I have been asked a bunch of times how to donate to pinballvideos, and my answer was usually to just donate to the actual content creators, because I don’t know how to put the money to good use for the project.
My reasons are outlined in the Patreon description, but the gist is that I have hosting costs now, which made me think a lot about crowdfunding, which ultimately led me to the conclusion that keeping in touch with the people who like pinballvideos enough that they are willing to pay for it would be a good thing all around.
If nobody wants to become a patron, that’s fine too, it won’t have any negative effects on content updates, and I’ll pay for the hosting myself, but I believe having some regular donors would be a big benefit to the future development of the project.
Pinballvideos.com is my go-to site for entertainment and for studying every time a tournament is coming. Thank you for hosting, of course I want to support.
Thanks a lot, your support is much appreciated! I’m really happy that this was as well received as it has been.
Here are my plans for the immediate future:
First, I’m going to add some Patreon info to the website itself, maybe there are a few more people who’d like to support who don’t frequent Tiltforums. I’m probably going to wait a week or two to see if any more patrons sign up before starting the conversation about future development on Patreon.
In the meantime, I’ll implement the infrastructure needed to power the $5-patron-restricted beta access to new features, i.e. a “log in with Patreon” button. That has the nice side effect that all patrons will automatically have user accounts on pinballvideos, which allows for all sorts of useful new features.
I always wondered why people are doing these silly teaser announcements, containing no information at all, about things they are supposedly working on, instead of just doing them and announcing them when they’re done. Those people always say they’re confident they’ll get whatever secret thing they’re doing done by so and so, but this never happens, and by the time they actually get it done, if ever, nobody even remembers what any of this was actually about.
Well, now I know why, it’s because it’s damn hard to keep something you’re excited about to yourself, no matter how silly that is.
Needless to say, I haven’t yet implemented the patron login, because I was busy doing that secret thing, which I’m confident I’ll get done before I’m off to the Hungarian Pinball Open next Friday.
Alright, I’m done doing the thing, and I’m ready to announce. This is something I’m quite excited about, and I hope you’ll like it, too.
As you might know, I never added any non-commentated tournament footage to pinballvideos, because I think that’s a bore to watch. Yet, there’s so much awesome non-commentated stuff out there, especially high class European tournaments. It’s hard to believe, but there actually isn’t any commentated footage of the #3 player in the world on pinballvideos right now. That’s just silly.
I’m on the record saying that I enjoy watching the original post-commentated PAPA videos quite a bit more than many live-streamed tournaments nowadays, because post-commentary tends to be a much more conscious and focused effort.
Put those two things together, and the natural conclusion is that I should try and get some experienced commentators together and start producing focused post-commentary to some awesome footage myself.
Well, that’s what I did.
You can go to https://pinballvideos.com/v/2144 to see how this first try worked out. (I lied when I said that there weren’t any commentated matches of the #3 player in the world on pinballvideos right now—this one is.) I’m really happy with the result, and I hope you’ll enjoy it, too.
I’m planning to do a lot more of this sort of thing, so I’ve added a stretch goal and an additional tier to the Patreon campaign to reflect this move from just collecting footage and generating metadata to also producing and publishing original content—you can go and check that out on https://www.patreon.com/pinballvideos
Originally, “Gameplay” was only uncommentated footage I added when there wasn’t any other footage available for a machine. Then streaming became a thing, and the footage in that category now ranges from no commentary, over chatting with the viewers and occasionally saying something gameplay related, to succinct running commentary, sometimes even tutorial style.
So, in short, the “Gameplay” category has become a total mess, and I’m not sure it’s good enough to put a commentary marker on some of those videos. I’ll probably have to really clean it up and revise the whole taxonomy.
In the meantime, while some videos in the “Gameplay” category might have more or less succinct commentation, everything else is guaranteed to have commentation (well, with the exception of two German tournaments Evan added a while ago to get some footage of Ostermeier up—I don’t know yet what I’m going to do about those).
I thought you were going to say you were adding a feature to let users of your site record commentary for videos on the site. Maybe this would be a good idea? You could crowd source audio commentary that matches up to the video and people could upvote their favorite if there are multiple.
Or maybe that’s asking for trouble. Not sure. But I’d love to have Crazy Levi yelling boom over some of the Elwin killing a game videos.
