Welcome to the Offy D end of the year extreme blowout super blog! Since I forgot to write anything last time, I'll bring you all the hottest and most up to date news on the Offy D Corp's domination of the online video gaming content market. Failing that, I will rant.
WELCOME TO MY RANT.
Towards the end of 2018 I decided to stop making This Is Content videos, after researching the effects of the mysterious 'Click Through Rate' stat on the algorithmn. The plan was that not making videos with low CTR/views would increase my channel's average CTR, and thus make it go much more better like. The actual result was: things got neither better nor worse. Well, the world got worse for not having TiC in it, but otherwise it seems the increase in views it might have brought was cancelled out by the loss of those TiC views, so it was all the same really.
The other big change this year was switching to a narrative-only style for the narrative videos, moving away from the 'narrative let's play' style. The main motivation for this was that this style is more fun to make, and that my first attempt at it, the Crusader Kings one, went very well. It has the nice side effect that by the end of the series, I have a somewhat contiguous script document that can be used as content in and of itself. Epic The Fire Margin novel coming soon! In tandem with this, the abridged commentary videos carry on the 'let's play' part of the old NLP style, to much success.
So in essence my old video style has been split, and personally I think this is the better approach. Original content isn't for everyone, and is less comfy than a straight up video about gameplay. Plus, it's easier to dislike original content due to the specifics of it. There is certainly an audience demographic that preferred the styles being combined, but I really don't know how large that is. Well, we're ploughing on like this now!
The abridged videos have done very well, and as noted in a recent blog entry, they are going to be the main focus of 2020. I've already done one month with the new 4 abridged videos per week schedule, and the results are coming in. From October to Decemeber, views and money are up a whopping 50%, and that's including a week WITHOUT videos this month. This gives me hope that the 2020 plan will finally grease some gears, and perhaps lead to some sweet, sweet SUBSCRIBORS.
My goal for 2019 was 30k subs, which I guess didn't happen huh? I started with about 23k, so that seemed possible at least. Broadly speaking, 2019 was a very bad year for the channel, with all metrics down about 1/3 compared to 2018, which itself was a worse year than 2017 as I recall. Can we finally buck the trend in 2020?! I suspect that if YouTube ever 'clicks' and the algo decides to start showing my videos to viewers of big strategy game channels, something good could happen. But to get that, I need to meet unknown CTR and views thresholds. That means the overall plan is: just hope things get better. I think that was my plan for 2019 too. Oh yeah: PRAY TO THE ALGORITHMN.
Here's a good start - I got a new mic setup so that it's somewhat less in front of my face when I talk. Now I can see the screen more gooder and things! It also lets me hang the mic above me, which may not see all that relevant, but I assure you its easier to talk with your head slightly up than slightly down, on account of the direction in which one's mouth fluids tend to accumulate. Trying to avoid mouth-clicking is half the battle to recording things in a makeshift studio, so I hope to have a slightly easier life now!
This will be of particular use for recording Kings and Generals scripts, which carries on into 2020, horray! Since they are effectively paying my rent now, this is quite good, eh? Their channel is approaching a million subs, so clearly the magic spell weaved by Devin's beautiful voice is yet to wear off. Plus, it's good for my channel. Why? Because people randomly commenting 'hey aren't you that kings and generals guy' provides a 9999% increase to my viewer engagement rate! Was briefly considering making my channel banner just 'yes I am that voice from kings and generals', but this would surely crash my algo-faith-points.
One day I will dust off all my old essays about the history of science and japanese battles from the uni days and write a script for them myself. Did you know that all the OTHER history channels have the Battle of Nagashino totally wrong?! Revenge will be had.
To change topic, I did a lot of writing this year! Let's count it up and see...
* Second 2/3rds of Recs Romanum - 35.4K words
* Last of the Lamplight - 32.3K words
* Honour Among Kings - 69.4K words
* The Fire Margin - 113.5K words
THAT'S ALOTTA WORDS. Easily 2 longish novels worth of furious typing in there. Obviously it's faster to write my stuff than an actual novel, because I have a continuous series of writing prompts in the form of the videos I'm writing them about. Plus, not having plans, arcs, character development, or a clear message, makes writing things much easier! I should write the new Star Wars [CROWD LAUGHTER]. (seriously though, I'm not afraid to include gay kisses, in fact, I'd make the whole thing ABOUT gay kisses. I guarantee you there are no fanfics in existance that have explored this territory already).
Since my new schedule means I write about half as much, 2020 will be a less writey year. Expecting to whip out about 150K words during the year. Some of that will be conluding The Fire Margin, and then the next project I want to try to making a history-documentary-esque thing about Stellaris. Stellaris is like my Crusader Kings 2 series, in that the pace is way too fast to have dialogue, or much characterisation of individuals, so instead I guess it will end up being a very summarative sci-fi space opera. Yes, it will be boring, but I want to try it. After that, the other thing I want to do is STALKER, but might do something more relevant or called for instead. Why plan, when you can just grasp at whatever comes to mind at the last moment?! PRAISE THE ALGORITHMN!
One final note on the writing - I have edited The Promised Crown and Last of the Lamplight into novel formats, and will do the same for the other stuff in time. I would get on and finish all that off, but that project is very much in the 'if you have time at the end of the week' priority basket, so I barely ever work on it. And that reminds me of...
THE GREATEST VIDEO GAME EVER DEVELOPED. Which is still being slowly developed, as regularly mentioned in these blogs. Is it done yet? NO! But it's now in beta, so it's legitimately close to being done. I've got a big list of things to sort out that came up in testing, but probably won't actually get around to that due to holiday season discruptions on my usual video making routine. Anyway, just keep holding on, and I'll give you more juicy details in the future. The future - that's where the game is set! Oh, juicy!
Now for the Offy D Corp Internationelle Game Awards for 2019:
* Best Thing I Remember Playing: Valkyria Chronicles 4
* Worst Thing I Remember Playing: Dunno, but I tried and hated 'Prey' on ps4, can't remember why
* Thing I Wish I Had Been Playing The Whole Time: Sakura Wars V So Long My Love
* Thing I Was Actually Playing The Whole Time: Total War 3 Kingdoms / Medieval 2
* Thing I Will Be Playing In The Future: Final Fantasy VII Remake
* My Backlog length: [INT OVERFLOW ERROR]
Also Beatsaber is good, even though it's a massive con by the devs to make money off copyrighted material they don't own. So is my channel, so hey, let's not rock that boat!
Okay I wrote a blog, thanks, bye, I hope you 2020 good, and I hope the Offy D corp does as well.
Meme of the decade is probably 'F to pay respects' or 'Time to Stop', or something, but it's also this image:
