A Whole Bunch of Back Pocket Updates! (Patreon)

That's right, I'm here instead of your regularly scheduled Back Log to instead bring a whole slew of changes, news and updates relating to Back Pocket that we've been working on behind-the-scenes for a bit! Look... I guess that sounds a bit like a Back Log, but think of it as one that's a bit meatier in the preamble than usual, and then cuts literally everything else out.

But don't worry - it'll be back next week, and to at least pay homage to our usual weekly post, I had to include this wonderful meme from Mitchob1012 in the Discord, who captured both mine and Gus' reaction to the events of last week's Community Game Night perfectly. Anyway, to the updates!

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1. Back Pocket Highlights - our brand new YouTube channel!

Don't worry, we're not deleting the existing one either. Back Pocket HIghlights is actually our attempt to not only build a stronger presence on YouTube through shorter form content, but also hopefully to revitalise the existing one a bit as well - or at the very least, streamline what kind of content you can come to expect on each.

So what is it? Back Pocket Highlights is where you can expect to see all our YT Shorts, PlayBack episodes, and, in something that's been requested for a while but we're finally trialling, cut downs of segments from our main Back Pocket episodes! Now, a lot of this is in service of the mysterious and ever elusive YouTube Algorithm™️, so you'll likely see more clickbait-y titles and thumbnails there than you've come to expect on our other content. Without getting too deep into the weeds of it all (cause frankly, it's actually quite boring), we've been noticing some trends on wider YouTube that indicate that our best hope of having shorter form content such as PlayBacks find a degree of success was to give them a new home, as they were basically being stifled by the existing, very-long-form content on the Back Pocket channel. So I'm gonna do the clichė thing and ask you all to please go and subscribe to the new channel and give a video or two a like! It'll be worth it, we promise 💖

So what about the existing channel? Well, that leads me into the next section...

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2. 'Monetisation' changes to Back Pocket

Ew, that felt icky to write. Now, we don't love that word in the video game world, and for good reason. But I promise, none of this should be too surprising, and a lot of it honestly shouldn't even be particularly negative. We just want to make sure you're abreast of all the ways you can support Back Pocket, how that is changing ever so slightly, and other things we might experiment with soon.

Ok, first up - Patreon! As you're well aware, this is where we make the bulk of the money that funds Back Pocket, and so we've just been undergoing some light maintenance to ensure that it's doing that in the best way possible. You'll notice our tiers have some fancy new descriptions, but the bulk of what they offer has not changed. What has changed is some stuff behind-the-scenes on how Patrons will be charged going forward. For those of you who are already Patrons, you will still be charged on the first of every month, but for any new people that sign up, they will now be charged every month (like most other subscriptions) on the date they signed up. Ultimately this changes very little for you, but allows us some more flexibility on the backend, including being able to properly edit tier prices (don't worry, we'll warn you if we ever plan to do so) and also to offer free trials! In fact, we have a free trial available for the Gold Tier right now, which will be a great way for people to get a taste of the cool, exclusive content that goes up there without fully committing to it. And finally, if you're the kind of person who prefers annual subscriptions, you can now do that for Back Pocket! You'll get a small discount on your subscription that way, but once again, if you prefer the month-to-month cadence, nothing too significant is changing on your front.

Moving to Twitch and YouTube, we're looking at doing more to position the existing Back Pocket channel on YouTube as a more robust alternative viewing option to our Twitch stream. Some of you may not even know this, but we simulcast the show weekly to YouTube as well, and want to try and foster that side of things a bit more. To that end, we've enabled the ability to become a YouTube member, which will get you access to a bunch of the emotes that you can currently access from a Twitch subscription, in the YouTube live chat! We've set the price for this at A$4/month, which believe it or not, actually still gives us a bigger pay cut than what we get out of the far more expensive Twitch subscriptions, and is a lot cheaper for you. These emotes should also work in the chat for the post shows, which is a very neat little bonus/ We've also enabled the Superchat option on YouTube, which is essentially a tip jar/highlighted message feature, if you want to directly support us in that fashion - we'll do our best to shout you out live if you do! Our Twitch streams and sub offering will largely stay the same, however we will likely be experimenting at some point with manually running Twitch's inbuilt ads during our own in-show ad breaks, so don't be too shocked if you see that happening soon. It's ultimately a way for us to try and integrate in a potential extra small revenue stream in with as little impact as possible on you - especially considering we already have ad breaks in the show!

