T w e n t y S i d e d
Rutskarn is doing a Patreon. Here is his pitch:
Link (YouTube) |
You know those lists where people tell you little factoids like, “George Clooney played a bit part on a sitcom before he hit it big.” I imagine someday people will say something like, “Adam DeCamp was on a Let’s Play with some other people before he became a famous writer.” I’m not just saying this because he’s my friend. I’ve been hanging out with this kid since he was actually a kid, and his ability to extemporaneously spout genuinely humorous fiction is like nothing I’ve seen in my 43 years. He really does have talent.
Joking about his age aside, he’s out of college and trying to make his way in the world. And this is what he’s decided to do. I have no idea how well it will work, but I’m honestly cheering for him. This Patreon business is new to everyone. It might be that there’s only so much Patreon money to go around, and as more street buskers crowd the sidewalks we’ll all end up splitting the same pool of donations into ever-smaller shares. But maybe this is a newer, better way of doing things and artists can find an audience and earn a living without publishers, editors, brokers, and executives getting a cut. Maybe in the long run we’ll all get more entertainment for less money. I really have no idea.
Anyway, that’s his pitch. Wish him luck, and if you want to read the Bastards thing then consider giving him some of your Earth Money.
Good luck, Rutskarn! Remember me when you get to the middle.
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Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
The Disappointment Engine
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
Hard to trust a guy who doesn’t show up for the exciting finale of Marlow Briggs >>
Marlowe Briggs? Mo’ like Marlowe Bigtimemistakenotgettingbackintimeforrecording
I’m really getting uncomfortable with how little someone without a credit card can do online.
Debit cards work, too, almost always. I pay for stuff directly out of my checking account, no credit card required.
Not with a Maestro card, as far as I know.
You can link a Maestro cvard with Paypal and/or Amazon Payments and use those for most other things – I do.
Paypal only allows Visa, MasterCard, American Express or Discover for me, not Maestro.
Also prepaid credit cards.
You actually don’t need a credit card to get PayPal account, (just a bank account) though I don’t remember how much of a hassle that is to get set up. And almost everything online supports PayPal.
I wouldn’t trust PayPal with direct access to my cash though, unless there’s no viable alternative. Indeed I signed up to a new credit card to exclusively pair with my PayPal account, completely separate to my day-to-day credit cards.
Can you use a Visa gift card to set up the account? I want to say they work the same way as regular CC’s, and if someone gets a hold of the number, all they can get is however much cash is loaded onto it.
Not to be a dick about it but at some point, if you want to pay for things on the internet, you are going to have to let someone somehow have access to your money. Just like to pay for something in real life you have to hand over a card and let someone record the details, or make some kind of revealing motion that alerts everyone in visible range precisely which pocket you keep your money in. Debit cards offer maximum convenience. Actual credit cards offer maximum protection in that baddies aren’t stealing YOUR money, they’re stealing someone else’s. In between sit the pre-funded, stored-value cards available from every major credit-card player, and a fair number of one-time use, online-only products that’ll work for just one transaction. Pick any of the above. Whichever suits you best. But not playing with one of those is going to mean not playing on the internet with anything but free stuff, because there’s limits to how many niche methods of payment merchants are going to be willing to handle, and frankly, not a lot are going to pick Doge-coins and Oyster cards.
That’s exactly the point. Attach PayPal to your credit card, not to your bank account. Furthermore, having multiple credit cards as long as you’re sensible is a win/win scenario, as long as you can find providers willing to provide completely fee-free cards.
I’d like to make 2 comments about the editing:
1) cutting off the sentence “I’m talking about the decaying skeleton. Seriously, who told this guy….” didn’t do anything for me. I’m not sure why that was cut off when no other sentence was.
2) the stereotypes list… after the first three labels failed to correspond to the speech, I finally figured out he was labeling after the speech, which is the opposite of my entire life experience. Though that could be a regional thing and I’ve just had all my life experiences in a different place than Mr DeKamp.
Of course, I was already on the “as soon as he gives me an excuse, Ruts gets money from me” train before this video started, and while those glitches (or are they?) jarred me, they aren’t bad enough to get me to jump out of the train.
Thanks! And, yeah, I sort of agree, honestly–video editing’s not my strongest suit! I’ll probably update the video as circumstances change. Good feedback to keep in mind for next time.
Are you saying you couldn’t trust the man who has edited nearly every episode of Spoiler Warning? He’d never do anything… unfortunate, would he?
Seconded. Though I enjoyed #1, I think it should have been done more often. Maybe twice, and then the third time punch it by not cutting away.
