People Make Games in 2020: A few thoughts

Hello everyone!

I thought it might be interesting to round out this year with some reflections on how People Make Games has been getting on throughout 2020. This has been a complete train wreck of a year, but PMG is still standing and I can’t tell you how grateful I am for that. Our team remains healthy and because of your support, we’ve not had to feel insecure in our jobs. That’s no small thing at all. Thank you thank you thank you.

Let’s kick off with some numbers

Anni’s currently working on another project and so I haven't been able to ask her to whip up some nice infographics for this post. Can you tell? I bet you can’t tell.

Overall, we’re really pleased with these stats. People Make Games videos have been watched more than twice the amount of times they were watched in 2019, while bringing in more than double the number of subscribers to boot.

Interestingly, most of this happened in the second half of the year. I think I’ve talked about this before in a previous Patreon Show, but since around August, YouTube has started recommending our channel to an awful lot more people. It looks to us like the success of Quinns’ video on Entropia, the world’s only “cash-based” MMO, seemed to get the ball rolling and we’ve done our best to make the most of it since then.

Whatever it was, once those folks came across the channel, it seemed to cause a kind of chain reaction with all sorts of other videos (new and old) suddenly getting their moment in the sunshine. This has always been the hope, I suppose! We don’t do a lot of time sensitive stories on PMG, for a number of different reasons, which means most of our stuff still feels just as relevant today as it did when we first pressed publish. It’s been great to see that pay off this year.

I’d say my biggest regret when looking at those numbers above is that we didn’t publish as many videos as we’d hoped to. Bringing Quinns on board has meant we can work on more projects than ever before, but 2020 has also coughed up its fair share of difficulties. We’ve had to limit the kinds of stories we can tell right now and speaking for myself at least, the last 12 months have been a bit of a shitter when it comes to mental health. Making things hasn’t always come as easily when it’s under the shadow of a global pandemic.

So perhaps that’s not something I should consider such a failure. We’ve had the enormous privilege of reigning in our deadlines a bit in 2020, in order to better protect our team from burnout and stress. And it’s worked. Things feel a lot brighter now and we’re still here, ready to bring you plenty more videos about games and the people who make them.

Quinns!

February saw Quinns join PMG as some kind of sports correspondent. That title doesn’t quite fit his work properly, but we like calling him it all the same. And after throwing himself into the world of Kabaddi with his first piece (and promptly getting tackled to the ground by a team of athletic King's College London students), the severity of the COVID pandemic became clear.

Not the year we had planned for our newest reporter, but Quinns has made some truly fantastic lemonade from 2020’s horrible, horrible lemons. From taking us inside the world of Second Life sex work, to explaining Blaseball, to that interview at the end of his Entropia piece. He’s been an absolute dream to work with and gosh, what a pro! This isn’t the job he’d signed up for, but he’s absolutely taken it all in his stride.

2021 will hopefully see him return to the world of games that aren’t video games in one form or another. There’s already been some talk of purchasing a racing pigeon, for example, but I’m probably not meant to tell you that.

Travel

It’s a little strange looking back at the earlier videos from 2020. We began this year with one of our most ambitious stories to date, travelling all the way to Hong Kong to interview Blitzchung in-person and it remains one of my favourite things we’ve ever done. A vital reminder to me of the importance of getting out there and meeting people where they live.

And yet, just days after Anni and I flew home to Brighton, Hong Kong was forced into a state of emergency as the first COVID-19 cases were confirmed in the region. At the time, we thought we’d been lucky to avoid the virus. That seems a ridiculous thing to say now, doesn’t it?

It would turn out that Blitzchung was one of our last in-person interviews of the year (in fact, he was the last one for me) and I’ve still absolutely no idea when that’s likely to change. And oh my word, that has sucked. Losing the option to say ‘hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we actually went there and spoke to them?’ has stolen part of what makes our work feel different, I think. I’m so eager to get back to that kind of filming once it’s safe to do so.

If you just knew who we have pencilled in for a future video too.. Gah! One day.

Patreon

Aside from our health, the thing I’m most thankful for this year has to be the support PMG has continued to receive from you, our patrons. It is not lost on us that you’ve all stuck with us through one of the most difficult years in our lifetime. We won’t ever take that for granted.

That’s why back in September we decided to send out several hundred stickers to almost all of you. I think they look really cool (shoutout to Anni’s design work, as ever!) and we’ve loved seeing all your pictures of where they’ve ended up.

I also found the process of packaging them and writing silly notes extremely valuable. As shown at the beginning of this post, we have to think about numbers quite a bit in this job. How many new subscribers are we getting? What videos attracted the most views? That stuff is undeniably important to what we do, but it can be surprisingly easy to become desensitized to what those stats actually mean.

As of writing this, People Make Games has 845 patrons! Eight hundred and forty five real people who believe in what we do and ensure that we’re able to do it. That is absolutely amazing to me and sending out all those stickers certainly helped me take a moment to appreciate what that kind of number really means.

So yeah, if we can, I’d love to do something similar next year. I don’t know what that will look like exactly, or how we’ll work it into our budget, but it was honestly one of the most rewarding things I’ve been able to do this year and I’d really like to make it something of a tradition, if we can.

I hope you’re all staying safe out there and from everyone here at People Make Games: we hope you have a significantly better 2021 than whatever this was <3