With the release of Episode 28 of the Retro Spectives Podcast we have officially been podcasting for a full year. Our latest episode is about a title called Katamari Damacy, a game where your goal is simple - roll up everything in the entire world into your big sticky snowball (not a euphemism, I swear). Your katamari begins absolutely tiny, so small that when mice ram into you they send you spinning wildly out of control. By the end of it though, you’re toppling mountains.
As podcasters, we’re not yet at that stage, but we’re also no longer getting bullied by mice. This is a small slice of insight into my journey in the foreboding world of podcasting thus far.
A Big Idea
Just over a year ago, I decided to start a podcast. At the time, I only had a very rough understanding of the medium. I had listened to Serial, of course, and had haphazardly downloaded a few episodes from podcasts related to Magic: The Gathering. That was it really - a lazy smattering of interest - but something about the format really captured my imagination. My volunteer radio service with 4RPH was rewarding, but podcasting seemingly offered me the opportunity to dive into topics I was deeply passionate about. Even more amazing was the prospect of having people listen to my wild and crazy opinions.
The broader topic of the podcast was very easy for me to figure out - I wanted to make it about video games. The genre is incredibly over saturated, but games and gaming is what I knew best, and what I felt I was most qualified to talk about. This wasn’t a business project, where I was trying to find a niche in the market - this was an opportunity to explore my favourite hobby as a content producer rather than a consumer. I didn’t want to do it alone though. The discussion of ideas is far more interesting than incoherent wailing from atop a soapbox. I needed a co-host.
This is where the specific idea for the podcast emerged. A good friend of mine, James, has wildly different tastes in video-games to me. Every time we saw one another, we seemed to get locked into these endless arguments about some stupid video game mechanic or another. I realised that those discussions were potentially quite interesting if we could repack them in podcast form, and perhaps having such an outlet would stop us from ruining our friends dinner parties with endless bickering.
So, we wanted to argue about video-games. But we needed a structure, a battleground in which to fight. We didn’t really care too much for the industry, news, or hardware. We wanted to talk about the games themselves. We decided that each episode would concern exactly one video game, to ensure they never became completely obsolete. But this still wasn’t niche enough - and besides, hundreds of reviews are released for new games every day - why would anyone want to listen to our podcast above the competition? We narrowed it down even more - we would only review and discuss classic games of the past that were at least 15 years old. That should be enough to make our show distinct from the masses, right?
Unfortunately, not really. I blame myself for not doing more thorough research, but it turned out that there were plenty of podcasts already doing these sorts of retro game reviews - Cane and Rinse, Retronauts and the Classic Gaming Podcast, to just name a few. One final refinement was needed. We decided that our reviews would be from a modern perspective - we wouldn’t try to understand these games in the context in which they were produced, but purely on how enjoyable they were to play today. And finally, we committed to defending our opinions to the death rather than being equanimous when a disagreement came up over anything. Not that we’d take opposing opinions for the sake of it - but we wouldn’t back down when conflict naturally occurred. Honest disagreement often has far more value than passive and pleasant harmony.
We had an idea. Now we had to put it into action.
The Setup
There’s always more to these things than you initially think. We had to set up an RSS Feed, create multiple different social media accounts, design and refine a website, and pay a graphics designer for our nifty logo. I read a hundred hints and tips articles, researched marketing strategies, and tried my best to distinguish between outdated, irrelevant and straight out wrong information out there. We had to navigate scheduling, divvying up the world-load fairly and being able to communicate with one another when the rare hiccup emerged. Oh, and we had to actually find time to play the actual game we were reviewing for the fortnight. What started as a simple idea back in December 2018 took a total of two months before we were comfortable setting Retro Spectives free into the world.
I won’t go into enormous detail explaining everything that led to us to finally reaching release. But there are two big things I wish I’d known before going into this whole thing.
Ignore all the rubbish you read about getting into ‘new and noteworthy’. There are millions of podcasts, and you’re almost definitely going to be a tiny drop in the pond when you release. Focus on making the best podcast you can, not on promoting it, or warping it to suit this nebulous marketing goal. We all harbour the secret hope that we’ll crack the big time, but it's far more realistic to gradually ( and i mean very gradually) snowball your way to popularity than hit a million downloads overnight.
You need to be able to have frank and uncomfortable discussions with your co-host, and/or whoever else is working on the podcast with you. You’re not doing this for money, no-one is strictly in charge and there is potentially a lot of work involved. That’s a recipe for disaster if you aren’t able to talk about things like workloads and creative differences. There were a couple of times where we had some issues, but we were able to resolve them simply by talking about it and coming to an accommodation. I was lucky to find a person as good as James to co-host with and I feel our communication is key in keeping the podcast going successfully.