I have the same friendly, helpful, kind criticisms for the video.
Don’t worry, Rutskarn. I still plan on throwing money at you.
I want to say that cutting off the end of the sentence, “Seriously, who told this guy””” absolutely did do something for me. It wasn’t funny, exactly, but its abruptness implied a higher power editing Rutskarn’s video recording. As if he has a producer who watches the work in progress and goes, “Oh god, cut, CUT, CUUUUUT, why is he still TALKING” – a guy who really doesn’t understand the cleverness of what’s happening in front of the camera, and who is caused such deep pain by it that he insists on this abrupt hacksaw attempt at editing despite the protests of his underlings.
Also, this pitch convinced me. Off I go to Patreonize.
Fair point. You don’t have to share a bus with me.
“I envision Adventurers as an anthology series, so when one arc wraps another will begin–quite probably with all new characters within the same setting. ”
Or you could just follow the adventures of a single party, which is constantly adding and subtracting members. Some people settle, some people die, and the cast from six months back would look completely different from the present.
Bonus points if you do it from a first person perspective and kill off the main character every couple chapters.
But it’s not like I’m saying you should adopt my idea. Thinking is fun.
“The setting is low fantasy, but certainly has magic and monsters and even curses.”
So we’re talking about a persistent world, or are you planning to switch it up every few years? Because there’s also sci-fi, modern world adventurers, (not everything has to be a government agency goddamit!) apocalyptic, et cetera.
The idea is to stick with the persistent world, but I just might slide up and down the chronology. There’s multiple interesting time periods to consider.
I’d comment on your other ideas, but–well, that’d be spoiling things, wouldn’t it?
The real question is whether or not there will ever be more Vatsy and Bruno. Hands down one of the weirdest things I’ve read in the past few years, but totally worth it.
…Cahmel?
Uh oh. Now I want to drop my “no automatic recurring donations” rule, which is what’s kept me away from Patreon so far. Hmm.
Looking for loopholes… maybe I can make an exception here as its basis is “whenever an entry comes out”, instead of “whenever X amount of time passes”. That’s paying for each entry in a series, instead of for a given amount of time. It’s a bit of a hairsplit, but not a huge one, and it might just be enough…
I’ll be over here rethinking my logic.
It’s first per-sonnnnnn….
And he’s a socially awkward scho-larrrr…
I know, I know! Nnnnngggggg… :-P
(I’ve actually settled this, but I think continuing to reply is funnier, so… done.)
The brilliant thing about this scheme is that the more you give ….the more you give. Pledging more also means pledging more often. At $800 per novella-length instalment, they will come out once per month. At $1m per instalment, Rutskarn will publish once every 5 minutes!
(Kidding, of course, but I’m curious whether Patreon itself actually can cap it to once per month, say, or if it’s completely in the hands of each project.)
P.S. Something new I’ve learned, only in US English is the word instalment spelled with a double ‘l’.
Backers can absolutely cap their monthly donations.
Yep, just did the thing and saw the thing, good feature. Out of curiosity though, are you hard capping yourself to one entry per month, or do you potentially see even more frequent releases in future?
I may well release stuff more often–but for free, not for pledges. Once a month is a reasonable amount of time to charge this level of funding.
So as a general rule I’d be paying at most once per month but only if content is actually released? I’m pre could afford that while my employment lasts. I think I’m going to have to look into that Patreon thing. I’ve never actually let paypal charge my account without supervision, let’s see how that works…
Shamus has a great point–this Patreon thing is kind of an unknown quantity. I’d like to see it remain a viable option for everybody, but it’s not hard to see it becoming another Kickstarter, where the gold rush lasts nine months or so and then it all peter off.
Patreon does have one advantage over Kickstarter: it’s not really based around physical goods. So pricing models can theoretically adapt to increased usage–ie, the more people use Patreon, the smaller the per-creator donations have to be for everyone to remain solvent. Or maybe that’ll only help people with prexisting audiences.
Anyway–this is kind of new, scary territory for me to wade into. I’ve never really turned to my internet followings for any kind of support before. I don’t know if what I’ve got is something people ultimately want to pay money for. But I can’t afford not to try.
Thanks to everyone who hops onboard. I appreciate it. I’m planning on holding a stream soon so I can keep everyone abreast/lose at videogames–I’ll let people know through my site, and Patreon, when that’s happening.
And thanks, Shamus.
I think it has significantly less room to fail hard, though. The worst that can happen is that people are out a single donation if the creator doesn’t measure up or disappears – they can just cancel and take their money elsewhere.
