Votes come later. This is nomination only.

I want to have a show match of sorts, with some major deviations from the way TF2 is competitively played. In fact, I'm hoping this can be the first of a series of showmatches featuring new and varied gameplay.

There will be prize money, hopefully in the form of steam wallet bucks, or possibly keys. Everyone who participates will share in the winnings, this time $100 - the current monthly total of my Patreon site. It'll be a nice little stocking stuffer for the players.

That said, I need your nominations for players for this show match. This isn't a vote yet, so if a nominee has already been said, saying it again won't matter. Except maybe it will be funny if I get a whole page of nothing but "squid." If you can make that happen, I'll laugh a little.

But yeah. Nominations in this form please:

Name
Claim to fame (top 6v6 player, top 9v9 player, up-and-coming star, has a hilarious youtube channel, etc.)

I'm guessing most people also set that as their monthly max. So really, it'll be like $69.11 for the first vid I make in a month, and then more like $5 for the second, third, etc. Which is still great!

Hey everyone,

I want to get back into shoutcasting. But I'll be frank: I can only do it if I can make it worth the time I'm putting in. If I'm only getting $2 per video through ad money, it just isn't worth giving up time with my friends, my girlfriend, or anything else I do these days.

So you can help with that.

I set up a Patreon site - please check it out, it's an awesome way to give money directly to content creators. For me, you'd be giving me money each time I upload a video - with a monthly maximum so you don't have to pay a ton of money in case I release a whole bunch of videos in one month.

http://www.patreon.com/user?u=57084

I'm hyped about getting back into the TF2 casting scene and hope you're just as excited as I am! Please let me know what you think.

Schedule is going to be key. But also, I'm thinking Patreon will be key. Gonna set that up tonight. The TLDR of Patreon is, people can donate/tip to me directly for each video produced (with monthly maximum to avoid me shitting out 30 videos a month and eating their wallets). It'd be a way of guaranteeing earnings above and beyond ads. I bet if it works for me, it can work for TFTV and any of the other TF2 content creators too.

You know what might also help in this case? Patreon. http://www.patreon.com/

That's what I was thinking of, YouTube partnership. I am pretty sure I can nab that without the Machinima deal - and no, Machinima doesn't take 30% from me, they pay me a flat $2 per 1000 views. The difference works out to about 50% if my analysis is correct.

You're somewhat correct about the TF2 market - I would need to get a lot more views per video to make it work. Comp TF2 is certainly a fairly small subset, but folks like Stabby and STAR have shown that the pub tf2 market is much larger. Shoutcasts really only appeal to comp TF2 most of the time, so I will have to find a way to appeal to that pub market. MVM vids, for example, seem like they could work... but I'll keep throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. I just don't want to spend hours on the editing process - shoot, render, upload is all I want to be doing.

After checking my YouTube reported CPM and total payments vs. what Machinima sends me, even after removing ads that are likely exclusive to Machinima, I could probably earn double per vid. That just might be worth it? We'll see.

Thanks so much for the helpful post. I've emailed Machinima already, looking to end the contract.

I may experiment with more vids again, including shoutcasts. I can't make any promises about coming back out of retirement because I've applied to a new job that will be far more stressful... but I want to see just how well I can really do. If the money is good enough, it will entice me to keep churning out good content. And yes, in a sense it's about the money. I won't go back to giving up a sizeable chunk of my social life and travel plans for low pay, as much as I do love TF2.

Edit: If it's just Adsense alone, then yeah, not worth it at all. The big bucks come from the video ads and other auctioned content, so unless I can hold onto those, I'll have to keep the Machinima thing and stay hidden in retirement land.

OK wait hold up. Valve is fine with anyone monetizing videos on YouTube.

Does this mean I don't actually have to get paid through the Machinima network, and could just upload vids on my own? That would like quadruple or quintuple my CPM... in fact, it would make TF2 video production an almost-viable job.

Someone explain to me why I'm wrong and I still have to use a network like TGS or Machinima please.

Thanks Kaneco. You have validated my assumption about the dearth of dank piles of foreskin at Valve.

YouTube has also been allowing game companies to trawl the site with bots looking for their game content. http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1sm26m/the_death_of_the_lp_gamers_will_no_longer_make/

I got one of these notices on my SimCity video, which is cool because it was a worthless shitty video anyway. Luckily my TF2 vids haven't been touched, I assume because Valve doesn't hire massive, seething piles of human foreskin for marketing and legal departments, but EA is of course as evil as ever.

3rd-person camera is great if it's used right. It's rarely used right.

The problem most cameramen have with 3rd-person is their mousing habits. I'm sure everyone remembers when the i46 final cut to Arx's camera because they were having temporary difficulties with Beta's machine - his mousing habits were atrocious to watch. He obviously knew what he was looking at and could catch all the angles he needed to see, but it wasn't relateable to anyone who didn't have their hands on the mouse.

I often had people ask me how to improve their up-and-coming casts, and I used to have a stock "camerawork" response saved in a text file to copy-paste. It boiled down to this: 3rd person camera is never supposed to be you zooming around trying to find something. It's supposed to be you quickly establishing a perch and keeping it still until the action you're looking at is finished. Once you pick the perch and the angle for your 3rd-person shot at mid or wherever, let go of the fucking mouse and don't touch it again.

Also, it's best when used sparingly. The viewers can't get a sense of the individual skill without seeing 1st-person camera, period. Keeping things first-person also helps establish simple stories about complex action - you can always easily say what one person is doing and then fit it into the broader context. That's a lot easier to understand, and a bit more exciting, than starting with the broad context and trying to explain individual action after the fact.

edit: By mousing I'm really including WASDing too. No moving the camera once you're perched!

What is this, eve online?

http://i.imgur.com/4TF3kvl.png