Defend The House's Final Form

This might be a giant wall of text as I am going to try and outline everything that I have been figuring out recently with the future of the channel. There has been slightly less videos recently as we experiment and figure stuff out but I think I am close to having the future of DTH figured out.

First thing I have to talk about is the decided Facebook 2 video series. We have 4 currently in the works and we're going to be sticking with these 4 into the recent future.

Defend The House 2

Review Roulette: Joe and Jamison get given a random game to play and review.

Commentary Series: This is a more laid back series where me, Ben and Jamison all play a game together, watch, react and commentate, very Game Grumps like, there's no official name because each game is going to get it's own title. Currently we are working through Heavy Rain, Beyond Two Souls and will be going through Detroit. This series is called 'Trapped: A David Cage Experience' (David Cage is the guy who writes those games). 

URL (Unnamed Racing League): Me, Jamison and Ben race to finish a specific in game objective set by ourselves. This can be anything we decide. The series will pilot with a race in Getting Over It and will flow into multiplayer games like Battlefield 1 and PUBG. 

Podcast: We will be moving the Patreon exclusive podcast to Facebook and it's going to be re-branded.

We've also been keeping up the consistent livestreams. I'm playing through the whole of the Halo franchise and in the evening we like to dip into multiplayer games like Rocket League, PUBG and GTA V. We will soon be livestreaming the behind the scenes sessions that goes into making the DTH videos! This will segway into my next topic.

The death of Behind The Myths

I really enjoy the BTM series but I HATE making them. The main problem is there's multiple hours of footage and the audio has to be adjusted manually. Usually in let's play recordings, everyone records their audio individually, so in editing, its quick to adjust but with Myth sessions, theres sometimes 8 people joining and I cant ask every community member to use audacity and Google Drive, it just wouldn't happen so I end up with 1 single audio file for the whole community, with everyone's voices on. I try to adjust the levels on Discord before hand but I never get it quite right so some people are always too loud/quiet and I have to spend a lot of time individually cutting phrases and lines and adjusting their volume. It takes DAYS. Even if the audio wasn't an issue the series makes things very difficult. For myth sessions I end up with one giant 3 hour video (sometimes more) which uses up a ton of hard drive space  instead of nicely organised and cut up video files and with the introduction for DTH2 I just don't have time for it anymore.

So I'm sad to say I will be killing off these videos starting in March, I'll have one last one for February and after that they will streamed on Facebook. There is a chance for cut down highlight reels but these will probably just go up on Facebook as they will be of a lesser quality.

A new format approaches.

To try and fix that downer, let's move away from series leaving the channels and new ones coming in! A big problem I have had with DTH for a while is I pick video ideas that only work in specific games like Myths, Bot Battle, Beauty Of etc. We have had problems in the past where no current games suit the DTH format and making videos gets very difficult, actually right now is one of those times, all we have is Battlefield 1 which came out in 2016. I have always needed something that's more flexible and I had an idea after the release of the video 'Skydiving onto a Ladder' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5Pz0V52_fA). 

After the Skydiving video performed really well and people seemed to like the format, I thought about how it could work in other games and situations. That video is more of a challenge video than a myth, it's a difficult task, with me and Jamison tackling it for hours on end along with our painful reactions, I think we can recreate this and make it a regular thing. I don't know how to title the new format but we're essentially going to be give ourselves very difficult objectives to achieve in games (very often multiplayer games) and I'm going to film the journey and turn it into a video that's edited similarly to the Skydiving video. I think I can make this a high quality product, worthy of the DTH brand. I think it can be unique and still show people stuff they have never seen in video games, stuff people have never tried before. I still have to figure some things out but we will be starting the series off in Fortnite!

New games ahoy!

So it's time to bring some new games onto the channel, we have needed some new ones for a while. The first one coming in will be Fortnite followed by Rainbow Six Siege. There will not be myths for Fortnite initially, we tried to film them and its a nightmare doing it in a public lobby so we're going to use it to launch the new challenge format idea I have, hopefully custom lobbies become an option later on. Rainbow Six Siege will be a Myth focused series, then in March we have Sea of Thieves and Far Cry 5. Some games finally!

The end of Patreon?

The last thing I have to announce is there is a high chance the Patreon ends in April. Our partnership with Facebook will be bringing in a new form of revenue and I should be able to comfortably support myself using that alongside Youtube income. This Patreon was created to fuel DTH's future, to help it become financially stable and to help pay for the usage of music but if I can do that through other means, I do not feel ethical about taking people's money when I don't need it. This isn't decided but I will keep you guys updated.

The near future

For the month of February I want to squeeze a few more videos out of Battlefield 1. A new Details video is being edited and I have some ideas for some cinematic community mayhem type projects. Things should start opening up in March as we start to figure out this new game plan for DTH, new games come out and I put the new format to practise. Been a tricky few months but I really feel like I'm starting to see the long term game plan for DTH and feel confident in where it's going. 

More updates to come but thank you guys so much for your support, I don't know if the Patreon will keep going but every dollar has been greatly appreciated, running DTH has been a time management challenge above anything I have ever tried and I think I am almost ready to take this channel to where it needs to be, I hope you guys stick around.

- Joe