On Recording & Broadcasting

In the past few months I’ve worked harder on the YouTube videos and the effort has paid off somewhat with new subscribers, comments and views on the channel. Still nothing to write home about, but it’s an improvement and one desperately needed. There were times were I wondered why I was still wasting my time don this stuff, and then someone made a nice comment or subscribed and I had a sudden jolt of endorphin for a job well done.

But recently, last week in fact, I came upon a realisation and that is that sometimes recording a game, or continue to record them is not worth the trouble. As much as I love Assassin’s Creed II, no one really cared about that series, and last week I noticed that after 42 episodes, I had only 4 minutes viewed between all of them, and three of those minutes were from an episode months ago. It’s because of this that I’ve decided to move away from this playthrough. It’s proven to be something the audience doesn’t care about, and so to keep pushing on with it is just pointless. 

The last Assassin’s Creed episode ends with a nice Batman theme!

I also haven’t done more Brawl videos, be it Hearthstone or Overwatch. With the latter it’s because they keep using the PTR Brawls on the main servers and I’ve already recorded and used those, but on the former, Hearthstone, it’s because I realised that my format for it, my approach to the video series itself, isn’t very attractive. So I’m not gonna record more brawl episodes, not unless I find the specific brawl extremely fun to play through. But as an avid player of most Blizzard Entertainment’s game, I do want to continue recording these games, but only once I figure what the best approach is. Maybe ladder matches on Hearthstone and competitive Overwatch are what people want to see, I don’t know. To be honest there are bigger and better channels out there, with hosts who are infinitely more entertaining than I am, and they already do these videos, so I need to find my approach.

I could go the easy route and just troll online, making fun of people or playing the wrong characters for a situation, but I can’t, I’m honestly too nice to do that, too lawful to pull that off.

I have a couple of games series I am working on, but I want to have a good chunk of episodes to go before I put any of them up.

That takes me to the second part of this thing: broadcasting. I love to stream, I find it a very entertaining activity, even if you’re like me and end playing for a non-existent audience most of the time. But finding the right games to play, to at least draw your audience in is a difficult thing, and newer games have more immediate viewership and help bring people in for a nice chat, at least compared to older games, which is something I have to limit myself to for now. I’m planning on buying a new PC soon and once I do, I’ll be back to streaming full-time.

I also have consoles and a related issue is that my computer struggles to encode and broadcast games through the capture card I bought. Hell, even the latest games I’ve reviewed I have had to avoid posting videos because they are choppy at best It could be a matter of driver or the XSplit consuming way more resources than it should but the result is the same, a situation where to even record becomes a chore and I have to double check everything I record just to make sure that the quality is one you can enjoy.

I will probably stream but focus a bit more on some arts & crafts projects I have in the pipeline, or play an older game, some of those classics I do so enjoy. But most games from this year and even some from last year put such a strain on my machine that I’ve had to play them in the barest of minimum requirements, which I have no problem with but it does make recording them a bit trickier.

Can only record games with low graphical requirements without issue. It’s annoying!

I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus from Twitch, and it will continue for at least another month or so, but I am still working on YouTube content, just want to think of ways to make what I deliver better and more engaging. I have a couple of rants in progress that I want to do on video because it’s the type of opinion piece where I end up talking to myself about it in angry tones.

Still not crazy though!

So that was it, keep an eye on further announcements, and once I have the new PC I’ll make sure to share as many photos as I can about it. It’s going to be my baby and it’ll be so powerful I’ll have to feed it the souls of my enemies to keep it running!