Writing for Substack

Trying something new

Hey folks, I’m brownbear.

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a former top-tier competitive Age of Empires player, competing in and winning several Age of Mythology and Age of Empires III tournaments in the mid-2000s. I’ve been writing about real-time strategy games for the past eight years on my blog and YouTube channel.

Going forward, I’ll be writing weekly articles here, focusing on RTS, competitive gameplay design, and a host of other topics that interest me, like skills development, game industry trends, and everything in-between.

With this first post, I wanted to write a bit about the decision to start writing on Substack. There’s a few motivations here.

Firstly, after eight years, I realized that my old model for content creation had lost its fit in my lifestyle. I love making YouTube videos, but it became harder and harder to prioritize making time for them, because they’re time-consuming to produce. There’s ways around that, like speaking from bullet points rather than a full-blown essay, but I felt like the real value came from the quality and clarity of the script.

I did streaming for awhile to see if that worked, and again, I loved streaming Age of Empires II on Twitch. But maintaining a streaming schedule with family and work obligations was really challenging for me. It’s not so much that I ran out of free time in so much that streaming requires you to organize your free time in a way that was difficult for me. Again, large blocks of time, on a schedule.

I really needed something that was much more flexible, time-wise, and much more mobile-friendly, because I’m often on the go. And Substack is perfect for that - I can write anytime I have a minute, which is amazing, and schedule stuff to publish later at my convenience.

The focus on writing also dovetails with a general feeling of confidence I’ve gotten as I’ve written more and more. When I started Brown Bear Gaming, I felt like a cheap imitation of a lot of other content creators; but over the past few years I feel like I’ve gotten it to a point where I’m producing high-quality work from a unique and interesting perspective. Whether it’s my article on region lock, my in-depth critique of Age of Empires IV, or my thoughts on getting worse at StarCraft, I don’t feel like anyone else is doing the sort of stuff that I’m doing. And I feel like it’s at a place where I feel confident allowing folks to pay to subscribe to support me.

I’m certainly not giving up on YouTube and Twitch - Pikmin 4’s announcement makes me eager to make some Pikmin stuff - but I think it’s important to have a focus, and the place where I feel I can create the most value is my writing.

Next, you might be wondering why I chose Substack over my existing website, Illiteracy Has Downsides. There’s a couple reasons for that.

The first reason, plainly, is to monetize my writing content. I’m a fan of the Twitch patronage model, in which you provide your content for free while allowing supporters to chip in a small amount on a monthly basis, mostly just to support you but also offering some modest rewards as thanks. The idea that I’m on the hook to provide quality work to financial supporters also really pushes me to produce; I probably never would have done my long, 300+ ELO grind to top 1% in Age of Empires II had it not been for a couple of subscribers on my Twitch channel. So it turns out to be win-win in that respect, too.

I’ll probably crosspost everything I write to IHD, if I remember to do so. And again, every article here will be free for everyone, at least in 2023.

The second reason is that I find the tone of a newsletter to be a lot more enjoyable to write. I’ve always written using the same style as the newspapers I like to read, and while that’s very effective and clean, it’s also formal. With a newsletter I can adopt a more conversational monologue style of prose, and I find it both more fun to read and more fun to write, too. I originally had a version of this piece that complained about various aspects of content creation and when I read it I thought to myself, is this the sort of conversation I want to be having when it’s 7AM and I’m reading an RTS newsletter so I can wake up a little bit and enjoy my Saturday? And so it sort of pushes me to write not just at a high-quality bar but also in a way that is inviting and friendly and casual.

(I’ve had a similar shift in my own consumption habits, spending more and more time on Slow Boring and less and less time on The Economist. Maybe this is my way of staying with the times.)

I feel like I’ve had a lot of false starts over the years, so this time around I decided to pre-write a good amount of quality content before getting started. I’ll commit now, publicly, to publishing a high quality, thought-provoking article every week for the year of 2023, starting today. All of these articles will be free for everyone. Regular email subscriptions are free, too; I’m grateful, of course, to anyone who decides to go the extra mile and purchase a paid subscription. Of course, don’t feel obligated - I’m just glad you’re here!

Until next time!
brownbear

If you’d like, you can follow me on Twitter and Facebook and check out my YouTube and Twitch channels.