Hello everyone, I am officially launching memberships! This is a way for people to support me on a monthly basis if they would like, where I get 95% of the cut. This is especially here for people who aren’t too bothered about a Twitch sub and would just like to show their support, or people that enjoy my other content that is not monetised, like YouTube or my blog. I wrote a piece explaining my current situation and goals here, so I have made this an extra option just in case anyone would like that option. A super helpful way to enable this Noob.
So what is a membership? It is very much like Patreon if you are familiar with that. There are different tiers for different fees. You pay monthly and I provide content. There is not going to be tonnes of content but there will be bits to thank you for your support.
Level 1 – £5/Month – You will get weekly behind the scenes posts of bits and bobs that I have been up to. Whether that is emotes in progress, random clips from upcoming YT videos, sneak peeks at stream updates or just random thoughts or insights about what I am doing. You will also get credited at the end of my YouTube videos and Twitch streams. Finally, you will have access to an Enooblers Anonymous channel in my Discord!
Level 2 – £10/Month – You will get the above benefits plus a fortnightly update post, summarising everything that I have been up to in the last couple of weeks in one place.
Level 3 – £69/Month – You will get all of the above benefits, plus memes.
Alien Isolation – £999 – I will play Alien Isolation on stream through to the credits.
And that is all I’ve got so far! I am very much going to be learning as I go. If you do not want to sign up to a membership but would like to give a tip, there is the traditional ‘Buy me a Coffee’ way. You unfortunately wont get the membership benefits for that, but any donation at all is immensely appreciated by me. If any of this sounds appealing to you, you can check out my page here.
If you are only here because of one area of my work and are wondering what other things I am speaking of, you can check out my Bio Link here if you would like, where you can find everything that I do in one place! There is quite the backlog of content there and I hope to continue to work full time producing more 🙂
Now that I have updated everyone about where I stand with regards to the future (if you missed it you can read it here but as a tl;dr, I’d like to try to earn enough financially to keep going), I can start to get my head into actually making it happen, with physical goals and practical changes for 2022!
First off, should we talk about the reason we are all really here?! Games! I am not setting goals for a certain amount of games to play or anything like that, but as everyone knows, I do love a game plan. This list is a none binding guide of games that I might play throughout the year. There are a mixture of gifted games, game pass games, requested games and backlog games on there. The real plan though is to keep it flexible. If a demo, open beta or free weekend pops up I will slot them in.
I love playing Indie Games. I love discovering them, I love getting to know what is coming out and I love sharing them with everyone. I have tried to share this passion in different formats in the past, particularly with the Steam Game Festivals and other variations. Sharing the full experience, making highlight videos, doing write ups etc are all things I have given a go. I still don’t have in mind exactly what I want to do yet, but it is one of my goals to find a good way to cover the indie game festivals. There are plenty of them throughout the year, I always have a really cool time with them, I just need to get better at sharing that. Following on from that, I would also like to make a special effort to ensure that I am consistent with my Indie Showcase. There is no reason that I can’t have covered 52 games by the end of the year. I have plenty on my waiting list that I am desperate to try out and this series was designed to be manageable.
I realise that the above is displaying some vague goals, so here is a tangible one. I would like to get to 250 followers on Twitch. I don’t usually focus too much on the numbers but there is a reason for this one. Keymailer is a service where you can request keys to upcoming games. I am on there and have gotten keys from there in the past, but you can’t actually get accredited until you have 250 followers. I am most certainly not going to get a lot of the keys that I might like even if I am accredited, but if I see a particularly interesting looking indie game I will request it. Being accredited really ups my chance of being accepted for a key and getting to cover a game, so this is why I would like to aim for the followers. I currently have 198. 52 within the year sounds do-able, and if I get there sooner then that should hopefully open up some content opportunities.
Another goal of mine is just to finish making my streams a really cool place to be. It does seem like it may be a never ending job, but if I can get on top of the basics then it will be a lot more manageable. Creating sound bits, more channel point rewards, using cam more often, potential community goals, using the fun tools that I can with the chatbot, more customised alerts. Basically, I want to try to use all of the tools that are available sooner rather than later. I also have 25 emote slots that I need to fill (or I will once I finally get my animated ones) and I am redrawing the majority of them. I cannot wait to share all the new ideas, for now I can share a sneak peek at the new style.
It’s really easy for me to get caught up in setting goals. I would like to do a lot of work on my YouTube as well as my streams, but I also have to try to be realistic. I have to prioritise Twitch because that is where I make my money. My YouTube isnt even close to being monetizable. But it is niggling away at me that I would love to do well in that too, and I have some ideas in the back burner that I would like to make a start on if I can get a handle on everything else first. I do understand though that I cannot expect that to be doing well when I am not putting all of my effort into it.
