Concept : a segment of improvised fighting game victory quotations
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Hi, SB/SB Adjacent podcaster here. I have literally hundreds of hours of prepping, recording, editing, and promoting podcasts in or adjacent to this community.
There’s a lot of reasons podcasts don’t happen much!
For one thing, video games kind of suck as a topic. I have podcast around a hundred hours about video games and the vast, vast, vast majority of games have very little of merit to chew in critically. You very frequently have to start pulling in outside stuff from games to fill the content. So unless you got a really choice game to disect, you start talking about your favorite scenes from Adam’s Family Values or some shit fast.
Organizing podcasts is a huge thing, when it’s an ‘open call’ you gotta get everybody on the same page at the same time. If you have more than like five total people it turns to anarchy (bad) extremely quickly even if you can all get them in the call at the same time. Especially when everyone is on an internet delay bouncing across the globe. Giving everyone a chance to speak up and discuss things takes a lot of awareness and/or wrangling from the host.
Podcasts tend to work better when everybody is comfortable discussing stuff together, has a natural rapport, respects, and basically understands where everybody is coming from. One of the big issues with the ‘free for all’ casting era of SNEXploration Squad is personalities clashing, and not in a fun way. This did eventually develop into a core group of tight folks, but it took a while, and any new SB podcast would be functionally going from zero again.
Oh and the big pain in the ass that often isn’t appreciated: recording and editing is a whole thing. Every additional person is another chance your recording setup could explode. And then if you get all the audio you wanted to, if you want it to be engaging and listenable someone needs to go through chopping everything up for coherence and dead air.
For another thing: as folks get older, we get less time, less energy. Some would say less drive, but I’d say my drive is focused on other stuff because podcasting is a thing that takes a lot of effort for relatively little return in 2025.
And having passion and something to say is at the heart of what makes a podcast work. Just podcasting for the sake of…having a podcast is bluntly confusing to me?
This is all to say…the lack of podcasting seems pretty reasonable to me? It’s a lot bigger hill to climb up than it sounds like.
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I stopped reading because this sounds amazing and is exactly what I want to hear and I am just going to podcast about that.
More seriously thank you for the serious reply. I listen to the SB podcasts from the 2010s and I often think about what works and what doesnt- I love love love the rawness , or ‘not-slickness’/ underproduced vibe.
What I often enjoy is the games we are playing recently segment that ‘goes on for too long’ - there seems to be a lack or pressure to just talking about what is organically in your gaming rotation at the very moment, and not having to stick to the topic of the podcast.
I believe many people here would appreciate a looser format of show alongside than the high concept episodes that you guys put together so many beautiful releases of.
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Yeah I am thinking that a change-up in format could end up with a media end product that might:
- fit more comfortably into the day to day of the modern day SB-er who doesn’t literally live in their most cherished/idealised vid-game life style all the time (only in their hearts)
- avoid the sort of slightly existential, unasked question of “why even video games” that the hour+ podcast format sort of allows/(inevitably facilitates?) by providing a space for as much meandering as it does
I have consumed caffeine recently. That is how I feel given Status:“Under the Influence”
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I’m going to let you peek behind the podcasting curtain: even that was still edited.
Editing isn’t always about being slick, it’s about taking out every time someone says they need to pee. It’s about eight people in five time zones all answering a question at once because nobody is perfectly in sync and now you have this incompressible burst of audio. It’s about removing long, silent, dead air pauses.
I would also argue: you cannot have a video game podcast that doesn’t have an answer to why video games. Otherwise…why not just make a different podcast entirely? This isn’t wrong, there’s a reason I moved onto talking about War Movies and Webcomics. But that’s not really Select Button, right?
When I say it’s hard to talk about video games, I don’t mean it’s impossible, I just mean it’s extremely difficult without a lot of curation of source material and having a group of people who are on point to talk about it.
If you’re going to have a cast which is just a bunch of random people with a stated episode theme that just becomes a circular conversation about nothing…why would someone listen to this group of Random people? What about those people is pulling them in? What is your hook? What sets you apart from every other podcast exactly like that? This isn’t an insult, this is a genuine question. Remarkably few regular podcasters from Ye Olde Days are even posting on the forums anymore. Many of the old voices wouldn’t even really be around to pull folks in.
And if nobody is going to listen to the podcast…why is it being recorded? Why aren’t we just having fun talking with our friends about whatever in a discord call with no worry about an audience? (This btw, is what happened with the podcast people)
Like, these are all big questions that became increasingly difficult to grapple with for all of the ongoing SB adjacent casts that took up the mantle as SB Cast faded away.
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I’ve avoided posting this because this is the podcast killer question but who is going to edit this? BComa? Who hasn’t posted in a year or so and as far as I know is also the one with the keys to the podcast? Myself? I have my own backburner podcast projects that I don’t even have time/energy to edit let alone a new project. If Milkman is offering to host, organize, edit, produce (and this is so much more important to a Good Show than people give credit) then best of all luck.
The last few podcasts happened because I yelled loud enough and was willing to put the time into them. Now though for the effort I put into them knowing maybe 10 people listened was disheartening. I can have enough fun with my friends without fierce organizing, and praying everyone’s microphones work and everyone is in a good mood at our wildly different timezones and that we won’t have internet hiccups and trying to balance social dynamics and performance dynamics especially when you add random people that haven’t really talked to each other.
Some people will feel like they are being talked over. Some people will talk forever and if you don’t have a strong host to tell them to shut up they won’t and then they’ll feel hurt if the host does.
If you want an unscripted people talking about video games there is a million billion hours of podcasts and “podcasts” and live streams. I am still really proud of the work I did and helped make (A more Mario 64-like Mario for Wii U, Geno-cider, the deathcasts) but there is also the fact that no one listens to it, who wants a new podcast? You find out 3 fuck sticks with backwards baseball caps that say Star Wars get 900 dollars a month to say “Yeah I played Final Fantasy Rebirth and liked it.” Real criticism and really trying to be funny and interesting and stretch artistic muscles and making a good show did not pay out. Anytime I saw listening numbers for a show that clearly did not put in the effort I/we did I got more and more disheartened. There was a real dark period of years where I would hate listen to more “successful” video game podcasts where they did not express anything .
In short I relistened to my own Shakespeare In Love episode and dying laughing at myself and my friends about 6 times. I’d listen to that podcast. But I’m not famous and that’s how you have a podcast anyone listens to nowadays.
This post may have gotten away from me.
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30 posts were split to a new topic: how not to start a podcast
Thread temporarily closed and drama moved to the axe so things can cool down.
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