Reinventing a Brand with Stephen Heywood

0:00 Hey everybody and welcome to our Tuesday Focus. Tonight on Office Hours we're going to be heading into the world of gaming with my guest Stephen Haywood of the TechBuzz Gaming. And Stephen is going to be talking about reinventing a brand, all about his journey from tech broadcasting to building a new brand inside the wider gaming world. Stephen will be breaking down the reality of starting over from square one and from migrating an established audience, all of that to leveraging high-end live production, broadcast infrastructure, and tech know-how in a brand new arena.

0:32 We're going to be talking during the planning for this show about how the broad brush term gaming, man, it's become so widespread. spread. We've seen that gamification stretches across not just the obvious platforms such as e-sports, role-playing games, first-person shooters, multiplayer online shooters, but also brushes up against things like gambling and prediction market stuff. I don't know for sure we're going to be

0:57 talking about that, but as I was thinking about today, it's just so many millions of people involved in leisure time activities that have some sort of gamification. We see millions of of people playing classic card games, puzzles, strategy games, to wordles, brain teasers, and a million other computer or phone-based pastimes that lets so many of us interact with our computers to occupy our leisure time.

1:21 Well, tonight we're going to be mostly talking about what happens if you want to develop a game or a game-specific site, particularly about strategies that worked for Stephen, strategies, according to him, that spectacularly failed, which will be an exciting thing to talk about, and his personal pivot toward this arena. I'll talk to him about where things might be heading next. As always, Cindy Drozda is here for our live show real-time Q&A manager

1:46 because this show is driven by your questions. So let me toss up the QR code. If you want to play along with us, you can use that code, shoot it with a phone or anything else that reads QR codes and get your questions in for Stephen during the last half hour. And we'll let him dive in and give you some of his insights and answers.

2:05 So too much preamble. Let's get right to it. Hello, Stephen. Stephen Haywood, welcome to the Office Hours Tuesday Focus. Hey, Bill. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate you inviting me on. So glad to have you here. You have a fascinating story of reinvention. You came out of tech broadcasting. How did you decide to make the pivot into the gaming world? Well, it was actually my kids, believe it or not.

2:29 I had been doing live broadcasting for almost 20 years now. and the tech and I pivoted to the broadcast space. And then it just kind of got oversaturated. I was kind of getting bored with it. And I took about a year or two hiatus from it, not doing any shows live, not doing anything, trying to figure out what I wanted to do

2:52 and how I wanted to reinvent my studio. And my kids, they were the ones, as they started getting old enough to play video games, were the ones that kind of got me to do some YouTube in the space. It is such a huge thing. I mean, I'm looking back, having been in this business a long time and how fast gaming took over. And then all of a sudden we were seeing more money spent on gaming than any movie from Hollywood or any other television show or whatever. I mean, it really did take over.

3:24 And I know it shocked me when I saw the rapidity of growth and how high end computers were really enabling so much development we had never seen before. Are those some of the things your kids got excited about that caused them to say, hey, do this? Well, yeah. And they were doing a lot with cell phones, as you as you mentioned earlier in the top of the show, you know, playing Minecraft.

3:49 And I'm sure everybody knows what Minecraft is. I don't play that. that uh but they they had been doing that with just you know your your iphone my kids had iphones at early age and they were doing that but i sucked them into the retro side of things um as you see behind me i've got like these digital pinball machines which are oh nice modern but they're

4:09 but they're digital right so yeah um i started getting those three-quarter scale arcade or in the game room like to my left which i could show you here in a little bit i have a a full-blown arcade to my life. Nice. So it's a lot of retro games that we all grew up with. Hey, I'll never forget walking into the bar when I was working in one in my, gosh, I think it was

4:32 in my 20s, early 20s. And seeing this table, they just dropped on the floor for Space Invaders. And the funny thing was, I looked at it about a week later, and as many of our employees were playing it as customers, I think it just swept through the world. So there's a lot of stuff that this has, it's developed super fast. It's become a huge thing. And so now we have all these

