Second Wind - Q3 2025 Financial Report + Upcoming Plans

Hey folks!

It's time for the next quarterly report and our upcoming plans as we close in on the end of the year.

/ REPORT BREAKDOWN

Note: We've added unpaid contracts to the report which means these are contracts we've already signed, but have yet to complete and be paid for. These amounts are marked with ( ) in their columns and listed in the summary. They are not included in the net profit, loss, or warchest in the report.

We had a really strong Q3 this year. I'm extremely proud of the team for hitting all of the financial targets I set for us earlier this year. We're in a really good spot right now as a business and things are looking steady for us as we plan for the future.

As expected, we saw a drop in sponsors for Q3, but we've already signed a lot of sponsors for Q4 which includes some bigger partnerships that we will be talking about soon.

Our updated merch strategy with Omar at the helm is also going really well at the moment. We didn't include the numbers in this month's report because we had some accounting errors to fix on our end, so that will be included in Q4's report.

The long-awaited Adventure is Nigh - Season 1 and 2 blu-rays will be ready for pre-order VERY soon, and we'll have a couple extra merch items dropping on our DFTBA store before the end of the year. You can also expect the Year 2 compilation of Fully Ramblomatic on Blu-Ray at the start of next year.

On the Work for Hire front, we're close to wrapping up the Guild Wars 2 Documentary, which Javed has done an absolutely stellar job of editing. We're really proud of how that project has come together to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the franchise. That documentary will be airing later this fall on the official Guild Wars channel as we don't host our work for hire projects here on Second Wind.

We also wrapped up work on Surgent Studio's Dead Take which released to great reviews and player feedback. We did a full rebrand of that project, helped with all of their trailers and social media assets, rollout strategy, mock reviews and even helped with some of the visual feel and tone of the game.

/ YOUTUBE VIEWCOUNT UPDATE

I wanted to take a moment to say we're extremely appreciative of the huge wave of support that came into our Patreon earlier this summer with our call to action when YouTube was borking out. Having our views drop like that so suddenly is an extremely scary thing for our business, even if we are mostly funded on Patreon.

The YouTube view count issue seemed to end up stemming from how YouTube reported views, and an API change that disabled one of the most popular ad blockers around. YouTube seems to only be tracking non-ad blocked views now, which is understandable as that's more accurate for sponsors and advertisers... it would just be nice if YouTube would actually communicate these things.

Other big YouTubers came to a similar conclusion, and it's backed up by the fact that our ad revenue has remained consistent despite the decrease in viewership during that time-period. Things seem to have stabilized now on YouTube's end thankfully.

Regardless, that kind of unpredictability is why we'll never chase algorithms or focus too much on viewcounts. It can change at any moment and isn't something we ultimately can control, so Patreon, Merch, Sponsors, Work for Hire... etc, that is and will always remain our focus to remain a sustainable business.

/ UPCOMING PLANS

As of this writing, we are less than 1,000 subscribers away from hitting 500,000 on YouTube which is super exciting to see and just in time for our upcoming 2-year anniversary celebration on November 15th!

For the rest of the year we're continuing our focus on refining our current shows and business as we noted in our Q2 report, but we do have some exciting events and one-off projects coming up!

Our one-shot Adventure is Nigh x Balatro episode is done and ready to go! We're just waiting on some things to line-up promotion wise before releasing it, but you will have it before the end of the month! Jack, Yahtzee, and Jenna had a great time making this and the crew knocked it out of the park with the animations and art as usual.

I'm also still planning to launch my own interview podcast soon. Had to put it on hold the last couple months just due to how busy things were with YouTube going crazy and such, but we're working on branding now and I hope to have it up and running before the end of the year.

We've also got a new episode of Game Arcadia from Jenna Stoeber dropping this Thursday!

And of course, we've got some great events coming up to look forward to.

• Week of Horror - October 27

  • Next week, since I (Nick) will be the main full-time person in the office while everyone else is filming Adventure is Nigh, I'll be streaming a short horror game Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings with Jenna or Jess!

• Second Wind 2-Year Anniversary Party - November 15

• The Game Awards - December 11

• End of the Year Party - December 20

We've got some big plans for 2026 cooking already as well.

As always, thank you for sticking with us and supporting us, and we welcome your feedback, ideas, or suggestions!

Until next time,

Nick Calandra

Editor-in-Chief