Interviewing Developers and Loss Leaders.

It has been an interesting week for me. It has taken the better part of a month to feel moved in. Up until this point, I've been flooded with a lot of direct stress. Much of my time has been spent setting up my life again in this new location. These slow, monotonous tasks have hampered my ability to get things done. Thankfully, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel now. Day by day, I'm completing small tasks that are eventually going to settle into a new state of normalcy. The stress I know versus the stress I don't—that mystery being unveiled will be a huge help going forward.

Fortunately, this last week, I got to do something I haven't done in almost a year. Tarn joined me on stream, and we got to chat. He also responded to my small collection of audience questions. I feel like these live interviews are some of the most important work I do. They both give my channel a sense of legitimacy while helping build the Dwarf Fortress community as a whole. I've completed this process roughly a dozen times with Tarn, yet this time was different. The first live interview I did with Tarn It looked a lot different then than it does now. My questions were largely random polling, and the game was about to enter a long quiet period. That interview took place in June 2020. We mostly talked about the Steam version, having little to no idea what it would even look like at that point. It’s interesting looking back and seeing how I’ve improved as an interview host and how much things have changed.

I continued these interviews almost quarterly. At the time, they’d push me up a bracket in viewership quite considerably. I was averaging 50-75 viewers back then, depending on the day. During these interviews, my numbers would climb into the low 300s. This was huge for me and incentivized me to host them as often as humanly possible. However, at the time, and looking back now especially, they were largely the same interview every time. Yes, we'd find small new bits of information here and there, but the structure was largely stagnant, talking about how the premium version was coming along. Combining that with the general dour feeling of the pandemic, these were long days for everyone. I could feel Tarn getting drained as I walked through the quarterly similar questions.

This one felt different. Obviously, after Dwarf Fortress released and sold well, the stress from Tarn and Zach seemed to wash away in the following interviews. Yet, the content of the interviews remained the same. Because now, instead of the endless "So what's the release day for the Steam version?" it became, "When is Adventure Mode going to be out?" The responses were always the same: menus, UI, performance, engine upgrades, etc. Now that is gone. Adventure Mode is out, and Fortress Mode plays better than it ever has before. I actually got to flex my interviewing skills this time around. Tarn also seems to be in much better spirits than even the last time we spoke. He seems genuinely excited to work on the game again instead of plodding through the motions of long-term rewrites. If you've played any game for as long as I have played Dwarf Fortress, you might be able to relate to this feeling of excitement. New and exciting things are starting to happen again. This is a good change. If you missed it, here is a link to the interview as well as the mid week blog post with the MP3 file.

Let’s talk about the interview itself for a moment. As I said above, these give my channel a sense of legitimacy. This is important as someone who tries to skirt the line between "Influencer," "Content Creator," and something more real-feeling. Corporate buzzwords used to describe artistic or creative work designed solely to market to an audience are something that makes me physically ill. I don’t hide from the fact that the end result of a lot of my work helps Dwarf Fortress sell copies, but I don’t want to focus on that as a goal. This makes me make choices and pick and choose my revenue sources. It also directly impacts my ability to make content profitably—at least when it comes to YouTube.

Most of my bigger projects come with a budget of sorts. I allow for some money to be spent on art and anything else that requires my own hours. When building my movie-style videos, I have a number in my head of how much that video needs to make for it to break even. Things like skipping a stream or commissioning an artist are costs that go into these. I also factor in the mental cost of spending most of my weekend working on an edit. I don't place these interviews on the same level of need when it comes to revenue. The audience they attract is not my normal audience. It is often a lot of folks from the wider Dwarf Fortress community. Sometimes, it breaks through into game dev as a whole. While my core audience does often tune in to help them get a bit of traction, it is rare for them to stick and grow like the movie videos do. They are not pure entertainment with the standard YouTube hooks built in to help them be profitable. Simply put, this video cost me money to produce. If it ends up performing as well as most of the interviews, I will likely lose money long term on it. The ad revenue shown in CAD is the majority of the money this video is likely to make unless luck strikes and it gets an influx of recommended views.

When the interview was completed, I ended the stream to get to work editing it. The Twitch stream itself made $46 USD due to how short it was. The YouTube stream made $19 in ad revenue with a peak viewership of 546, while the Twitch stream peaked at 306. Then, I edited the VOD and uploaded it. That took a total of 9 hours, including the hour of rendering time. If I do a little bit of math, the total revenue in Canadian dollars made at the time of writing is as follows: Twitch: $65.59, YouTube Stream: $19.30, YouTube Upload: $56.58, as shown above. If we add these together, the result is $141.37 gross revenue from that day. However, when you factor in taxes, that brings the total down to $101.78 Canadian dollars. That is less than six hours’ worth of minimum wage here. To those of you wondering, yes, that is not the full picture. The video is continuing to get views, and the total revenue will likely break even for time worked in a week—with a little luck, anyway. The streams will continue to make the revenue I need to do this long term. I will continue to evaluate my created work to sustain that trend for as long as possible. But every business needs a loss leader. For me, it’s these interviews. While they might not net me as much income as the other things I make, it is worth it as a way of helping give something back to the community who let me do this for a living, without filling it up with ads for HelloFresh.

This blog makes me enough money every month that I can justify the three hours a week to sit down and write these posts. I thank those of you who help me pay for that. You make this possible and allow me to have the coolest job in the world. I'll see you Tuesday for more of the normal... "CONTENT" when I turn my stream on this week.

All systems go on my next big video project. That means I will likely either do a really short Friday stream or skip it all together. Regardless the schedule this week is Tuesday - Thursday with Friday depending on vibes.

Watch the interview!