RetroBreak Rewind – October / November 2024

Hi everyone! I didn’t get round to doing one of these posts for October, so here’s a double rewind for you! One of the worst months, followed by one of the best!

I didn’t feel very good in October, and I think that was reflected in the channel and the stats too. I was having a rough time with my mental health and couldn’t focus on anything at all. The content I made this month all felt rushed and, mixed in with a bunch of technical issues too, quite badly edited and produced too. I won’t dwell too much on Octobers lacklustre stats though, as I made a choice to try and turn everything around in November, and it seems to have paid off!

Here’s the stats for both months:

October:

November:

Now for a breakdown of the months…

October

As you can see, I only managed to put out two videos in October too! Those being, my Playstation Journey, and the first part in my Top 20 GBC games series. Both good videos, but ones filled with a lot of issues that (hopefully) the viewer wouldn’t notice. Both of them took a lot longer to make than I would have liked, hence only getting two out. The Pulsation video ended up being far longer than I first envisioned, and didn’t do nearly as well as I had hoped, and isn’t bringing in any new viewers either.

The GBC video on the other hand was plagued with technical issues… I won’t cover it all here, but listen to this podcast episode if you want all the frustrating details!

Thankfully, despite the insane struggle to get it uploaded, the video is actually doing very well!

It’s really nice to see this after having so many months of flatlining videos back to back…

Making this video though also made me realise that I needed to upgrade my PC, so I did something a bit crazy, and bought a new MacBook Pro! The brand new M4 Max with 8tb of ram! I’m hoping to be able to use YouTube funds to pay for it over the next few years, so it’s another reason why my motivation is increasing to make better videos (and hopefully more ad revenue to go along with it!)

The new Mac has been amazing so far, it solved all the issues I had with creating the videos in October, and the hard drive space and faster export times have been such a big help too!

So, now onto November, and easily the best month for the channel all year! (Finally!!)

November

Back to proper upload schedule in November! Starting off with some simple videos, including a new catchup episode where eI basically explained all the issues I encounter in October and how I’m planning to fix them. I think people enjoyed hearing my thoughts, so I’ll do some more of these in the future! It gave me a bit of extra time to work on the 2nd part of the GBC video too!

Next was a slightly controversial one, my impressions on the Chromatic. I got to play it at MCM and didn’t really think about doing a video on it at the time, else I would have tried to get more footage! The video did really well though, made me think I should try covering more relevant new releases in the retro space (at least ones i’m interested in personally anyway… I’m DONE with all those Chinese emulation handhelds!!)

Another simple video after that, a pickups video, showcasing games from MCM London and the most recent gaming market, then, finally, part 2 of my GBC top games videos! This one did really well too, and is still growing! Watching the two back to back ,you can see how much better quality part 2 is! Hopefully this will be the new standard from now on!

Here’s the stats for the new GBC video. Just above average, not a runaway success, but I do see it keeping up the momentum, and at the end it sends people to watch the first part if they event already, so the two should feed off each other nicely too and keep people on the channel longer!

Then, to end the month, I did another shop tour! It’s been a while since I did one of these, and forgot that I should be filming in 60fps! Luckily another new feature with this Mac is the ability to use machine learning optical flow, which basically means you can slow footage down and machine learning algorithms will fill in all the missing frames, it looks so good, it may as well be regular 60fps footage slowed down! I was so impressed with the results! The video did well too, and has made me want to go out and film more in shops again!

Here’s all my content from Oct / Nov