Week 49 - Closing in!

What was and what will be

As the year starts to near a close, I realise first of all that week 52 by my count is only one day long. I think the more standardized approach would put us currently on week 50, but whatever. As with GM naming conventions, the key is to remain consistent!

The tutorial around isometric games is still in the works, and is likely the last proper video tutorial of the year. So I'm trying to make it a good one!

I've also been trying to work out what to do with livestreams. Someone recently pointed out that I've been breaking twitch affiliate rules by multi-streaming across Twitch and YouTube simultaneously. I'd previously researched this and concluded it was only a partner limitation, but it seems that was either wrong, or had changed since.

I think given the circumstances I'll probably just drop my twitch affiliate status, as sad as I'll be to lose my single cat emote (sorry Lulu!). That way I can continue to stream to both audiences. I made very little from my Twitch affiliation anyway as YouTube is still where the majority of my audience lives.

Patreon, income, and staying aliiive

On Patreon we managed to get very close briefly to my $1500 goal around September time, sadly we've lost quite a few of the higher tier supporters over the last couple of months dropping us back down to just over $1200. A lot of those people have been changing their pledge from $20 to $1, and quite a few new $1 supporters have been coming in to replace some of the losses. Understandably near Christmas time some people are feeling the need to cut back. It's been an awesome year overall (despite many ups and downs) and it's still nuts that I'm making enough to do this full time. Hopefully we can push even higher next year!

A few of you see this income as really low and wonder how I live on this much from Patreon, but remember that I still run ads on YouTube (~$200-$400 monthly) and I sell individual video source code access to non-patrons (another ~$200-$400 monthly) so while Patreon support is the main pillar keeping me up, there are others filling in the gaps. As long as we can keep above ~$1000, I can keep doing this work.

Thank you all for being a part of that, I'm hoping to find more ways I can give back to you all next year with some new perks and rewards. Keep an eye out!

-S