On February 12th 2019, we released our first batch of three episodes.
Imposter Syndrome
It doesn’t seem real the first time you record a podcast. You don’t feel like a ‘podcaster’ - you're a fraud, a poor imitator, a terrible actor. James and I both had a vague idea of what podcasts were supposed to sound like, and we tried to copy them. You begin with jovial and friendly banter with irrelevant rubbish about your lives, get into the meat of the episode, then plug away to finish. I’d listened to and read a thousand critical reviews in my life, so had plenty of reference points to draw from. It felt like I was reproducing a hollow shell of content, a crudely put together pastiche of other people’s opinions and styles.
But when I started knocking down episode after episode, that feeling of insufficiency slowly started to disappear. I became more confident in sharing my opinions about these classic video games, no matter how highly regarded they were in the past. One of our big breakthroughs was cutting down on the initial chatter. The truth is, James and I are terrible at small talk. Talking for the sake of it to create a friendly and inviting atmosphere was having the complete opposite effect - we were stilted, awkward and artificial. We still occasionally have a quick chat before starting, but we never force it, and generally dive right into the meat of the episode.
The essence of enjoying podcasting and creating something worth listening to is to find your authentic voice and share it with the world. The instinct is to treat the medium like an actor would, to pretend that you’re somebody else and put on an elaborate performance for the audience. And while part of what you’re doing could be considered acting, the intimacy of podcasting comes from revealing your true self to the world, warts and all. That’s going to turn some people away, yes, but it’s also precisely what will make you stand out.
James and I both wear our likes, dislikes, biases and preferences on our sleeves - and we’re both a lot more comfortable while podcasting because of it.
Announcing Ourselves
I said before that I consider myself lucky to have a co-host as good as James, and a large part of that is how we divided the workload between us. James takes care of the website, the hosting and the editing - all the technical and difficult work. I, on the other hand, get the far easier job of writing up posts, running the social media accounts and largely interacting with the outside world. Or at least I thought it was much easier, at first.
The thing is, I am terrible at using social media. Posting on Twitter always seems like I’m one person with a lost voice in a crowd of millions. I’d squeak out a piece of content or an opinion and feel grateful if a person immediately to my left or right even noticed. We cited our email at the end of every episode and are yet to receive a single one. We asked for feedback and criticism and got one review on a weird site saying I was being mean to James (which to be fair, I was). I would follow people who would follow me in turn, and I’d get confused as to whether any progress was actually being made.
Our posts to reddit were slightly more successful, but wildly inconsistent. Our format of one game per episode gave us a very straightforward path to submitting content to the relevant subreddits. Some communities gave us a lot of excellent feedback and engagement. Some subreddits deleted our posts immediately. Some were very mad at us for suggesting these games had problems. Most disappointing of all were the ones that got zero replies though. Reddit generally isn’t super well setup for people to engage with podcast content.
After much trial and error I think we finally cracked it though. I got some help from another redditor in setting up a discord server. For those who don’t know, Discord is a cross between a chat room, a forum and voice chat client, all rolled up into a heavily customisable package. It is widely used by the video-game community and so was a natural fit for what we were trying to accomplish. It took a few weeks to get running, but now our discord server hums with activity, arguments and people making fun of my obsession with Dark Souls.
The lesson here, I think, is to find the piece of social media that suits you and your podcast best. I wasn’t getting any traction on twitter, and could continue an endless howling into the wind of generic bitey statements. But instead I now engage with a much smaller core of listeners and we have awesome discussions about games, old and new. I expect ( and hope) it continues to slowly grow, of course, but that smaller and more engaged community is far more valuable than 2000 followers on twitter or instagram or whatever else I may be half-heartedly using.
Solving the Reddit Equation
While my early posts on reddit about the podcast were all over the place, I did finally figure out a somewhat consistent strategy to gain attention. When you’re using reddit you want to be able to click engage with the content immediately. Asking someone to commit to an hour of listening to you talk is a big ask. So you need to provide people with some value upfront.
Instead of just dropping a link to my cast with a tiny preamble, I instead would raise a detailed point of criticism, usually aimed at a core mechanic of the game in question. It could easily be 3 or 4 paragraphs long - as long as it got the point across in full. In doing this, I provided a point of interaction for those without the time or disposition to listen to an hour long pod, and also gave a preview of the tone of the podcast to potential listeners. Some people only responded to the post , but even that in turn generated more interest in the podcast by raising the ranking of the reddit post.
The other thing I did was start writing articles. And to be fair, this was (and still is) a hell of a lot of work. Not everyone has the time to produce this amount of side content. I wrote about 30 articles last year, most of which were directly tied to the games that we reviewed. Articles are better suited to reddit than podcasts, since the entire thing is a single click away. It was an additional stream of content that I could loop back to each podcast episode and just get people on our website in general. Obviously, not everyone is in a position to put these additional layers of work in - but the principle of feeding people into the proximity of your podcast through different media is a sound one.
