Knowing when to stop.

Over the last twelve years, I have built up a dedicated audience that I am extremely thankful for. In the early days, people found me through modded tycoon games. Eventually, that shifted into colony builders and strategy titles. Thankfully, my community has stayed with me as the channel has grown, allowing me to experiment with how I present my content. The biggest shift was moving from daily stream highlights and single-take tutorials to highly edited, carefully planned videos. These days, my YouTube channel features a selection of feature-length films, with periodic news updates scattered in between, all covering the game my audience loves: Dwarf Fortress.

The movies have truly given me long-term stability. My first successful video of this kind was Godlytombs, and since its release my channel’s growth and revenue have tripled. It went from covering groceries and my internet bill to being a third of my monthly income. However, this success has come with one major problem. YouTube has decided that Dwarf Fortress content is all that I am allowed to make. The platform controls how much a video is recommended based on the preferences of the audience watching. This includes live-streaming. What makes this brutal is everything is connected. If your shorts perform well, that sends more eyes to your videos. If your videos perform well that sends traffic to your streams. This becomes a problem if one of the three under performs.

Both of these streams were similar length. Twitch has a similar effect but different. I personally find the Twitch stats facinating. I often have the same if not higher unique viewers. However they stick around for a much shorter period of time. I assume that has something to do with me playing in a more popular directory than normal. That brings in random people who are channel hopping. Otherwise the only real answer is my normal audience tunes out after seeing it is something different. I personally think its channel hoppers but who knows honestly.

What does this mean? Well, I don't have good stats from this week because as I was streaming today something crappy happened. While I do enjoy messing about in the game it absolutely has some performance issues in spots. Today that manifested by overloading OBS and causing the game to crash. Bringing both of the streams down with it. This breaks the YouTube continuity and requires scheduling a new stream. This also cuts the twitch stats in half. I'll show the average views from the stats I do have.

I should state that I always take a risk when streaming something new. I never have much of an idea how it’ll do or whether it will be worth it for me. With or without the crash taking down OBS, I don’t think the interest is there for me to continue streaming Mount & Blade. YouTube suggestions have been cut in half every time I stream it due to the low view numbers, and this becomes a vicious cycle the longer I leave it.

As for Twitch, the first time I try something new I often get a good turnout. After that initial interest wears off, I start to see the number of people who are actually willing to watch. In this case, I would say that even though the last stream ended with a muffled thud, I feel like the audience on Twitch is there. But since I’m streaming on two platforms, I have to consider both. I honestly think it is worth streaming Mount & Blade on Twitch. However it was starting to actively damage the YouTube channel. That next question is where do I go

I just wanted to share a little bit of insight into the thought process that goes into what I stream and how I stream it. While I could keep playing Mount & Blade on Twitch with the YouTube stream offline, that would impact the Twitch channel. Some portions of my community tune into Twitch when they see my YouTube stream online, and I also feel bad about ignoring half of the audience. The logical choice is to not play Mount & Blade: Bannerlord for a while until interest in it builds back up. I will return and play it again, but for now, I think the channel needs a break. Now I have to decide what I should try next to change things up, Maybe Songs of Syx or Starsector. Whatever I end up choosing, do remember that I had a lot of fun messing around in Mount & Blade: Bannerlord during the time we had. I will look forward to the next time it makes sense to return. Until then, we will rest.

If you have questions on this topic, let me know in the comments below this blog.

Okay, so this was a bonus blog post and something I wanted to send out after my stream crashed today. I'll have a post for Monday as well but that will simply be a question form for my next chat with Tarn Adams! The next interview is happening on the 19th at 10am Pacific! Hopefully I'll see you there!