There might be limited money out there, but it just acts as encouragement to make something people are truly willing to pay for.
Definitely interested in what you might turn out, though.
I personally don’t think Patreon will go the way of Kickstarter. The nature of funding over time involves all the advantages and problems of a publicly funded radio or TV station, chief among them being maintaining their donors. With Patreon, people know they can’t just start a project pitch and hope for the best: they are going to have to produce content on a semi-regular basis. The money simply won’t come if they don’t. This format discourages people from making pitches unless they’re committed to the project and have confidence in their ability to deliver.
Also, I think that the internet community is more saavy of crowdfunding now, after the explosion that was Kickstarter. We understand how this thing works better and are less likely to donate willy-nilly.
We may have a situation where so many people are starting Patreons that patrons simply won’t be willing to give to any more creative projects, but I highly doubt we’ll have the same ‘gold rush’ mentality.
Not sure if I’ll be too into the series but you’ve got my support because of all the good times here on twentysided.
Good luck and I hope my 5 bucks a pop helps out.
“I am poor” says the end titlecard of the guy who has made and edited his own commercial available internationally. It’s not that I don’t believe him, I’ve just been suddenly struck by how awesome it is that we live in a time and place where some guy fresh out of college (and, for that matter, some guy still in high school) can just do that and it’s not even a big deal.
Yeah, pretty much. “I’m poor” means “I’m living in a sphere where, with equipment I can scrounge or borrow, I can attempt to make a living working on an international scale. From a tiny, domestic, living space.” Which is pretty crazy.
Isn’t THE FUTURE a fun place to live? :)
You’ve got a hell of a lot of face/voice dismorphia going on there. I’m not sure what I thought you looked like, but that definitely wasn’t it.
Every time I hear someone say this, I’m left wondering what they pictured and whether I benefited from their imagination.
The blonde hair, for one thing. That hairstyle, for another.
That voice belongs to a stocky black haired dude with a beard.
To me, anyway.
Best of luck to you, fine young sir!
Now I’m imagining Rutskarn and Chris swapping voices.
I’m still waiting for the inevitable reveal that Josh actually is the zombified corpse of Teddy Roosevelt.
To me, Rustkarn will always be Richard Nixon.
In fact, whenever I watch an old video of Nixon, I’m shocked at the voice. It’s just… wrong.
Whereas I pictured you about 8 years younger with more acne.
You can blame Josh for that mental image.
In fairness, I believe there is internet evidence that once, Adam was indeed 8 years younger with acne. Of course, this is true for so many of us!
I had the same thing, but I’m pretty sure that’s because I have seen his face before.
Amazing what combed hair will do.
It’s interesting to me because there’s always been the rather prominent self-illustrations (the old Spoiler Warning title card and the Diecast one) that are pretty good matches. By the time I’d seen his mug on Chocolate Hammer proper, there wasn’t really any room for surprise. Then again, I’ve only been here for not much more than a couple of years.
It is always weird when someone sounds exactly the way they look. Even weirder than when they sound nothing like they look.
Which reminds me of how in your “Bootlord” video, you sound like a completely different person.
Also, this is a good reminder to play Unrest now that I’ve bought it.
Best of luck with the Patreon!
I figure this will be as good a place as any, but currently I too am extremely poor. But I really enjoyed Vatsy and Bruno, and so I definitely have interest. Will I be able to purchase access to previous serials at a later date?
If at any point you can pledge, you get the back episodes along with the next one! Seriously, no worries–if things turn around for you, it’ll always be waiting.
Should soon, college student and the semester just started so all my cash went to books, fees and whatnot.
Should have some spending cash in a month (hopefully)
Good luck on the patreon :)
Isnt that a bit unfair towards those that have been your pledges for a longer time?Wouldnt it make more sense(and more money)if you were to sell back issues,but at reduced price?(say $3 per issue,or $25 for the whole previous year)
People keep acting like delays are inconsequential. If you’re that cheap, wait 30 years until he stops producing content entirely and someone archives everything because they don’t want it to be forgotten. It’s cheaper, with no downsides!
I would hope than in 30 years (at which point Rutskarn will be almost 30) he’d be producing more content than ever. And I don’t mean in the Tom Clancy way of having one’s name stuck at the front of other books by some Joe. The earlier your PDF datestamp is then, the better your hipster credibility will be when you claim you read Rutskarn before he went mainstream, directing the blockbuster movie of the year: Marlow Briggs and the Twentieth Marlow Briggs Movie.
