| RE: [godot-tutors] Video & Tutorial Quality + Personal ramble |
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> I can't help but to feel that I am missing something. I can't put my finger on it. A concept. A pitch that sums up your channel’s mission and your intention as an author in a single sentence. If you’re looking to run your website or channel for a living, your core concept gives you a foundation to build upon, to focus on and to refer to anytime. There are a few approaches to that, but for most people it seems easier to start with what they know for sure they like or are driven by. Do you like to produce games? To teach? To socialize with individuals? To market to a crowd? It starts with broad questions like these and you want to narrow it down over time to find what will set you apart from everyone else on a conceptual level (which, in turns, should shape all your design decisions). To give you an example, GDquest’s mission is to help people from around the world learn the techniques professionals use to create games. Eventually, it became “with open source technologies”, which extends the initial idea. > I am looking into ways to make better tutorial videos. There’s little to do but spend more time on them and get reviews from industry professionals. Writing a script and getting it reviewed is a good idea. But expect the pace to go down if you decide to work that way. With about 300 videos out, I can also say it’s a repetitive job. You’d better have some strong intrinsic motivation to keep you going in the long run. As you’ve already seen, a specialized Youtube channel/website grows slowly. Few subscribers actually watch the videos, and fewer as you grow. Beyond general advice, if you really want to improve your content, ask 2-3 experienced persons to critique one or 2 videos in particular. Pick people you trust to give you honest critiques too. I can say you’ve improved your content over time. Professional experience in a gamedev company will sure be valuable. However this brings us back to what you want to do: it will eat up a lot of your time, and Doc Géraud, a French youtuber, among others, has had to cut on video production when he got a job at Ubisoft. > People keep suggesting I should create an Patreon. If these are people from the Godot community, they don’t know if it’s good for you. Patreon is hard. Well, if you live in Eastern Europe, it might work eventually. But you can bet people like Brackeys or Heartbeast make at least as much money off Youtube ads, even though they don’t pay well anymore. > I do not feel it is right to ask money for the work I do. Patreon’s model is to ask for people to support you as an artist or content creator. They’re the ones who decide to give you a tip. Then, the idea that you should work with passion or somehow deserve to get paid for what you, yourself, are calling work. The question is: do you need the money? Do you have something in particular you want to do or bring to the world that requires money? Or would you rather do this as a hobby for some time? The day you become a full time content creator, it’s not the same deal anymore. It becomes a business venture. You end up doing a lot more communication, marketing and administrative work than you’d like to. Community management too. It’s half of my work, and it’s only paying off now, after 2 years. I’ve had another business before that: a small indie game studio, in partnership with a web engineer. We made no money for 1 ½ year, then had some success with cheap html5 games for mobile devices, and finally parted ways. This experience made a real difference: the mistakes we made back then, I didn’t make with GDquest. One was to favor our principles, our wish to create really good games first, and only then would it be acceptable for us to make money. I was 19 when we got started, had no idea of how much it cost to run a company. In open source, it’s especially hard. So you’d better not shoot yourself in the foot from the start. Make money first (it doesn’t have, and probably won’t come from the videos initially – that’s a long term opportunity), and use that to reach your objectives in terms of the content you want to put out, but also the life you want to have. One big personal mistake was to focus solely on work, at the expense of relationships, family and myself. Be sure to keep all that in the equation at all time, weigh the pros and cons of your decisions. That was a long reply! Hope it helps, Nathan From: Ivan Skodje [mailto:ivanskodje@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] Hello everyone! |
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