State of the Institute - March 2019 | Part 2 (Patreon)

Hello folks!

As most of you are probably aware, I’ve needed to take a break from The Templin Institute these past two weeks, but now seems like a good moment to drop my radio silence and update you all on what’s going on.

Before all that though, I’d like to thank everyone for their well-wishes and kind words. Over the last day or so I’ve been catching up on what I missed and seeing the hundreds of comments has been incredibly heartening. I think one of the downsides of working almost solely online is that it can become very easy to think of our audience as nothing more than numbers on a computer monitor, and if you asked my inner cynic, he’d say words like “community” are sometimes used a bit too loosely or disingenuously on YouTube and elsewhere. It’s unfortunate that it takes an event like this to remind me how wrong this perception is. The outpouring of support we received and continue to receive since announcing our break has been remarkable. It means a great deal to me personally, and I know to Larissa as well. 

So, with that out of the way, here’s the situation. As mentioned during our original announcement, the number of hours I had been working over the past six months was wholly unsustainable and increasingly dangerous. That’s entirely on me. Part of the problem with having a job you love is that it can be difficult to recognize when it’s necessary to take a step back, even in the interest of your own health. The Templin Institute was incredibly fortunate in how quickly we’ve grown, but it’s clear that I didn’t have a realistic understanding of the additional physical and mental pressure adding so many new shows/streams/whatever was going to have on me.

With that in mind, we’re going to be temporarily reducing the amount of content we create each month. For the remainder of March, April, and May, we’ll be cutting back to one video each week. Miniseries like Stellaris Invicta will continue but will replace our regular content. Our plan is to use these next two months to recover and streamline our production process with the intention of eventually getting back up to two episodes released each week. We’ll evaluate where we are in June and provide an update on how things are looking.

Once we’re fully back up and running, we’re going to be a bit more conservative with how much additional content we can take on while also scheduling some periodic breaks. We’re confident this will keep The Templin Institute operational for years to come and prevent the entire thing from ending in a glorious but doomed shootout in an abandoned movie theater against federal agents who have been in hot pursuit of our fiery red Cadillac as it left a trail of chaos across the continental United States/multiverse.

Until then, you can expect the final installment of the Stellaris Dev Clash series next week on the 20th, and the next episode of Stellaris Invicta on the 30th. I imagine this new release schedule will be confusing for a while but bear with us.

We’ll have more updates on the exclusive Patreon patches, the community Stellaris Game and more very soon, but that will need to wait till next time.

I’d like to leave things here with my most heartfelt thanks to everyone who has become a part of The Templin Institute. This break, while necessary, happened with very little time to prepare and I recognize that this was not fair to you, our audience. 

I’ll be slowly resuming my duties this week as I’m plugged back into the main Templin computer, so if you see me on Discord, by all means, give me a shout. It’ll be good to get back to the fun part of this whole thing.

- Marc