I have to admit though that I’m mostly a donator for the sake of donating (and as a substitute for ad revenue). Literary barbarian that I am, the number of novels I’ve read since I graduated uni a decade or so ago can be counted on one hand. Yeah…
Nah, all the best writers die before they hit fifty. Like Edgar Allan Poe, and… um…
Well, nobody can touch Poe anyway.
You must think that inconsequential means a very different thing if you think that $5 now is the same as $3 later.
I think the point is that it’s not, but it is also not the same thing to have the content now than to have it later.
“People keep acting like delays are inconsequential” means YES, you can get it all for 3$ in 10 years, but then YOU’D HAVE TO WAIT 10 YEARS FOR THE CONTENT, wich is NOT inconsequential.
Which is totally not what I wrote.At all.
The way Rutskarn set it up,you can pay $5 for issue 1,then $5 for issue 2,then $5 for issue 3,or if you wait till issue 3,pay $5 for issues 1-3.What I said is that it would be more fair to long time patrons(and give more money to Rutskarn)if giving $5 on patreon would give you just that issue,but the rest you could buy at reduced price($3 per issue,or $25 for 12 issues).
And while it is true that other patreons give out past issues(episodes)for free,they give them out for everyone.Rutskarn basically set up pay wall(ugh,too ugly a phrase,but I dont mean that it as a negative),but with a rapidly diminishing profit for him.What I suggested was for him to increase the price of back issues from $0 to $3.
You said it was “unfair” to the people who paid more money that they would have access to content months in advance of people who paid less.
It’s not unfair. It’s paying for the privilege of impatience.
Except its not.First of all,you assume that everyone will hear of this from day 0,which is never the case.Second of all,you equate paying less with paying 0.
Rutskarn is selling you a luxury commodity which you will not at any point have to buy (i.e. it’s not something like food where you need it to live or a car where you probably need it to get a job), and he’s also not lying or tricking you concerning the price, so there’s not really any reasonable definition of “unfair” that applies to this deal. If you know full-well that you could wait a year and get 6-12 installments for $5 or you could wait a month and get just 1 installment for the same $5, it is entirely up to you whether or not getting that first installment 11 months early is worth the extra money. Either you’d rather pay more and wait less or not, and either way all Rutskarn did was give you the option – which is hardly a scam.
He’s not saying it’s a scam. While I do think he overplayed the “fairness to long time customers” angle, I think the following is equally his concern (though I may just be projecting here, since this is my only concern with Rutskarn’s stated plan):
He’s trying to make a helpful suggestion to Rutskarn that there may be a better way for him to set up the business model(*) so that it is more fair to Rutskarn. That if Rutskarn makes “back issues” free to new subscribers (at least, the most recent half dozen or so), then some people may choose to take advantage of his kindness and only pay him $5 every third issue or so.
(*) The unwritten assumptions being that Rutskarn is new to business, that this isn’t necessarily a plan that he spent years perfecting, and that it isn’t set in stone.
Keep in mind that I can buy five novels for $26. Unless Ruts is planning to write a book every month, $5 is quite steep to people whose sole interest is buying content. The main draw is supporting the creative process, and people trying to game the system won’t pay anything if the system doesn’t leave them some gaming room.
In Daemian’s own words:
“What I said is that it would be more fair to long time patrons(and give more money to Rutskarn)if giving $5 on patreon would give you just that issue,but the rest you could buy at reduced price”
So no, his primary concern is quite clearly that longterm subscribers will be “cheated” somehow compared to people who came in later – which is obviously laughable because longterm subscribers consciously chose not to be latecomers and presumably have their reasons.
Right,just how I consciously chose to read a comic* at just the right time when a person there incidentally chose to link to Shamus’s blog at just the right time to hook me with his comic,and then Rutskarn started his thing just at the right time to catch Shamus’s eye in order to get into the spoiler warning(not to mention all the incidentals of bioware releasing mass effect,and Josh and Randy doing a lets play of it with Shamus),and then patreon became a thing at just the right time,…Yup,totally all of this was my conscious choice.
*Not even going to go about how I got into that comic because I was incidentally reading another comic,which Ive reached because I was on a forum about a video game,which Ive started playing because a cousin of mine showed me how the prequel to it was awesome.
Cool! What was the prequel called? (I wish I could remember how I ended up here. I’ve done too much archive surfing to have the faintest idea by this stage, given that I have the memory of a goldfish. Also having the memory of a goldfish doesn’t help.)
Heroes of might and magic 2.Basically,that game is the reason I am here now.