I have so many more content ideas slowly cooking away in the background and I haven’t even mentioned this blog, or my aspirations for this website. I would love to set aside some time weekly to do some writing. I want to write some thought pieces that I am passionate about. Maybe that can do some good in the world, or maybe it can help my content get seen. I can aim for the former, and if it even opens up one opportunity then it is worth it. I do think I am slightly better at written words than I am out loud, so hopefully people can take something new away from my writing.
So, since one of my goals is to put myself out there, maybe I should start here. If anyone enjoys my content I would love it if you could recommend it to a friend. If you watch my YouTube videos please give them a like. I’m not going to pretend to understand the algorithm but I hear that is helpful. If I do something you particularly like please reach out and let me know, feedback is very important. If you have a favourite series of mine please give it a share on the socials.
Finally, I’d love to hear any thoughts from anyone about a few things. What do you look for in a streamer? What kind of things do you like to get back in return for your support? Are there anything you like, like community goals that you would like to see on my streams? Is there any type of content that you would either like to see me dabble in or think would help me with my goals?
I once again want to close this out with a HUGE thank you for everyone’s support. So many great things happened in 2021 and that is down to you guys.
I just finished up my 2021 Reflections thread on Twitter and started working on my 2022 Goals thread. It quickly became apparent that limited characters weren’t going to work for everything I want to share, so here we are! I’m going to treat this as a bit of a channel update post.
I made a thread last year of my achievements through the year and I enjoyed it so I thought I’d do the same for 2021😄 If anyone would like to see more of what I do or support me you can find everything I do at https://t.co/SciVHvTr3M
We did a LOT of stuff in 2021. You can see a bunch of it in the Twitter thread. The majority of it was on Twitch but there was a lot of extra stuff too. Something I should mention about this though is that I have been doing this pretty much full time for the entire year. It is not my full time job, but I have sort of been treating it that way just because that is what made me happy. Obviously, this isn’t totally sustainable so it makes the future a little unclear. But I will share my current thoughts and plans as best as I can.
I don’t earn much from Twitch, but I do earn enough that it is significant in my life. Between my low hour job and Twitch I just about manage to pay my bills. I don’t have any disposable income, which isn’t an easy way to live but I would take that over doing a job I hate 1 million times over. I do have savings but they are limited, so I am at a point where I am giving myself the rest of the year to see if I can make this sustainable. This is one reason that I don’t buy new games, everything that I buy comes straight out of the money that is supposed to be sustaining me for the next year, and I would really like to be doing this as long as possible.
Earning money doing this thing that I love never sat right with me. I couldn’t understand how I deserved it. People continued to be generous and helped me to understand that they like to support me because of the entertainment I have provided. Mid-year I was earning enough that I managed to come off my benefits (which is something I am entirely grateful for in itself). When that happened I started to slowly try to change my mindset, treating streaming as a job as well as a hobby. I still can’t say that I am fully understanding of the financial support people give me but I do trust that they wouldn’t do it for no reason, and although I do not feel as though I deserve more, I started to feel a little confidence in pursuing growth.
Don’t get me wrong, I do not want to be a huge streamer. My only goal is to be able to continue doing this as a job beyond the year with the understanding that not many people get to do this as a job. I am keeping my future work options on my mind the entire time. It feels kind of unbelievable that I had found the confidence to even try to pursue this. Whether I can grow a little or not, anything that I do contributes to putting me out there and finding new opportunities in the future, so that is win-win really.
Before New Year my head was buzzing with ideas. I was thinking of using sound bits so that at least people get more out of their cheers. I was thinking of using cam more because I know some people like that and we could do some fun stuff with channel points. I even got a ring light for Christmas for it. I was thinking that I should stop feeling so self conscious about putting myself out there. Try advertising myself a bit more, try tiktok etc.
Unfortunately, over the New Year I have lost almost all of that confidence that I had gained. I have literally been thinking about throwing it all away and quitting completely so I’ve been giving myself some time. But I had already set some plans in place, I know that deep down it is what I want, so I am going to try my best to continue working towards it, despite the intrusive thoughts.
So basically, what I am trying to say is that I am going to try to keep putting my all into this, it may not be forever but I am going to try my best to see if I could make it that way. There is going to be a separate post of practical 2022 goals, but writing this felt really important to me. I just wanted to make sure everyone knows where I stand with where I am now and any changes I make going forward. I want to make sure everyone knows that any support, whether financial, making a recommendation or even watching my streams is extremely appreciated by me.
Hello everyone, I thought it was about time that I wrote something on this blog of mine, and starting with an update only seemed right!
I made this website last year while I was going through a bad time, you know when you just get so immersed in something that it helps you block everything out for a while? I literally worked for 3 days straight, taking my laptop to bed and everything to get this up and running. Obviously, in times like those you may not be thinking straight, and it later became clear that there was no way I was going to keep putting the time in to create new content once it was all out. Then I got heavily into streaming and there was even less time, and the rest is history.
