Randomly Mine: Feb 15th, 2019

Sponsorships

I’ve never been against sponsorships. There’s multiple channels I’m subscribed to, friends and colleagues that have done sponsored content over the years and never had an issue. I don’t fault people for hustling in a time where people have aspirations like buying bread without comparing price-tags.

I’ll continue to watch people like Gus Johnson, OperatorDrewski, or Commentiquette without a care that they’ll get paid to promote something.

But it’s also something I’ve never been comfortable doing myself. Very recently, I was approached by a properly big Multi Channel Network. Certainly one having more luck than Machinima. The emails exchanged and calls hosted were polite, pleasant, and I’d happily have further conversations with those granting me opportunities to build a brand.

But that right there is probably why I’m not comfortable with all the sponsorships I’ve gotten so far.

Raycevick isn’t a brand, it’s me.

Now that doesn’t mean I spend everyday of my waking life analyzing the detail of my cereal boxes, amazon packages, and takeout orders. But the video’s I spend my days making are a part of me. They don’t get put onto a consistent work schedule. I don’t play a character. I don’t write stuff I disbelieve in that moment.

And I do that on purpose.

When a video’s not meeting a deadline – like now – a typo becomes an inside joke, or a factual error that wrongly misleads a viewer, that’s on me, no one else.

Backlash, criticism, and valid complaints are all directed at me for something I had control over, and that’s why I can sleep at night.

What I wouldn’t be able to stand is having my name associated with something negative completely out of my control, or something I don’t care about from the beginning. I don’t use Energy Drinks, so why would I sell them? I don’t Corsair products, why would I sell one? Moreover, I also wonder how would I even connect them to my videos?

How would one transition exactly from the ending of Mass Effect Andromeda… Years Later – that’s also a goddamn hour – to telling people how dope Wix is?

And at the risk of growing a hipster beard from this statement alone, I hate repetitive mainstream advertising just from sheer overexposure. Since watching Web Zeroes as a Teenager in 2010, content creators are still telling me to build a website with SquareSpace, and at this point, I’m probably refusing to out of spite.

Did you know Audible exists? That lootcrate has random items? That G2A can get you cheap codes? 

That last one really bit people in the ass.

And that’s what I don’t want to deal with.

I’ll be upfront with you guys and say that if there’s one big company I would seriously consider accepting sponsorship from were the opportunity to present itself, would be Logitech, as I’ve used their products since childhood without regret.

There’s some smaller brands too. Madrinas stands a serious chance of making me a coffee drinker, and there’s a local energy bar company called Hornby that makes an Organic bar that… actually tastes good? Gasp!

But knowing my luck, were a sponsorship to happen, the day it’s announced, the CEO of whoever will be exposed for punching orphans and I'll be caught in the crossfire.

Metro: Exodus

No, I haven’t played it yet and believe me, it’s seriously tempting to just drop all contact and vanish into the Russian countryside through my computer.

Guilt

My ego took over on the 12th of February and had to tweet about Activision’s actions, those being the firing of 800 people and announcing that the next Call of Duty game will have an “entirely new campaign.”

Being that I did a video in regards to Activision’s greed and received a fraction of flak for it last year, the ancient part of the brain that craves thrill and excitement starts screaming repeatedly in my ear “I told you so!”

Now I didn’t say that…

I just heavily implied it.

But in all seriousness, I don’t feel too guilty about those tweets as it’s in line with what I mostly post on there, light jabs or random observations, not unlike these mini-documents.

But it is something that I'm always trying to stay on top of. I don’t want videos to have sections that boil down to “my crystal ball is better than yours.” Not only are broken clocks right twice a day, the point of videos I produce is to offer people either a new perspective or a greater understanding of one they share, not boasting about it.

In the event I make another video on Rainbow Six Siege, there’s going to be a part of my head screaming to make the intro about how paid-lootboxes were shoved in weeks after I mentioned the game’s monetization being whack, and I will be moving that aside for something more useful.