I did a thing.
Ever since I started my journey of content creation here on Hive around 18 months ago I've tried to gradually evolve it. As many already know I tried my hand at streaming a while ago and while that was a great experience my current living situation doesn't really let me stream much.
Growing a Twitch channel is also really hard and is borderline impossible without having some kind of presence on other platforms. Hive is currently the platform where I have the biggest presence but I have close to no presence outside of Hive.
And so I decided to start a YouTube channel. I feel like I've been going in circles for a while with my content creation not consisting of much more than playing video games then writing about them. With YouTube I want to try and take it to the next level.
And so Totally Free Gaming was born. Since gaming is my passion it had to be a gaming channel. The most over-saturated topic on YouTube. I didn't really want to just start a personal gaming channel as I feel like that would be harder to grow than if I focused on a specific niche.
That niche ended up falling on Free To Play gaming. Here I will be focusing on Free To Play gaming in general. I'll be posting reviews, "Should you play", "Top 3 / Top 5, tips & tricks and content like that. I want the channel to evolve as I go. Early on I will likely mostly focus on reviews to kind of build myself a little library of videos.
Now creating video content is way more time consuming than writing content. After playing a game and recording it there's a few hours of work included in writing a script, recording the voiceover and editing the video. There used to be a time where I published written gaming content daily, later on bi-daily, and that won't be the case anymore. I'm gonna try my best to get out weekly videos which will probably work out fine during my summer break and be more of a challenge once I go back to work in mid August.
I just uploaded my first video to introduce the channel. This isn't a video I expect to do well in any way but I thought having a video that potential viewers and subscribers could take a loot at to get an idea of what the channel is all about would be a good idea. I pretty much have my first review ready to be released in a few days to follow this up. Just need to put on some finishing touches.
This here is also the reason why my blog has been a bit blank lately. I've been putting a lot of time into working on this project. That doesn't mean it's taken me two weeks to produce this video but I've been thinking a lot if this is even something I want to spend my time doing and if it's gonna be worthwhile at all. After a lot of thinking I decided to go the "ah fuck it" route and just go for it. If it fails it fails.
This channel will now get most of my attention when it comes to video game content creation. I might still dabble in a bit of written content every now and then for when I don't play Free To Play games for the channel. Going forward you're gonna see more personal life blogs and blogs about this project on my blog.
I also go into this project with little to no expectations. I've always said that expectations are the root to all disappointment. I also understand perfectly that growing any kind of online presence is a massive grind. It could take years to even get close to a 1000 subscribers but I'm willing to do the grind. If it ends up fully failing I can always fully re-brand it to just become a personal channel in the future.
Hopefully this can be a way for me to help onboard some users to Hive as well. I'm gonna be linking to Hive from my profile and right now it's the first socials link people see in the channel banner.
I also plan to write some "behind the scenes" stuff, like I'm doing now, when I post about my videos here on Hive which is another thing I hope can bring potential outsiders to come check out Hive.
And so, before this gets to long and you lose interest, I present my first ever YouTube video on the Totally Free Gaming channel:
Expect to see more videos about Free To Play gaming in the coming weeks.
Don't forget to like the video and subscribe to the channel if you want to help me on this journey.
My first goal is to reach 100 subscriber so that I can get a personalized URL for the channel and not this randomly generated mumbo jumbo: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQASWC5vkAlN_4-Io6zi_Og. Baby steps.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.