But I’ve decided I want to bring it back. Sometimes I can’t express myself well out loud, sometimes I just don’t want to speak, or sometimes I get really excited about something and this seems like the perfect outlet. I have done some reshuffling of my menus and written some (probably too many) lists so that I finally know where I am with my visions of what I want this to be!
I have changed quite a few of the sections above to group together some pieces I might want to write, so if I have something that I want to write about a game that isn’t necessarily a review I can! I have also realised that everything I write doesn’t have to be a ‘piece’. If I feel like writing only one paragraph about something I can, and I am going to! This is going to be a good place for me to keep everything together and to always have a suitable format to express myself.
Some of you may have noticed that I am extremely behind on my Ps Plus series. I have made the difficult and sad decision to stop. I know that no-one really followed it intently and most people will just think ‘ok cool’ or ‘do what you need to’ and move on, but I just wanted to explain the decision as it is super disappointing to me – even if it is the right thing to do – and what that means for the channel going forward!
There have been a few things that have lead me to the conclusion that stopping the series is best for me and my channel.
Firstly, I have been struggling to keep up with the number of games that we are getting. One extra game may not sound like a lot, but I struggle to get them all done in one session. I like to make sure I play each game for long enough that I get to see what it is about, for some this requires a couple of hours. That could mean 6 hours a month just recording the games. I don’t want to cut corners so I wait till I have time, which sometimes never comes and makes me behind (with the added stress of a broken capture card and some mental health problems I ended up months behind).
The playlist of my very first year of covering the Ps Plus games, 2019!
The same applies for my Monthly Round Ups. I love doing these, they feel like a marker to remember what happened each month. However, when I first started, I intended for them to be more heavily edited, interesting, fun videos. As I’ve gotten more into gaming and especially streaming (as well as doing video editing as a day job for a while), I lost the passion for the editing and it became a chore. I also started having more thoughts on the games and the industry as a whole, which I don’t think is a bad thing, but when you add that to 3/4 games per month, it makes the edit longer and longer. I feel like the quality declined in what I wanted to do and that tells me it is time to take a break.
By the time I have recorded all games and the Round Up, edited, scheduled, created thumbnails and made a social media write up, it adds up to a lot of hours and instead of catching up or doing something else, my YT Channel has just come to a stand still. I used to keep clips of all the funny things that have happened to make highlights, make a yearly video, rank the games etc. And as time has gone on, I have done less and less of that. I hate that I have done that because I still think it is a sound idea, but I feel that if I am not mentally all in then I should probably dip out.
The playlist of my second year of trying all of the Ps Plus games, 2020!
My third reason requires a bit of background. I had a few reasons for starting this series. It was back when I was a total noob (can you imagine me being even more of a noob than I am now? Jeez) and I didn’t own very many games. I had already been doing my Ps Plus coverage but in writing, so moving onto video seemed like a natural progression. It was an opportunity for me to get to experience all different types of games, and share that with others, bringing in a new perspective. Since then though, I have experienced MANY games. Back then I knew what I definitely liked, and knew what I definitely disliked, but not a lot in between. In the mean time, I have developed as a person and a gamer.. in no small part to this series might I add. This is a great thing, but on the other hand, there are now many games that crop up that it almost feels pointless doing a video for. Fighting game? Sport Game? Racing Game? More than likely I am not going to be into it. Horror game? I’ll quit after 10 minutes. FPS? Ill enjoy what I play but not feel compelled to go back. Third person open world adventure/shooter? I have either played it, am planning to play it or have watched someone else play it. Indie Game? Puzzle Game? Adventure Game? I probably want to stream it blind it so I don’t really want to make a video. Sequel? How do I even make a video for that? There are lots of patterns in the games given with Ps Plus and all of the above have happened many times. Occasionally there will be a game that I will add to my to play list which is great, but when my to play list is now already 100+ games long, it makes trying out all of these other games feel like it is probably not the best use of my time.
Here is the playlist for all of the Ps Plus games that I tried in 2021!
It is not all negative. I have 100% gotten what I wanted out of the series. I have tried some games that I was sure I was going to love that I decided not to play, like Control and The Witness. Equally, I have found some games that I never would have thought of picking up that I really want to play, like Days Gone and Hollow Knight. That was a huge part of what I wanted to achieve, and I am so glad that I know I have helped others achieve this along the way too.
This is a playlist containing all of the Monthly Round Ups I did!
I’m going to be so sad to see this series end. I love all of the random little moments that it has caused, I love the joy I hear from people when I try out a game they love, or a game that is most certainly not a ‘Noob game’. Maybe in the future I will be able to pick it back up, and of course if there was a demand for it I would love to keep doing it, but as it stand I think this is the best call for now. I do have a new super exciting project coming up with a really great friend of mine so please keep your eyes open because it will be starting in the next couple of months, and I am really looking forward to continuing my Indie Showcase series, as well as starting some Let’s Plays that have been on the cards for a looooong time.
And to finish, have some laughs with my Highlight video from last year 😀
CtrlAltNoob 