You can choose to subscribe now, or wait and get the stories much later, but for much less money. Absolutely nothing about how you first discovered that Rutskarn exists has a significant impact on how soon you give him money in exchange for stuff. The only reason to think that you are being treated unfairly because you chose to get something for more money now instead of less money later is if you only value having things that others don’t or can’t have, and therefore want to keep the barrier to entry to having the things you have higher. That’s a terrible reason for wanting anything.
Seriously. Either the deal is worth it or it isn’t, and you get to decide to take it now or wait until it’s a better offer. There’s nothing unfair about that.
And you too,like syal,dont understand the difference between 0 and not 0.Nor the fact that not everyone is bound to find out about this from the beginning.
I believe I undercommunicated my parenthetical point: “though I may just be projecting here, since this is my only concern with Rutskarn's stated plan” and I’m sorry that I didn’t say this more explicitly:
but I don’t really give a good rat’s patootie what Daemian’s intent was. I am much more interested in whether this plan of Rutskarn’s is fair to Rutskarn than to later subscribers, because, frankly, I’m much more interested in seeing Rutskarn have food and shelter and free time to write than in anything else.
If I could convince him to move to Seattle, or convince myself to move to California, I would gladly provide him free housing and food, just so he could write more.
And outside of such pipe dreams, if he wants to make content available for money, I will not just pay double(*) what he’s asking, but I will also point out to him that providing “back issues” for free is not maybe the best idea.
(*) why only double, when that seems so cheap compared to housing and food? because, frankly, cash on hand is more expensive to me than room/internet/electricity I’m paying for anyway. I have a guest room which is empty 99% of the time (it’s supposed to be my bedroom, but I find the couch more comfortable when I’m lacking female companionship), so filling it costs me less than $10 a month.
Adam Decamp looked nothing like the mental picture I had of Rutskarn. It left me wondering, Why is Rutskarn lip-syncing over this poor kid Jaboody Dubs style? What did he ever do to deserve that? Especially because the audio doesn’t quite line up with the video. It’s about .5 second off.
Adam clearly has to do a better job of matching his look to that of Rutskarn.
You have my axe! And by “axe” I mean “money”.
Maybe when more money is laying around. :)
But you look the part of the professional geek so that works out marketing wise.
(I also must agree with the guy saying the title cards for stereotypes and the corresponding lines need to be swapped around, I was also confused by it. Welcome to the land of video editing, enjoy your stay. :p)
“Hm, the order I said it and the order it plays the cards in…this seems weird to me. Is it weird, or is it just my expectations at work? Ahhh. It’s probably fine.”
-Dramatic Ironyskarn
“Pfft, *I* was following the works of DeCamp before he got big.”
“No, literally, he was quite short in his youth. Before his bodybuilding phase and the steroid abuse.”
I think we’ve all been following him since he was but a wee lad of twelve years old…
Yeah, I just started following him too.
Having just recently finished a Chocolate Hammer archive trawl, I can’t think of much better entertainment per dollar. So I’m in.
That said… kinda weird that this has been announced on TwentySided but not Chocolate Hammer.
To be fair, this post is Shamus giving a plug for a mate rather than actual self-promotion by Rutsy. But yeah, like the Unrest post-mortem before it, it’d have been cheap (as in free) content for Chocolate Hammer – sure, duplicated from Kickstarter/Patreon but still.
You’re not wrong! I just got my site back in working order. Gonna at least mention it with my post tonight.
I was noticing a few dead links at Chocoham and I couldn’t help the suspicion that it was secretly under construction. If you have managed to carve out time from the other million things you are doing to work on it, I am impressed. I have never been able to be bothered to maintain a website due to impatience with things going wrong while I’m not touching it. XD
So this novella stuff does seem interesting and all, but I would really like to talk about the elephant in the room……Where does one acquire a shirt with pirate ships surrounded by seagulls?
Target.
I think the guy at YouTube responsible for choosing thumbnail images for John Carmack’s Quakecon talks also did Rutskarn’s video.
For some reason Rutskarn always looks odd to me in static pictures. Maybe it’s because he’s usually caught mid-word or mid-face and he just seems to have one of those mugs that change a lot when talking.
Shamus (or Rutskarn), if you don’t mind my asking, how did you two meet? I think I recall you saying that you met Mumbles on a TF2 server, was it the same for Ruts? It’s kind of weird to see two people of such different ages being such good friends.
I’m pretty sure we met in Left 4 Dead.
I’m late to the party but I’m getting on the crazy money-throwing bus. Let’s see where this goes rutsky.