If you’ve been in the Youtube gaming sphere for a while, you’ve probably heard of The Escapist before, and namely Zero Punctuation, a show held on that channel.
You might be surprised to hear that this channel has been crumbling recently after Nick Calandra was fired, causing Yahtzee Croshaw, the host of Zero Punctuation and the man carrying most of what the Escapist did, to leave.
This snowballed into pretty much everyone working on Zero Punctuation (and The Escapist in general) leaving, forming an entirely new channel and podcast called Second Wind.
This new company is wholly independent and hosting pretty similar content but without the restrictions of being under the Zero Punctuation brand, alongside a Patreon and a few new shows.
What’s On Second Wind?
Second Wind, after just a single day of uploading content, is already at 223k subscribers on YouTube, with the first video in the Fully Ramblomatic series hitting 302k views pretty quickly.
This series is pretty much the same as Zero Punctuation, just with a slightly adjusted style, and most of it is red instead of yellow.
On top of that, we’ll also continue seeing episodes of a series called Design Delve, where a veteran game designer talks about a bunch of different decisions that went into making a single aspect of a game’s design; the first episode on Second Wind being about Dark Souls’ levels and the misconceptions people have about them.
Even more, we’ll see the return of a series called Cold Take from Frost, where he’ll go over a bunch of things in a bit of a rambly, semi-podcast environment.
They also already have a second channel for live streams, columns on their Patreon, and a bunch of extra content planned to be The Escapist, but better, which they’re already delivering pretty well.
How is the Second Wind Patreon doing?
With the launch of this new channel, they need money to keep everything going, and they’ve chosen to go the Patreon route, where backers will get access to a Discord server, work-in-progress updates, ad-free versions of their podcast, written columns from various members, and a private community, all for $5.
This large amount of content on a promising premise has already led Second Wind to immense success, hitting $43K a month with 11K backers on Patreon exceptionally quickly.
It’s no surprise that many people would support an independent channel of passionate individuals rather than a company just trying to turn everything into a profitable brand.
Further Reading
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