rawb

I forgot how good Patreon used to look

I have the original video Rob used to launch his patreon too

so remember, Fall 2012 was his kickstarter,

and his plan to stay relevent while making the game was to use YouTube (which he really wasn't using before) and to do 2 weekly streams on Twitch

that started in the Spring of 2013, and the numbers were alright

YT was lower than he thought it would be, Twitch was larger than he thought it'd be

but he wanted to dial-back from the daily uploads to multiple channels, and just focus on semi-regular main channel videos

hence the Patreon

he started at ~$4k/month, big drop after that first month to like 3.5k, and then it held steady there for a while, he'd pimp it once every so often and it'd go up a bit

he was really on-top of doing his monthly Patreon chats, and had ~50 people watch it live most months

eventually dwindled a bit, but then after the start of Urealms, it spiked back up

Imagine $4k a month making “silly internet videos”

Rob didn't know what he wanted to invest his time into, which was good and bad

Tuna Bandits is what blew up his YT channel to 100k average views

people forget that Rob wasn't a YouTuber at all at that point

So he'd do these projects, and put time into things that he liked, with no expectation on them being popular

which is what he always did

but now with a Patreon he had enough month-to-month funding to just fuck around

which I think most people at the time liked

I don't really think there was even that much hype for his game, most people were pretty muted and just liked seeing Rob do new stuff

Urealms Live, for as Popular and profitable as it was, was this shift where suddenly Rob was consuming 100% of his time, producing something that felt like it should take 20% of his time

and you'd have entire years, where the guy would put out what felt like zero videos or streams other than URL

I mean tbh url was making him a decent amount of money in donation events in addition to his patreon income? Did he just like ignore it all?

this is way before that Vinny

well I guess not way before

and it's decent, but gets burned through pretty fast

2 people living in Toronto, on top of Rob "re-investing" in the show to make it bigger for some reason

The most Rob made, at any point in his career, was PlayMindcrack

that dwarfed what he made on Unforgotten Realms Live

Dolf probably knows better than I do

what the donation totals were for the campaigns

but he's essentially live off that for a year, because he was doing ZERO else

Do we know what the average youtube reupload made as well?

you mean putting the campaigns on YouTube?

Yeah

probably not much of anything?

I feel like not much

they were mostly sub 50k views

I don't think you get much from youtube ads unless you bring in big dog numbers

on a good day

$500 on a bad one

but having them uploaded to youtube definitely would help with promotion

So he went from one extreme on the guaranteed money spectrum to the other: Taking the money and saving basically nothing, trying to turn it into much more than it needed to be, to the point of detriment(in both product and state of mind), to doing basically nothing because for enough time, he could do absolutely nothing and barely lose income.

yep

which is why him canceling S4 was so crazy

years of investment, and sole focus on that show

it wasn't like he was steadily building some alternative

He should have said he is taking a 6 month to a year break.

In retrospect, the downfall started with S2, in that case.

He had some savings, but he's spent 100% of that during covid

If the show was left how it was, quality-wise, the same as it was S1, would many people have complained?

I think most people would still drop the same amount of money on it.

he made mistakes with S2, but nothing that I think preluded a downfall

he had hard problems to solve, the biggest being "how to get new fans into this show"

I meant the trend of putting more and more time and money into making a superficially better product

yeah, I still don't know where his time went

Rob will spend 100 hours to do 10 hours of work

It's not very complicated: He's extremely inefficient.

that's about the ratio I observe

maybe 5:1 instead of 10:1

He also is kinda a perfectionist

He wants to release things he is proud of

He started to have "standards" for what he was doing

It's directly observable going from OG Unforgotten Realms, to S1 of Unforgotten Realms on the Escapist, to the first half of S2, to the second half of S2 onward

and he still has those

He could have released a half baked Uquest but chose not to

This as well

but they miss the point of how you become/stay successful in a creative industry

we all make fun of his hot dog streams, but fuck, they were SOMETHING

you can't go from moving 100mph, doing new projects monthly, being exciting and funny in new ways all the time

to just.... I make 10 DnD videos a year

Honestly, I think UQuest might not have turned out much different; he had all the money he asked for, but assigned his wife to do a huge amount of work. She left, he lost all her time and work investment.

On top of that, he really had absolutely no clue on how to program the game he was trying to make.

$100k is nothing, that money was "show me there is interest in me doing something bigger"

because, even with only "2 years" he could have put out a fun-enough indie game

and he made one smart decision, which wasn't to focus on it 100% of his time

he knew he had to stay relevant while he made the game

He could have. That's what I was saying with him being extremely inefficient, and agreeing with Polu on the perfectionism thing

He had a specific image in his head for what the game should be, but he didn't have the knowledge he thought he had to make that come to life; he would've had to either completely rework his roadmap for the game to get it out in two years, or completely overhaul the production of it, probably hiring people that actually know what they're doing.