The Rails on Boards team kindly offered us their platform to let you know about our Patreon campaign, both the existence thereof and the reasoning behind it. Thanks guys!
https://bit.ly/thetrainrushpatreon-rob
As of last night, we setup our Patreon page to let fans of the show contribute to a virtual tip jar. It’s not a decision we took lightly as when we started the project nearly a year ago, we had no intention of monetising the endeavour in any way.
So, why are we doing this and why now?
One word: Sustainability.
Our show takes a long time to prepare for. Specifically, the research, the recording and the editing.
Breaking down our time investment, by the numbers…
1) Research
We’d be playing these games anyway. We believe a big part of the value we deliver is in the multiple replays we put each title through and furthermore it allows us to get derive more joy from our collections. It allows us to present the best analysis we can, gives titles time to breathe (for better for worse) and gives you something different to the ‘show and tell’ guys. We don’t intend to change that.
2) Recording
Dave and I like ruminating and chatting. Doing it with some nice microphones in front of us lets us pretend we’re Jonathan Ross and Chris Evans. Or someone cool. No problem.
3) Editing
However, the editing takes us way beyond our sustainable available free-time to deploy against the project. We try out best to hone our craft, both on the microphone and on the post-processing, to increase our efficiency. We’ve invested in physical tools, equipment and plugins, but despite all this, for each minute of released podcast, you can assume a minimum of 10 minutes has gone into collecting, curating and cleaning. It’s non-trivial stuff.
Couple that to the fact we aren’t particularly excited by that aspect of the production, somewhat quashing our appetite to record, and we end up in a place where we have to seek a solution.
We could seek volunteers, having has a friend assist us in the past when we were up against it. However, if we think it is hard work, it doesn’t sit right with us asking anyone to do it without compensation.
Fortunately there are services we can outsource the grotty passes of editing to. Specifically removing ugly mouth noises, minimising stutters from our functional speech impediments (derived from ‘being British’) & getting levels right. All the stuff we add no value to. However, these services rightly cost money.
The Solution
The general feedback is that you’d like to hear more from us, be it longer episodes or more episodes. From our perspective, we’d like to be able to release on a reliable schedule, life events allowing. To riff off of an infamous contemporary political speech, if we could initially achieve ‘Monthly means Monthly’, we’d be pleased as punch. Spring-boarding further off of that would be the cherry on top
So this is where we need you help. As we said initially, we aren’t trying to make a living from this, but we’d like not to take a significant financial hit either.
If you value what we do and think it’s different enough to what’s out there to exist in its current form (or better), then we’d ask you to consider contributing to our ‘tip jar’. As you can probably extrapolate, our mapped spend for any donation is to outsource the editing work and any unexpected overage would go into covering existing running costs associated with the show (hosting fees, in other words).
Whether you’re inclined to donate or not, we do appreciate you listening, both to this exposition and to the show in general.It gives us great pleasure to be part of this great community, to be a resource people can point all train gamers to, be it as beginner primer or just as easy listening for a long-horn. Although how relaxing shouting “you’re wrong, you fools” at a speaker is, well we’re still not sure.
Your friends in bankruptcy (simulations),
Craig Taylor & Dave Moss