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3. A cheeky Patreon survey

This one is specifically for you paid Patrons, so I'll keep it quick - you will have noticed that a Patreon survey went up this afternoon, and it would mean a lot to us if you could go and take a small amount of time to go fill this out! If you have attended any of our Town Halls, you may actually have noticed a lot of the suggestions you give us there are things that we very much implement - in fact, some are highlighted in this very post.

All of that is to say that your feedback genuinely does so much to shape Back Pocket, as do surveys like this. They're not at all something we do just for the sake of it - we pull a lot of important data from stuff like this, and it informs both the big and small things we do with Back Pocket going forward! Speaking of stuff in the future...

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4. Back Pocket events for the rest of 2024

If you know Back Pocket well enough at this point, you'd probably be expecting two big things still to come from us for the remainder of the year: an anniversary stream and a PAX panel/meet-up. So I'm gonna be really awesome and burst the bubble of both of those right here - unfortunately we've made the decision to 'skip' PAX as the Back Pocket whole this year, and have will be pushing the 'anniversary' stream to the start of 2025. I know this is probably a big bummer to a lot of you, but bear with me for a moment so I can explain to you just why we've come to these decisions.

Firstly, PAX. There is a slight chance this could change - we could get called up tomorrow by someone who wants to help fund a show of ours at the event! But ultimately we feel it is best we get ahead of it as possible, and say that unless that is to happen (and we don't necessarily expect that it will), we won't be there in any official capacity as Back Pocket. Now, that's not to say that some of us won't be floating around - I know both Ruby and I intend to be there, and there are at least murmurings from the rest of the team as well! But unfortunately given the proximity of other events around it, and the travel and cost involved, we decided it would be the right move to take this year off from official Back Pocket PAX duties. We know some of you will have already booked your tickets under the assumption that we will be there, and we very much apologise that we couldn't share this sooner, but we know the Pocketeers will still be out in force down in Melbourne in October! And this also doesn't mean we're ruling out doing anything at PAX in the future - just not in 2024.

Now - the 'anniversary' stream. Hopefully this one is actually less of a bummer, as we still very much love doing those big event streams and want to continue to do them going forward! However, in a recent meeting, when scoping out the rest of the year, we realised how difficult it was going to be to find a reasonable time to host this year's stream, and after discussing it further, all came to the conclusion that it would actually make a lot more sense to do these at the start of the year, rather than at some random point in August/September. The start of the year is already when we're devoting the most of our creative juices towards Back Pocket, and so seems only right to funnel those energies towards something akin to our anniversary streams. It also lets us reset our anniversary content ledger to some degree, and sit on the learnings of what did and didn't work in the past, both in the stream itself and for goals, for a little longer. Plus, video game-related delays in 2024 are so in, right? We might even do one of those fancy rebrandings (looking at you, Dragon Age) away from the whole 'anniversary' moniker...

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Okay - that's all! Sorry, I know it was a hefty word dump in this one, but it made sense to get it all out to you at once. But given just how long it is, the quick TL;DR is as follows:

📺 BACK POCKET HIGHLIGHTS - a new Back Pocket YouTube channel!

👑 More flexibility in the ways you support Back Pocket, including ANNUAL PATREON MEMBERSHIPS and YOUTUBE MEMBERSHIPS

✍️ A brand new PATREON SURVEY we'd love for you to fill out!

😔 Back Pocket won't be at PAX AUS 2024 in any official capacity

🍾 Our usual 'ANNIVERSARY' STREAM has been delayed to the START OF 2025

As usual, if you have any questions, please feel free to ask them here in the Patreon comments, or even better, over in our Discord! I'll make sure to answer as many of them as possible.

- Ben and the Back Pocket team 💕