shakes fist at Millennial comment*
Hey, I’m 25 and I follow the site. It’s more about finding the sane people out there. Deep analysis is really good stuff, we don’t see enough of it out there. Plus today’s society is too enamored with video. It’s great for some stuff, but terrible for many others.
To be clear, I was complaining about people who complain about millennials. It’s a practice I find baffling and wrongheaded, particularly coming from Baby Boomers, who really should know better since they got the exact same treatment when they were your age.
There goes a common thread through human history where any generation would complain about the next generation being stupid, self-absorbed, short-sighted and foolish, not realizing the hyperbole in such complaints nor that they themselves were no different when they were young. One should not underestimate the intelligence of the young; just that they have different priorities and world views doesn’t mean they are stupid. (I would hazard a guess that the ratio stupid:intelligent is roughly the same across all ages.)
Aye right! Although, there is something which does change, and isn’t constant across the ages…
Quantity. :D
I meant ages in the sense of comparing young people with old people. Not in the sense middle ages vs internet age.
Aye – although my comments might still apply, but on the smaller scale. So far throughout history as we know it, subsequent generations have been larger than the previous ones. So, for me, if anything is going to mess with the ratios, this will.
In a way, though, this is irrelevant, because it applies universally. I don’t know if I’m describing that right – it’s sort of a brute force, across-the-board difference not linked to any one part of the original discussion. In any event! – I think what you say is true in spirit, even if the actual numbers might have changed solely due to population size.
Obligatory xkcd link:
https://xkcd.com/1601/
On a semi-serious note, I’d take “anti social isolation” in public transport any time over awkward small-talk with random strangers.
A monthly video in the style of Errant Signal? Count me in. I almost never watch* Spoiler Warning or listen to the Diecast, but one video per month sounds quite intriguing. (I’d most likely read transcripts or summaries, however.)
Just do me a favour with these monthly videos, and at least sometimes show up yourself, not just talking from the off over some game footage. While many videos of some dude talking into the camera make me wish they had just written this all down instead so we could read it, I think seeing the face from time to time helps build the connection between you and the audience.
That said, if you haven’t yet, check out what Scott Manley does, I like the formatless format (heh) and the way he mixes game commentary and education.
*FYI, the chief reason why I don’t is that I tend to do either all of it, or none at all. Since the frequency and thus sheer amount of video and audio time of both combined would be too much for various reasons, I end up skipping all of it.**
**The chief reason is the sheer amount of it, and the multiple people speaking. Not necessarily simultaneously, but just having the different voices to discern and different opinions to assign to them in order to not get it all mixed up, is drag on my enjoyment of such video/audio content.***
***I wanted to keep going here, Spanish Inquisition style, but ran out of “chief reasons”. :D
I think you’re also doing one very smart thing with these, Shamus. It helps your audience see you as a real person, with real troubles and joys and annoyances and shining moments of triumph. I feel that, in this largely commercial world where you tend to feel like you’re dealing with a faceless corporate entity, whose interactions with consumers are strictly controlled and follow protocol, that sort of personal connection is something that’s incredibly valuable. I’ve often said on forums before that I feel developers are going about trying to fight piracy the wrong way; the people who pirate games are people who would have NEVER paid for your game anyway. It’s useless to try and chase their dollar. What they should be doing instead is engaging more people to build connections with them, turn them into loyal supporters who WANT to buy the game, to feel like they’re part of a community who sticks together and are sharing in something special.
I don’t usually share your articles, but every now and then you write one I really like and think that my immediate family and circle of friends will too (unlike everyone and their mom, my Friends list on facebook is something I take care to only include relevant people. FB says I have a friends list of 60 people. I know at least 150 people in my family. I call that a success.)
I think the last one I shared was the one about how storage limitations gave way to Christmas starting earlier every year… I should share more.
And I am very embarrassed that my Patreon Pledge didn’t go through this month. My card was cloned and I am facing the mother of all headaches trying to get the new one in order, but for some reason unfathomable to me Patreon is simply refusing my new credit card…
I’ve been with your site since before DM of the rings and you’re easily my favourite content producer on the internet, but just like many other people I’m flat broke myself. That said I sold all my steam trading cards from the last 2 years and bought Good Robot for a friend, so that’s my tiny contribution. Keep up the great work Shamus, I hope to be reading your stuff for years to come.
Just want to say thanks to all of Shamus’s patrons! I’m not one myself, as I’m not comfortable adding another regular bill right now, but I’ve loved the site for years (2007?) and hope it keeps on going and that it grows enough to put food in Shamus’s family’s collective face all by itself.
Fwiw, I read every article and listen to every Diecast. I only sometimes watch Spoiler Warning (Skyrim, KotOR, Salt & Sanctuary), but always read the writeups, even for seasons that don’t interest me. I usually try and watch the archived livestreams. I scroll through the comments to look for any gold ones. Not sure if knowing that is useful for learning visitor habits, and I’m only one reader, but there you go anwyay.
Edit: Oh, and I bought Good Robot, haven’t quite beat it, and still intend to finish my Descent mod. (Got the primary weapons in, but need to do secondaries and would like to try messing with enemy weapons, shield economy, etc.)
I just found out about this blog a few months ago, by way of someone in the BioWare forums linking to your Mass Effect series. I love me some Mass Effect. (Even ME3.) But just because I love it doesn’t mean I don’t like looking at it critically, so your series tearing down the missteps was awesome, for me as a fan and as an aspiring amateur writer.
As for the Patreon: you are now be-patroned by me. Happily, my day job pays well enough that I can share the love in a less metaphorical sense than usual.
If you’re looking for increased revenue without audience-hunting or changing up your content, could I suggest a slight tweak to your Patreon page? Right now you offer no “rewards” – I understand that you don’t think you can offer anything beyond “I will continue to write stuff”, but you could definitely add some extremely low-effort pledge levels which would increase your earnings almost straight away.
I’ve been making a living from Patreon for almost 2 years now, and so I’d be more than happy to help you come up with some stuff. Let me know!
Have you considered adding more goals to your Patreon page? That’d help, potentially at least, illustrate what $$$ you need to actually have a sustainable life as a ‘blogger’- which might (equally potentially) encourage people to put up some more money?