Supporting Zero Bad Ideas?

Four years ago, I made a Patreon account, thinking viewers of our (failed) YouTube series could support us if they chose to. I would have made people aware of the Patreon page, but I wouldn't have planned for anyone to chip in. In the end, I never published the page, and it sat unused for four years. Actually, I guess it's been five years, now.

This whole thing is a tricky idea to sell myself on, let alone anyone else. I love board games, I would love if I had a job that revolved around board games, whether informative reviews or entertaining game play videos.

But the problem with support, either Subscribers on Twitch or Patrons on Patreon, is that if I don't do enough for it to be worth it, no one will see a reason to support the channel. And I can't make as much content as I'd like when I have work and a personal life to contend with. By that reasoning, if Zero Bad Ideas was my job, I'd have an extra 40 hours per week open up for it. But I can't quit my job and do this unless I knew it would work out, and I can't get to a point where it would work out if I have a full-time job. That's pretty obvious, but it's still disheartening. We do one livestream per week, and eventually I edit those streams into YouTube videos, so content it slow. I could just skip the editing process and upload straight to YouTube from Twitch, but I don't want to deliver videos that don't meet my own standards, and that means cutting out dead air between game rounds, and inserting helpful pop-ups to clarify rules goofs or information that I realize during editing would be unclear to a viewer.

The glaring hole in my plan is that board games generally require at least one other person. Twitch streamers who play video games don't necessarily need to wait for a friend to be available who wants to play the same game, they just play solo or with random people online. That's not really an option for board games in my basement. I don't want to do 2-person games against myself, because it's frequently too much to keep track of and play efficiently. And on top of that, let's look at the two games I've streamed recently: Gloomhaven and Legacy of Dragonholt. Those are legacy campaign games. Even Brandon and I are trying to get back into Netrunner: Terminal Directive, another legacy game. The only people who would watch those streams are a) people who have already played them and want to see another perspective, or b) people who haven't played them and figure they'll never have the option. It excludes groups c) people who are interested in the game but want to experience it for themselves, and d) people who didn't care about board games in the first place. I'm not making it any easier on myself.

It's also a bit of a sore spot to look at my follower count on Twitch. I have 21 followers, and I appreciate each and every one of them. However, at least 7 of them are people who are part of Zero Bad Ideas, so they're never actually viewers contributing to the channel's visibility. On Instagram, I have 111 followers, and that number blows me away every time I see it. But, I post on there very often, and I use different hashtags and attract accounts I would never have thought of. But those 111 followers don't translate into Twitch views, and neither do my 48 Twitter followers; I get an average of 4 views per stream if I'm lucky. Those platforms are basically three totally different worlds, and I feel like I need to give each one the same amount of attention, but none of them benefit another. It's just a lot. I get why companies have dedicated social media managers.

Even this blog lives on the back-burner. I love writing, I even keep a semi-consistent journal in Evernote, but when I attempt to write something about a board game, or Zero Bad Ideas in general, I got nothing. I sometimes think I should start writing overly-critical reviews of games, and make that my thing. For a long time, I was known to be needlessly judgmental of basically everyone and everything, and it bothered me that that seemed to be my default setting, but it could be a strength in this industry. Not that designers want people to say mean things about their work (personally, I would be devastated if that happened to one of my game ideas), but I love CinemaSins on YouTube, and I still watch the movies they pick apart.

So, while I thought writing all of this out might help me sort out my thoughts on how or why a person might support Zero Bad Ideas, I still don't even know what benefits I could offer a Patron, besides my thanks (and an invite to the obligatory Discord channel).

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These have been my (in)coherent thoughts of the day. Thanks for joining me.

-Jason