Changes to voting schedule (Patreon)
Content
From this point forward the Patreon Chosen Series will be voted on whenever the previous game concludes rather than at a regularly scheduled date each month. This will allow for a more organic schedule for the games that you choose, but also means that you could be voting for games as often as twice per month or as infrequently as once every 2-3 months.
It'll be interesting to see whether the length of prospective games will impact the support they receive one way or the other. If nothing else it's good to see the end of the era of people worrying whether their nomination is long or short enough to qualify as a Patreon game. The voters will decide!
Several of you sent me messages suggesting alternate models, and I think it's noteworthy to point out that basically none of your suggestions matched one another. This shows just how many approaches could be made, and you can trust that I've thought about this quite a bit before landing on these two. Regardless, I appreciate that you care enough to get involved.
This of course means that there will not be a vote at the usual time in a few days, as Horizon Zero Dawn is definitely not finished. I'll try to slip in an announcement of this change in my next recorded episode of HZD to get people caught up on this change who have missed it here (and all the non-patrons I suppose).
I'm glad to see that the results are near-unanimous. It would be a lot harder to make a decision if I was worried that even 40% of people may view it as some sort of betrayal of our existing agreement. Either way, I'm putting this up a few days before April so that anyone who changes their mind based on this decision can react accordingly. Patreon tells me that it will next be charging people on April 1st.
I'll have to think about how to handle games that don't really have endings, such as FTL. In the past I've just gone ahead and played those sorts of games for about a month and called it quits, so perhaps that'll happen again. Perhaps I'll just go until they run their course, or maybe I'll even put up a poll a few weeks in about how long people would like it to continue. We'll see. I probably have plenty time to think about it since those sorts of games have proven rare so far.
I hope we all come to see this change as a positive. It's unlikely to be entirely permanent, as anything on this Patreon can change and has changed over time as it adapts to the scale and expectations of my audience. I won't be afraid to reconvene if for some reason (due to my feelings or "the feel of the room") this system doesn't seem to be working anymore.
Thank you for your continued support, and happy gaming!