Let's Play Channel Update: Dragon's Dogma 2 Launch / The Future of Patreon Voting (Patreon)

Two unrelated topics!

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Meowdy ya'll, so we're revamping the whole schedule, right? To try out a new layout where I do like 6-8 hours of a single game per week, to see if that's healthier for the channel. Part of my goal in doing away with the large number of designated timeslots is also that I want to be able to cover big releases right at launch, which I used to do when I was better growing the channel back in like 2014-2017ish.

So!

From March 22-28 I'm gonna be running a special event where I focus entirely on the launch of Dragon's Dogma 2 for a whole week. My plan is to have a four hour launch day Part 1 video, and then a two hour video every day for the rest of the week, ultimately covering the first 16 hours of the game very quickly. THEN Lies of P and multiplayer will return like normal, since it's not like I'm abandoning them.

It's an experiment, to gauge what works these days, what's healthy, what brings in new people, etc. If it doesn't work I might stop doing it, but I might also need to give it a few attempts before I can come to that conclusion anyway.

But anyway, I'm bringing this up here in part because that means there will be no Early Access video for the beginning of DD2. As I start to generate a bit of a backlog, I'll try to get ya'll earlier access to subsequent parts, but don't be confused when Part 1 launches to the public first. That's just, well, the whole point lol. Hopefully the Myst playthrough is sufficient apology.

Anyway I'll be living and breathing DD2 every day until I leave for LVFC, so expect a few posts and lots of content there. Hope it's good lol

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Hey remember the "Patreon Chosen Game" timeslot?

I've mentioned maybe dropping it entirely, since the Early Access tier is a bigger draw and the new schedule doesn't mesh well with the idea of designated timeslots. We also kind of killed it via vote results lately? Fallout New Vegas and Baldur's Gate 3 winning back to back means we almost never vote anyway. In fact, the current Patreon game is still in progress, so we never actually stopped.

Anyway, I think I might have a new plan for how to make this tier work in the new system.

Quarterly voting!

Every three months we nominate and vote for a new game. defined as Jan-Mar, Apr-Jun, Jul-Sep, Oct-Dec. I know it doesn't match up amazingly with the charging cycle, but neither does the current system anyway. This way we get to have Patreon involvement with game choices, but we don't have to compromise my goals for the schedule.

After all, my goal is to get rid of the timeslot that BG3 currently occupies so that we have more room for The Current Playthrough. It's just that I can't binge-air it all because we're not done with it and I'm recording it with Toaster, so it's tied to how much we can meet up, etc. It's gonna hang out as a relic of the old ways for a while. We'll see how I handle co-hosted playthroughs in the future. Maybe they'll be a weekly slot thing, or maybe I'll quietly store them up in the background until I'm ready to air them all at once as The Current Playthrough on the public channel. Either way, no difference for Patreon Early Access folks. I just give you stuff when I make it.

So when will we have the next vote? Maybe as I'm wrapping up DD2 (on my end, not in terms of when it airs), and definitely at least after I'm back from LVFC. Dunno how long it is. A bit pointless to vote if I won't be ready for a month, etc. But nowadays I'm usually only recording one game at a time, which is pretty refreshing, so the moment I realize I'm nearing the end of DD2 I'll be looking to figure out what I'll play next.

As a recap, people who support the $15 tier or higher get to nominate (nearly) any game, and everyone else gets to vote. The granular details will be made clearer at the time if you're new to it.

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Oh hey, general news.

We finished Deadlaws! It was cool! People cried afterwards and were all emotionally hungover and stuff. Check it out if you haven't: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhFUzvyRnohBF3nY7rUn9GfcPDg2yeS7c

And I released the new video essay to the public, so don't miss that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEZ7qFVQZWk

It's underperforming at the moment, which stings a bit when you put months of work into something, but oh well. My goal is to figure out a faster, looser workflow that allows me to make something around 40-60 minutes long every other month, so at least I know I successfully made it faster than previous videos. (it didn't take me five months like it appears, I actually started it New Year's Eve after scrapping something else) I'm already thousands of words into a Beast Complex video, so here's hoping for the shortest wait yet.