This is my first video. I released it over 8 years ago, and it’s pretty bad. There are tons
of forced jokes that aren’t funny, it doesn’t do any meaningful analysis of the topic at hand,
and despite being an adult when I made it, I sound like I’m 15 years old. It’s embarrassing
to watch back, but it is also how I got started with all of this. I wouldn’t be here without it.
I’ve spent a fair bit of time recently thinking about beginnings, looking back to the person I
was when I first started this channel and the expectations I had going in. To be honest,
at the time, I was pretty confident I would make it as a YouTuber. I had experience editing from
years of creating home movies with friends, I felt competent as a writer due to majoring in English,
and I held a deep passion for games, which I was sure would shine through and pull tons of viewers
in. I still vividly remember a conversation I had with my then girlfriend, now wife,
a month before putting out my first video. We had just moved to a new state, and I had no job
prospects at all. Concerned a bit for our ability to pay bills, she asked the very fair question
of what I would do for work. And in what I think is the single cringiest moment of my life, I held
up the Elgato Capture Card I had gotten earlier that day, and said, “This could be my future.”
And ya know, I was eventually right, but that moment was far from me calling my shot because
I had no clue what I was talking about or doing. I had a lot to learn. After releasing my first
video I not only realized that my work wasn’t anywhere near the quality I wanted it to be,
but also that getting views on YouTube is stupidly hard. In the span of an upload,
I went from completely believing YouTube would become my job to being pretty sure it never would.
Thankfully, though, it did. I’ve been doing YouTube full-time for a little
over 2 years now, and just saying that makes my head spin. To be honest,
while I have learned a ton from making stuff over the years, I still have no clue what
I’m doing. I try my best to wade through it all looking as together as possible,
but there’s a lot I don’t know and that I just can’t know. It’s the nature of the beast.
The thing I find myself most unsure about is how long I will keep doing this. There isn’t a clear
career path with YouTube. It isn’t a job where you get annual raises or a retirement package. There
isn’t a set end point. It is something most people do until they’ve either raked in stupid amounts of
money and can retire at any early age or fade into irrelevance making it impossible to continue doing
it for a living. Based on the kind of videos I make and the ones I want to make in the future,
I can assure you that I will not be retiring early. Which means that the likely scenario
for how this will end for me is kind of bleak. I don’t think I’m anywhere close to that point
but I also don’t think YouTube is a job people do forever. Who knows, maybe folks will still want
to hear my takes on why open-world games are bad when I’m in my 50s, but I’m not counting on that.
I’ve started to come to terms with the idea that only certain aspects of this job are in
my control, and trying to predict or influence the things that aren’t will only lead to me
being miserable. Right now things are going really well, and I’ve been putting a lot of
effort into building from what I have instead of preparing for some future I can’t know.
It’s easy for me to wax poetic about how this channel started or delve into anxieties
of how it might end, but it sometimes feels weird for me to just talk about how things
are going. Like I may be divulging too much information about how the sausage gets made.
However, that is probably the most valuable thing for you all to know, so as it has been a
long time since I’ve done any sort of update on my current plans for the channel I wanna talk a
bit now about where stuff is at and the direction I’ll be taking things over the next few months.
Currently, I feel comfortable with where the channel stands. After Gaming For A Non-Gamer
blew up, I waited for a while to see where stuff would settle because I knew the numbers I was
getting around then would not last forever, and now that things have leveled out some,
I’ve fell into a pretty consistent pattern of growth. Some months are better than others,
but what’s largely important is that the channel has not been stagnating. As for the work itself,
over the past 2 years, I’ve definitely shifted towards longer videos that examine my personal
experiences with games, opposed to quicker pieces that try to present a topic in some sort
of objective light. That isn’t to say I never want to make a video like The Color of Corruption again
as I love that one, but in general, the approach to making videos I’ve been taking more recently
is the one I enjoy doing the most. Also, it isn’t a secret that YouTube prefers longer watchtime
and seemingly aims to condition creators to make longer videos through how it presents analytics;
a tactic I have certainly fallen victim to. For example, when I put out my piece on Holocene,
my dashboard had a comment about how the video was underperforming because my watchtime on it
was significantly lower than average. It had really high viewer retention,
but the video itself was only 6 minutes long so even if it had 100% retention,
it would still have been below my average watchtime. Luckily, my interests and what
works on YouTube largely seem to align, but sometimes I feel limited in what I can make.
Experimenting on YouTube is tough as taking any sort of risk can affect my income, and,
to be honest, that’s why Patreon is probably one of the best things that’s happened for my channel.
Adsense can be incredibly volatile depending on the time of year or subject matter of a video and
there are certain pieces that I don’t want to put a sponsorship on, so Patreon makes it possible to
maintain consistency even when experimenting with different kinds of videos. I don’t talk about it
all that often, which is probably to my detriment, but backing patreon goes a long way. Simply put,
the more support I get there, the more I am able to make what I wanna make without worrying so much
about a video’s widespread appeal or how long it takes to make it. So now that I am fully into a
Patreon pitch, if you’d like to see me branch out with what I create, whether it be diving
into more niche topics that don’t perform as well on YouTube or making longer-form and bigger
budget essays that take way more time to create, consider supporting the patreon. You get some cool
perks like access to videos a day early, a monthly podcast and director’s commentaries on every piece
I put out. It’s a good time and helps a ton. The dream is to one day be able to primarily rely on
patreon so I don’t need to worry at all about adsense or sponsorships, giving me the freedom
to make cool shit for the people most interested in seeing it. And, of course, if you don’t want
to or can’t support the patreon, please know, that is entirely okay. I appreciate you just watching,
and I hope you’ll continue to watch as I move forward with whatever I make.
My primary goal currently is to keep being able to do this as a job for as long as I
can. I love doing this and it's a profession that feels like it was made for me, and while
it certainly is stressful, I want to keep doing it. My secondary goal is to expand what I do,
whether that be experimenting with vastly different approaches to videos or even things
outside of YouTube all together. I’ve already started this a bit with my show Once Upon A Roll,
which is a D&D podcast where I have a new guest on each episode and run a one-on-one adventure for
them. It is one of my favorite things to make as I get to play DnD with a ton of awesome people, and
I love having an avenue to tell stories. If that sounds interesting to you at all, please check
it out. One thing that’s great about the show is that as each episode is a contained story, you can
pick up anywhere and understand what’s going on, although listening to every episode will obviously
give you a much deeper understanding of the world and people in it. With that, one day I would love
to write up a module of one-on-one one-shots based on things that I have run over the years. I’d also
love to make a game some day. I have a handful of ideas for potential board games, and while I am
not ready to move forward with any of them yet because I can’t afford to put substantial time
in them, it is something I am actively building towards. While there are a lot of things I want
to do, obviously I also don’t want to stretch myself too thin and potentially lose this flame
I have burning right now, so expanding is going to take a fair bit of time as things stand currently.
For the more immediate future, there will be a few changes; hopefully none of them impact
things all that much. The big one being that I won’t be putting out a typical video this month
as I am spending as much time as I can writing a bunch of scripts so that I can stock up on videos
because in March, I am gonna become a dad. Yeah. It’s terrifying and really exciting. To get some
questions out of the way; no, I will not be using my child for content although I am sure becoming
a father will seep into some of what I make. No, I won’t be holding a community poll to determine the
name of the baby because that’s weird, and yes, this is part of why I’ve been slow on putting out
more episodes of Gaming For a Non-Gamer. My wife, more internetly known as the lady I live with,
is growing a human and deserves some rest from my annoying ass asking her to
play games all the time. There will be more episodes, but please have patience with me.
My hope is I will have enough stuff prepped that I
can keep releasing videos while I take time off for paternity leave,
and it won’t be all that noticeable to any of you that anything is different,
but also if videos do slow down a bit during that span of time, it’s because I’m changing diapers.
So yeah. I am quickly approaching a new beginning, and I don’t know exactly what to expect. Not to
compare having a baby to starting a channel, but I assume that similarly to the way I learned
that I knew nothing about what actually went into running a successful YouTube channel when
I first started but eventually figured it out, the same will be true for fatherhood. Hopefully
the comments will be nicer though. I am really excited for this new journey, and I am doing
everything I can to not look too far into the future. Between this job and everything happening
in my personal life right now, I feel really full, and I know that is only going to grow over the
next few months. I am happy taking things one day at a time because I have a lot to be grateful for.
Thank you all so much for watching, and here’s to new beginnings.