Some thoughts from the people who make People Make Games

Back when Anni and I had respectable full-time jobs at Gamer Network (the parent company of Eurogamer), we were introduced to the idea of an offsite. It’s a pretty simple thing: once a year, you and the rest of your team leave the office for a day and talk about how everything is going and what you’d like to see improved. No distractions, no emails, no twitter dot com.

I remember thinking this all sounded a bit fluffy at first, but in practice, it can be quite eye-opening to take a moment and ask... hang on, why are we actually doing it like this? What should we be doing instead?

And so, at the start of this month, we left the dog at home and went to a Caffè Nero down the road and took a long hard look back at the last six months of People Make Games. Here’s some of what we talked about.What is PMG?

People Make Games, in our eyes, isn’t just a YouTube channel. That’s where we upload our videos, sure, but it’s quite a bit more than that to us.

Within minutes of our Discord going live back in May (sorry, again, for all of those notifications), it became clear to us that PMG had the potential to be this incredibly warm and vibrant community, outside of what Anni and I create.

We do have a responsibility to nudge that in the right direction, of course, and we’re hoping to make that a bigger focus in 2019. For a start, we've got some fun ideas for what we could do to celebrate our first birthday in a few months time. Keep an eye out for more news on that front in a little bit!

We also think People Make Games can and should be a force for good in this strange little bubble of ours. Although Getting into the Games Industry is not our most viewed episode, it’s easily one of the stories we’re proudest of. There’ll always be daft videos like the one we just did about the Queen’s Golden Wii, but we want to use PMG as a platform to talk about the important stuff too. You’ll see more of this over the next year, without a doubt. We’ve already started work on a more long-term project that we’re really passionate about for this exact reason.

As I said last year, we can’t call ourselves People Make Games and ignore the fact that plenty of folks across this industry are having a crap time.

Freelance work

If you follow either Anni or myself on social media, you might have noticed that from time-to-time we do a little bit of freelance work to help pay the bills; that might be the odd review from me, or Anni might be commissioned to illustrate something cool. We both enjoy the change of pace this can offer and the extra cash has been pretty important to us, but we’ve decided to heavily cut down on the amount of external work we’ll be taking on this year.

There’s a very real financial hit to consider here, but we want to make sure we’re putting as much of our energy into People Make Games as we can. This is the year to make this whole thing stand on its own two feet and we want to give ourselves the best chance possible to make that happen.

Patreon Show + Behind-the-scenes

With that extra time, we want to improve what we’re offering to you on Patreon for a start. We’re pretty pleased with how the episodes themselves have turned out, but there’s work to be done on both the Patreon Show and Behind-the-scenes content.

By the time this post goes live, you may already have seen the Patreon Show for January and you’ll notice it’s being presented in a different format. Although we’ve really liked having both Anni and myself on camera chatting about what we’re up to, the videos themselves tended to run on too long and they weren’t always that fun to watch. We’ve replaced that with something more scripted and much snappier, accompanied by footage we’ll have collected over the previous month. We don’t think rambling, 10-minute conversations are the way to go with that show any longer and so we’re trying something fresh.

As for our behind-the-scenes tier, there hasn’t been enough from us there. We want to start using some of the time we’d usually give over to freelance work to remedy this. If you’ve watched our latest episode you’ll have noticed we did a lot more filming out and about, thanks to a new steadycam setup we’re using. This same kit should also help us record extra bits and pieces for the BTS crowd too, for a start.Fewer Skype interviews

From a reporting point of view, I think our Neopets/Scientology episode might be some of our best work so far. The interview with the original creators of the site is super candid and we don’t skirt around the Scientology stuff in the slightest. That’s partly down to the fact that Adam and Donna seem like fairly straight-talking people, but it’s also because I spent an entire day with them at their office in London.

I’d really like to do more and more of this in future stories. There’s something very different about meeting and talking to someone face-to-face, as opposed to a video call. Of course, sometimes that’s not always an option, especially when it involves interviewing people outside of the UK. But where we can, that’s going to be a really big priority. Spending time with people makes for better stories, it’s as simple as that.

So yeah, that's where we're up to after a couple of cappuccinos and a reasonably frank conversation about how we've been working so far, but if you have any feedback of your own, do let us know. You’re the ones keeping our lights switched on over here and we’re always happy to talk about what People Make Games could be doing better.

As ever, thanks so much for your support.