A Long Overdue Update

Hey all,

This has really been long overdue, but I wanted to touch base with everybody about the state of things and let you all know about a few changes to the structure of the Patreon.

Before I get into the details, if you want a quick TLDR, here’s what’s changing:

• The $650 goal tier will be Hangouts on a set schedule, the $800 tier is now Quick Looks, and both are now "at least once a month" instead of "at least once a week.
• The $1 tier reward for access to the live Spodcast is being removed.
• The Spodcast is being reworked into a live show that will be public and less focused around discussing specifically what people were playing or the news of the week. There will usually be gameplay streaming in the background as well. Think Giant Bomb's live shows.

Now that that's out of the way, I'd like to start with a big thank you for all of your ongoing support, both financially and socially. I'm not sure Spoiler Warning would still be around were it not for the financial assistance of this Patreon and the kind words and appreciation from our fans.

Second, you may have noticed that a good deal of the stuff mentioned and/or promised in the goals and the reward tiers aren't really happening anymore. I'd like to apologize for this and for letting it linger in the state it's in as long as it has. I certainly wouldn't blame anyone for feeling a little annoyed that we haven't done a patron-voted Quick Look or Hangout since last June.

This has really been caused by a combination of factors, but one of the main ones is that the later half of 2018 became increasingly stressful for me (Josh) for a variety of reasons. I had a bit of a medical scare last July which ultimately turned out to be very minor but looked pretty scary at first. Also I ended up having to go to a hospital, and as a proud participant in the American Healthcare System, I ended up owing about $4500 in medical bills which I'm only now finally about to pay off.

Also it turned out certain stretch goals and side videos took a lot more work than I initially anticipated. The cast and I typically don't have a very large window where we can all record together, so even getting people together to do additional videos can be difficult, and doing an additional edited video would often end up doubling my workload for a week, if not more. Regular Quick looks and the Spodcast were the two main casualties of this and attempting to do both together with a normal run of Spoiler Warning episodes could, in a worst case scenario, result in 15+ hours of extra work a week, on top of my normal 40 hour work week at my day job.

This combined with the ongoing drama of the medical scare meant it was very difficult for me to keep motivated to do all the work that had been promised.

Now, this isn't all to say that Spoiler Warning is cancelled or anything drastic like that. I still want to fulfill the promises of the stretch goals and the pledge tiers, but I also want to make sure those promises are realistic, and up to this point they really haven't been.

So here's what's going to change:

The $650 and $800 goals will be flipped; $650 will be regular Hangouts, $800 will be regular Quick Looks. Live content is a lot easier to produce because it requires very little if any additional editing work, so consistent Hangouts will be much easier to do than consistent quick looks. Quick looks will still happen even if the $800 tier isn't reached, but they won't have a regular schedule.

Additionally, for right now, the regular schedule will be once monthly instead of once every two weeks. This may end up being easy enough that we can ramp it back up to the two week schedule, but I don't want to bite off more than I can chew again.

Lastly, the "access to live Spodcast" reward will be removed from the $1 tier, as it's no longer really relevant.

I apologize if this feels like I'm reneging on past promises, but as it stands, they weren't getting done at all. Hopefully with these changes, we can produce content that is more in line with what the Patreon goals suggest.

But we're not quite done, I've got one last thing I'd like to touch on:

SPOILER WARNING 3: The Search For Spodcast

In brief, the Spodcast had two problems:

1: The more formal structure the podcast had fallen into required there to either be interesting news worth talking about or a game that most of us had been playing. Neither of these were guaranteed, so we ended up with a podcast that was often a perfunctory news section and then a bunch of "here's what I did this week" monologues without a lot of interesting discussion, which none of us were really satisfied with.

2: The general rule of thumb was that it took at least twice as long to edit a podcast for release as it took to record it, which meant when we got up to episodes that were in excess of 2 hours, it added a good deal of work to my schedule for a given week. Also, it turns out meticulously editing out silences and "uhms" is really tedious. With all the other stuff hanging over me over the course of last year, it became really tempting to just not record a podcast in a given week, especially since none of us were really satisfied with the final product anyway.

But there were still elements of the podcast that we enjoyed, and would like to try again. In particular, we all really had a lot of fun hanging out for the Horizon Zero Dawn sidequest streams, where the focus was often not really on the game being played as much as it was on just hanging out and talking about stuff.

So we want to revive the Spodcast as basically just that. Nothing's super concrete yet but we'd like to try doing a Twitch stream with gameplay in the background but with more of a focus on some structured things ("Hey the news this week is pretty interesting," or "Hey Chris and I have been playing this weird game.") Because it's recorded live, there's no editing involved which will make it easier to be consistent, and we'll still have something going on in the background for when the conversation loses steam. Since the live format of the podcast will be more front and center, we're not going to lock access to the stream behind Patreon pledges; it'll be open and announced like any normal hangout stream.

Our trial run of this format will be held tomorrow, Thursday the 4th, starting at 5 PM Pacific, on our Twitch Channel.

Q: What about the audio only version?

A: I'm not sure yet, and it'll depend a lot on what people are willing to put up with. If we don't regularly reference the game, I suppose I can just throw up the audio of the stream (sans background game sound) into an mp3 and host it the way we always have. Let me know in the comments if that sounds like a terrible idea.

Q: Wait, isn't this just a hangout? What makes it different?

A: Uh... [shrugging motion]

I think we'll try to have a couple of topics to guide the discussion like we did with the old Spodcast, and the discussion will be more focused on those topics than the gameplay in the background. But who knows, the distinction may simply turn out to be that "Hangouts" are live streams where Patrons suggest games and Spodcasts are everything else. If we even decide to keep the name "Spodcast." I think we should, just to annoy Chris.

Thanks for all your understanding, and your continued support. It's my sincere hope that this will allow us to be more consistent with the sort of channel we've been wanting to be.

And again, remember! Thursday, 5 PM Pacific, Live Spodcast! Our Twitch Channel!