T w e n t y S i d e d
I sat down with the rest of the cast Sunday night and we made it official: Barring any unforeseen difficulties, our next game will be Alan Wake. The game has a lot of interesting hooks for discussion: In-game advertising, the changing nature of survival horror as a genre, Stephen King, a troubled development history, and so on. It’s also short by the standards of the show, which will let us move on to Mass Effect 3 before we lose our passion for it.
We’re moving to five cast members: Chris, Mumbles, Rutskarn, Josh and myself. I have no idea how we’ll keep it on the rails. We’ll see how it goes.
Reader Atma asks via email:
[…]Well, i for one would like to know how the new format has impacted your audience, if the pipeline has improved, if the custom endings hit their goal (keeping people watching up to the end). I’d also like know out of curiosity how you are financing yourself on this show (if you are at all); i mean it’s a lot of work and although i imagine it’s nice having fun among a group of smart and talented people, it’s still a lot of work.
The pipeline is the same as it ever was, except that Josh keeps raising his standards as he gets better at Adobe Premiere, which kind of negates the time he saves.
We’re not making any money from the show. Individual episodes only score a few thousand views. Less than half the people who read the site actually watch the show. It’s probably not worth turning on advertising for that. Ultimately, it would probably boil down to a dollar an episode. Split between the cast members this would be joke money, not worth the time and expense of distributing it. Even if we gave it all to Josh, it’s still pretty much a tiny payout in the face of how much time he dumps into it. I get the impression that advertising really isn’t worth it until you’re into the tens of thousands.
The coming weekend is PAX, and the next weekend is recovering-from-PAX, so the next season won’t begin until the week of April 22.