Guests and Guesting
There’s a lot of value in seeking out other podcasters and working with them. At first I only wanted to focus on my own show, but once I became comfortable with its basic rhythms I started to investigate having people on. Cameron of the Sweating the Small Stuff cast was the first to reach out to me, offering me a chance to guest on his show. Not only was this a great chance to promote our show - it was also just a hell of a lot of fun. The whole reason I started doing podcasting was a chance to run my mouth about video-games, and it's like I’d been delivered a podium to espouse my crazy opinion. Later, we had him on our show and I got to tell him why playing FPS games on a controller is completely mental. The game we were discussing that episode was Halo, of course, further cementing my insanity.
Later on, Psionstorm of the WDGR Podcast gave me a lot of help in setting up our discord server. He showed me the usefulness of creating an active community of people who hang out together, and we bicker about whether Star Trek: Discovery is actually a good show all the time (Drew - the show sucks, admit it). You don’t need many people in there to make it feel like casting is worth it, as long as those people talk!
Most recently, I got to guest on Moses’ Magecast and talk about one of my favourite games ever - VVVVVV. Its delightful getting to talk about games from a different angle than the one you’re usually locked into. Our cast has a laser focus, which is good - it prevents us from rambling (most of the time, anyway). But it also can get annoying not being able to talk about certain things. Guesting is a fantastic way to broaden your subject matter in a new and interesting way.
I want to conclude this section by stating the sheer unimportance of the exact size of download bumps you get from guesting or having a guest on. Guest because you have something meaningful to say, and get guests on because you think they will be interesting. Don’t get out a pen and paper and calculate if it's worth it. You’re getting value enough out of the new interactions, learning new formats and sharing cool ideas, and there’s going to be an increase in activity for both of you no matter what. Have fun with it!
A Year Of Modest Growth
At the end of this article you might expect me to tell you that these strategies were all key in getting my first million listeners in a year. And I’m sorry to tell you that is unfortunately way off base. This is not an article trying to tell you the tale of a roaring success, or a way to get thousands of listeners overnight. In fact, a lot of what I say may even be harmful to shining in the spotlight - I don’t know, I’m brand new to the podcasting game.
At the time I write this article our first year has delivered about 3500 downloads in 27 episodes. Our best episode has 217 downloads, while our top 10 are all over 120. Our first couple of months we sat at 150 downloads, now we’re closer to 450-500 a month. By every metric we’ve only seen slight increases across the board, with an emphasis on slight.
For some this will seem measly. And you wouldn’t be wrong to pass that judgement. For me, (which, in a way, is the only metric that matters) it's perfectly fine. The paradox of download numbers is that you’re never satisfied with what you have. You could always have more, and you’re always thirsty. But as someone who started from literally nothing, it could certainly be a lot worse.
I think the message I ultimately want to get across here is not a path to crush it as a podcaster, but instead a path to something decent, something alright. I don’t want to sell the dream of podcasting as a way to achieve fame and fortune, but instead to an ok number of listeners and hopefully a small community that you enjoy interacting with. It's a far more modest dream, but perhaps one that’s also far more achievable. And it's one that you can be happy with at the end of your first year - at least it was for me.
Looking Into The Future
This isn’t the final page of our grand dream, of course. In 30 years time, if we continue on our current trajectory, our opinions on video-games should be enough to crush a small European nation. So what are we focusing on this year, now that we’ve established our launching pad?
Guests and guesting is the number one thing I want to try and push. I started this whole thing as an opportunity to talk about video-games, and I want to talk about them on as many platforms as possible. I want to get into brand new arguments with strangers instead of constantly bashing heads with James. I want my listeners to get incensed at my ridiculous positions and tear me to pieces on our discord, while I cry deeply, before eventually gathering myself to respond in an equally aggressive manner.
I want to continue to engage with Reddit communities, with articles and more sophisticated posts to them. I want to get better at articulating my opinions and finding cool ideas and takes on these classic games. I want to focus more on the lessons that have been forgotten in the rise of AAA games that we can relearn by examining classics of the past. I want others to take my opinions as their battle cries when they take those arguments to their friends.
I want to continue our modest growth, by continuing to provide good content. And I want our discord community to grow, because every person there is worth hundreds of downloads. Eventually though, I want to make it to the top.
I never said I wasn’t ambitious. But just like the Prince of the Cosmos from Katamari Damacy, I know that rolling from a mere 5 centimetres to devouring entire continents takes a lot of time. Our Katamari is only around 1 metre in size, but I’m going to do everything I can to make it much, much larger.
