A look back (Patreon)

WOW was 2020 a weird year. I imagine I am with most of you when most of my year ended up with me at home. Sadly that meant more work for me as it's far less efficient to collaborate virtually and much of what I do is team based.

That didn't stop me from starting to post 3 videos a week for many weeks this year!

My first video of 2020 started out strong with an unboxing of Cthulhu: Death May Die which ended up being a game I really enjoyed but sadly did not review. Sadly that's a fact that continues to be an issue, I'll talk about that in my next update actually!

Instead my first review of the year was for Arena: The Contest which is another game I enjoyed a lot followed by D.E.I. which again was wonderful.

Looking back I feel I should have known 2020 was going to be weird when the first KS I try my hardest to explain is Beyond the Monolith - and even with asking questions I didn't get it all right! It was a weird time for me since I covered that and it was canceled, and then I covered D.E.I. which was also canceled - a string of bad luck for sure!

The start of the year also had me covering some industry deep dives around subjects most content creators shied away from like funding goals on Kickstarter and culminated I believe in my March video of CMON is EVIL.

Throughout the first half of 2020 I continued to publish miniature painting videos, about once a month and they continued to get the least amount of views. Considering they took even more time than reviews to put together, but my reviews were helping so many and doing so well, I started to put more effort (time) into more industry and game coverage, with Gluttony which I posted in May being my last painting video for quite some time.

Shortly after this there were a few fiasco's like the KDM King Coin, LMS asking for money to ship the game a second time, Scale75 doing some copy/paste for their minis and more.

My attempt to cover this as just a dude with a camera lead to actual emails with the word "sue" in them culminating in my "I Need to Change" video in late June.

While you guys here on Patreon saw my deep dive into the game review industry way back in 2019, it took me until July 2020 before I finally felt comfortable enough with my way of filming (without a script) to talk about Reviews, Lies and Money.

My work fighting against the predominant industry norm of business favors and payment for advertisement veiled as honest opinion culminated in my first ever sponsored video through Skillshare on August 28th. Since then I've gone on to be sponsored for several more months still to come and also picked up Into the AM with both companies taking note in my general attitude and focus and both HEAVILY interested in the community around my channel.

By and large the second half of the year involved me doing a ton of Details video sand news updates which was great and I felt really great about it. It was helping a lot of people and doing fairly well according to analytics as well. My new job took up more and more of my time as the year went on but the loss of sleep making these videos was really worth it.

That is, until I made a video about Heroquest.

I went from hero to zero pretty quick according to the comments and to this day it's my #1 most disliked video. I recall at the time how hard it was. I had staid up until 4am editing the video so I could get it posted soon after launch. To wake up every day for the next few months (and honestly it's still getting some "wonderful" comments) to people calling me an idiot wasn't so fun.

In the end though I learned a lot from the video and the "feedback" and I believe I've handled things much butter since then (and still hope to improve).

Thankfully just later that week I posted the Darkest Dungeon Details video which got a lot of love and helped out many people.

Rounding out the year I got sent an Elegoo Mars 2 Pro 3d printer in November and promptly discovered a new hobby that can suck more time and money from me but bring me a lot of joy.

Since my channel is really a follow of my passions around the board game industry, this side step to 3D printing was pretty natural for me to begin covering.

November also brought me my latest critical review of a Kickstarter via my UpZone unboxing. Unlike Diemension Games, Everything Epic did NOT take as kindly to my criticisms which was unfortunate.

Not to stop there but November also brought up my latest video series of "What I backed and Why" which is a culmination of my attempt to further be transparent and honest with everyone about how my channel operates. This is actually based on my decision a little earlier in the year to stop critiquing the industry so much and instead just lead by example. I feel it's viewers expectations of how a channel should operate that will cause change, not me yelling at the industry for being shady.

If I were to summarize 2020 I'd say it's twofold - my acceptance and determination to inform all of you as much as possible to make all of us better consumers, and my shift from industry critique to leading by example.

ALL of this coincides with a huge push from all of you in support and it's allowed my videos to hopefully be a bit more personal. 2019 had me either not show my face, or show it but it was very dark and poorly lit whereas now in 2020 I have some pretty good lighting and have become accustomed to showing my face and hopefully being a bit more personable.

This looking back is something I try to do often. It helps me focus on the big picture, on the what and why of my channel and something I felt might be nice to actually write down and share with all of you because it's YOU that helped make it all happen. From the obvious monetary support the brutally honest criticisms of my own videos to being an AMAZING group of people that I look forward to talking with every single day whether that be on Facebook, in the video comments here, discord or anywhere else we might meet up.

I pray and hope that 2021 clears up enough to have expo's open back up. I'd love nothing more than to meet some of you in person. After all, it's not every day that you get to meet a real rockstar!

Here's to looking forward to 2021 and all that it brings. Keep on rocking guys and thank you so much for being so great!