Battle Plan (Woodchipper Edition) (Patreon)

Hey you!

Yes you!

Where all the videos at?

Well, it's been an intriguing few weeks here in the Failuredrome as I found myself in a slightly odd position of not having more than one game on my menu - that game being the Transport Fever.

The short series'  on Mars Horizons and SimCasino were plenty of fun but were always intended to be quick blasts rather than anything more lengthy. I've since gone looking for further quick blasts but come up empty. 

This has either been because I knew the games wouldn't evade the woodchipper, or because I'd tread the ground before in other games (played one startup company game that has a strong tick-based mechanic, played them all).

So, I slung up some Rimworld, thinking that because it suited my own brand of organic incompetence well it'd fill the gap nicely until the Next Grand Endeavour.

And yet, not so much. In addition, the less said about Sunday's Sports Slot the better. Hope you enjoyed the football episode, cos it turns out that was a one and done.

"BUT I WAS ENJOYING THAT!"

Yes... sorry. Here, our story takes a minor turn in the direction of YouTube theory. If it's dull, skip forward to the part where I talk about trains.

Okay, some basic YouTube theory, or rather, how to build a growing YouTube channel.

So, record a video. Ideally one that's quite good. Plunk it up on the YouTube and you get a few views. More views are better, but any views at all help.

Now record the next video. Again, get to plunking. Now here comes the interesting part - try to make it get more views than the previous one. Yes, "well duh!" but also because the way the algorithm generates traffic for you is based on each individual video. The level to which that video is recommended to viewers is dictated by the performance of recent videos. Build a smash hit then a dud, and the dud acts as a drag on the channel. 

So, you don't want duds. Got it. Rather, to maximise your growth you want each subsequent video to hit harder than the one previous. 

The easiest way to do that is to ensure that as many people as possible who watched your previous escapade watch the next one too. You'd think series would help with that. They don't. They actually hold you back, as each subsequent episode is likely to perform slightly worse than the previous one. There's also a minor factor of new people being reluctant to get involved at episode 14 than they are at episode 1.

This is retreading old ground, let's move on.

I use the woodchipper as a benchmark for "dud or stud" and it's served me very nicely thankyouverymuch. But I've also self-sabotaged along the way by indulging in long series that act as a drag on overall performance - baseball being chief among these. It's a series that served my commentary style nicely, but didn't fit with the taste in topic for many of my existing subscribers. This is key - if my video matches the taste of a subscriber (and they're more likely to get a recommendation) it's more likely to do well. 

Again, the old ground of staying on topic.

To that end, I'm going to stop self-sabotaging for a while and see what happens. This will mean that my channel covers the following:

- games with trains (TRAINS PEOPLE START HERE)

- town/city builders

- daft simulators

That's it. That's the limit.

I'm not going to do massive long series very often, but I'm not killing them off either. Series will continue when I feel like I still have stories to tell. What will happen however is more one-and-done episodes (probably on a fixed day each week) and I felt that the 3-6 part short-run approach was working out quite nicely.

There will be more trains. I haven't done enough with trains lately, and that's fine, but let's give the trains people what trains people want: trains.

It'll take a little while to get all this moving the right way, but here's what's coming up this week.

• Wed: Barn Finders
• Thu: Transport Fever
• Fri: Cyberpunk 2077
• Sat: Festive Bingo Nonsense Live Stream
• Sun: TBC

Rimworld will be picked up after I'm done with my festive nonsense (horse racing next!) when it'll be the Saturday night stream. Sorry Bannerlord friends, after a couple of parts in the 3rd outing I got the strong impression that I wasn't doing anything new. It's still a whole lot of fun to play but, been there, seen it, done it. 

If you want to verify anything I've claimed above, click the "videos" option on my channel homepage and look at the numbers for yourself.

It's all good. I might just go and have a long think about starting a standalone sports channel...

-CF