Duckfeed State of the Union 2024

Hello all,

Every once in a while we like to make a big post like this to announce some changes. 2024 marked our ten year anniversary of funding ourselves through Patreon, and over that time we’ve increased the amount of content we put out each month. This year’s changes are going to be about refocusing, reining things in a bit, and making sure we’re putting our energy where it does the most good.

The inspiration for these changes came from a WOFF! Dispatch question about vacations, and how we don’t take them. Because the content calendar marches on, doing things like going to conventions, taking time off for holidays, or even preparing for events like Duckstream… anything that requires taking a break from recording requires us to flex doubletime in the run-up and in the aftermath. The result is that “time off” really isn’t a thing for us, and it never really can be a thing.

These changes are about creating room in our schedule so this can be more like a regular job. The hope is that reducing our burnout will make us better podcasters. This doesn’t come naturally to us, because our instinct is to offer more instead of less, but that has led us to an unsustainable place, even with Gwen’s help. (And don’t worry, we’re keeping her around! We couldn’t do this without her at this point).

For some sobering math, in 2024 we will have released 371 episodes across our 12 active shows. That’s 230 free episodes, and 141 premium episodes. That’s an average of a little more than 7 episodes per week, at about 8 hours of content per week (on average). This is a lot more than is usual for most Patreon campaigns and networks. While we pride ourselves on providing a lot of bang per dollar, these are hard numbers to look at.

Guest Episodes of Watch Out for Fireballs!

A couple of times per year, a WOFF! episode will have a guest host, meaning it will be Gary and a guest or Kole and a guest. This will solve two problems for us:

First, it gets the responsibility of beating a whole video game in a week off of our plate for one week. WOFF! accounts for the majority of our work in a given week, and being able to tap out occasionally is a pre-requisite for any kind of workload lightening.

Second, it addresses the problem of having half of the show play and discuss a game from a genre they don’t really like, and have nothing to say about. This is a drag for everyone, we think! We don’t want to stop covering things like console RPGs, adventure games, roguelikes, or RTS games altogether because of this dynamic. Tapping in a guest who is down with one of those genres makes sense, and we think it will make for better episodes. It will also bring in some fresh perspectives from people we know and trust to be great contributors (who we will also pay for their time).

To tease a specific example, at some point early next year we will be covering Command & Conquer: Red Alert II, a game a lot of people have asked for. But for this episode, Kole will be sitting it out and we’re tapping in the wonderful Brayton Cameron.

If someone sponsors an episode that makes sense to handle with a guest, we will check with them to see if they’re okay with this. We don’t want anyone to feel like they’re getting short shrift.

Open Season on Revisiting Early WOFF! Games

While we’re teasing things… this has nothing to do with balancing our workloads, but in 2025 we’ll officially be open to covering games again. Specifically, a patron asked if we could revisit Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, a game that we covered wayyy too early (13 years ago), when the format of the show was different and we were worse podcasters.

This will be a “sometimes treat” when it feels appropriate.

Very Occasional Reruns

In addition to the guest episodes, we might occasionally designate a week to not feature an entirely new episode of a show. This won’t happen for Premium shows. Either we will pick an older episode that feels right, or we will make a premium or rarity episode free for everyone. By “rarity”, we mean episodes featured in bundles over the years. The unlocked premium episodes will take the place of our standard “welcome packs”. All of these episodes will have cleaned up audio when we can make that happen, and we will also record wrappers for the episodes to give some new context on the subject.

We’ll do this sparingly when the guest episodes can’t work to help us accommodate events like conventions.

We are Retiring Exquisite Suffering

There will be one episode of Exquisite Suffering in January, and then no more. We’ve done two premium episodes per month for a long time now, and we’ve decided that doing six (sometimes seven!) episodes of a mostly improv and digressionary show each month isn’t working as well as we’d like. So we’re going down to 4 or 5 regular episodes per month, available to all, with the hope that what we lose in quantity will be made up for in quality.

There is no current plan to replace Exquisite Suffering with a new show, since that would work against our goal of refocusing. We feel like a $5 tier that includes premium episodes of Watch Out for Fireballs!, Bonfireside Chat (when it’s active), Real Lich Hours, and Unfilmable is pretty action packed even before you realize that it also includes the archives of all of those shows and 200+ episodes of Exquisite Suffering.

The topic of the final episode of Exquisite Suffering will be determined by one lucky listener who wins a drawing. To enter this drawing, please complete this year’s listener survey (see below). The drawing will take place on New Years’ Day, and we will contact the winner to pick the game we’re covering. (Note that our usual standard for choosing an episode applies, no Custer’s Revenges please).

For anyone who will miss the monthly polls, we are still going to run a poll to select one of the games we’ll cover in a given month.

Using More of Patreon’s Features

This announcement is more of an FYI than anything else. Patreon has added features like discounts and gifting, and we’re going to try to use those more. This means we’ll occasionally run specials on new memberships, and bring up that people can gift a subscription to our content to each other if they’d like.

There are other new features that Patreon is developing that will be of more direct help to us as podcasters, and we’re going to be playing around with them as they come out.

Days of Future Cast Will Be Back!

Gary and Jeremy have talked about it plenty on the show, but this year has been pretty rough. We’re not saying we’ll never retire the show, but now is not its time, since we still have X-Men ‘97 and 2-3 great comics runs to talk about. There’s plenty to say. There’s a possibility that it will return to fortnightly releases, however, and we apologize for the show’s sporadic schedule recently.

Listener Survey

It’s been a very long time since we’ve done this, but we’d like to ask you to fill out this brief listener survey. It will help us understand who you are and what you want, and inform future decisions about the network in the coming year. Be sure to tick the box that enters you into the raffle to choose the subject of the last episode of Exquisite Suffering, if you’d like to do that.

Closing Remarks

We are very grateful for your support, which allows us to make a living off of doing the work that we want to do. Our hope is that these changes are a welcome shakeup that will help us make our shows even better for you.

This is always the case, but none of the changes outlined above are written in stone. Everything is an experiment and if any of this doesn’t work, we’ll try something else.

Thanks again for listening and backing us. 2024 was a bad year for humans generally, but having you along has brought a little light to the proceedings. Please be safe over the holidays!

Kole and Gary

P.S. The music in the podcast version of this announcement is "Cool Cave" from the Kirby's Epic Yarn soundtrack. People tend to ask.