4:56 disciplines, right? We got e-sports, we have those multiplayer online role-playing games, virtual world exploration things, team building games, solo player games. There's just so much variety. How do you figure out kind of what's on the rise and what games maybe, do games wane in popularity and people leave them and behind and the communities that formed around them? it's it's really interesting like this has probably been the most interesting community

5:22 i've been a part of you know you've been a part of you know the tech communities where they have their favorite tech brand that they stick with and then you you know go to the broadcasters and broadcasters are buying tools to make their broadcast better the gaming world's a little bit weird uh it's it's it's different it's there's different genres of games where those guys just

5:40 kind of cling to like you have your fighting game guys where they just play fighting games right Right. Right. And the cool part is the mix of modern versus retro. Right. Where some of the games that I grew up playing, you know, 40 years ago, the Street Fighters, the Mortal Kombat says I'm using these regular games that everybody knows are now being able to be played online.

6:03 Where if you have a cabinet or if you're playing it on a retro device outside of the modern or outside of the regular retro ones that we grew up with, you can now play them online, play against your friends. Well, that brings up the whole idea of there's so much cloud compute possibility that it doesn't surprise me that is there. Are there large communities of people who are looking for classic?

6:25 I mean, are there people playing Frogger right now? There are. Believe it or not, like I kind of started into collecting these. I'm going to pull up a switch to my camera here. You guys. Oh, cool. This is my this is my whole arcade game room. I've got Frogger. I've got Space Invaders. Bill, you talked about. I have Centipede. I have asteroids.

6:47 Some of these games that, you know, a lot of you guys probably grew up playing. I grew up playing. And every night or every Saturday night, you know, we have game night here. And, like, we have couches down here for the ladies because not all the ladies like to play the games. They just like to sit and chit-chat. So there are some ladies that play the games.

7:06 But my wife was like, nope, you got to have, you know, you got to have the couches. So I kind of got started with that. It was over COVID. Nobody was going anywhere. So I built an arcade in my basement. There you go. Very cool. You know, and I have to say, I still to this day believe that Animal Crossing may have taught my son how to read. Literally.

7:34 You know, we were going to go, when is he going to start falling in love with this stuff? And I looked at it one day and he's saying, Dad, what does that say? Dad, what does that say? And next, I know he's asking me less and less and less. And that's what lit his brain up to do that piece of leap into the next part of his life. So talk to me a little bit about where you see the you know, you have kind of a retro thing going on here. But do you think about how gaming fits into the life of both kids these days and how it affects adults and kind of where you're heading with it?

8:08 So that's a fantastic question. And that's something that I've kind of instilled with my kids because I'm a physical collector. I collect physical games. As you probably know, Sony made the huge announcement they're doing away with physical media. Yeah, big deal. Right? And with that comes a caveat, right? Now they control if they want to remove a game from a server, if they want to remove a piece of media, whether it's a movie or whatever it is.

8:43 You can't just go to your shelf and pull that game off or that movie off and watch it. So my kids, until they've been around me collecting physical games, were always like, I'll just buy the game on the phone. It's digital or I'll get on Steam. Right, absolutely. But they're starting to understand now as some of their games are disappearing from these servers, like, hey, we need to save these physical games.

9:08 We need to be putting them out there. Not necessarily people collecting them in their houses like weird people like me do, but they see the importance of it and the potential that one day when they have kids, they might not be able to play their favorite game like my kids can do with my games. You sparked this thought to me. We're seeing so much go on away from physical media and physical hardware into subscription services, into online stuff.

9:37 Do you think this is in part a play for that kind of subscription gaming that Steam and others have done? No, 100%. 100%. In fact, my son was, you talked about modern gaming. I do some modern gaming. I have a PS5 and the Switch. which Nintendo has kind of said we're staying with physical cartridges, even though they're kind of doing those license key cards.

10:01 My son has really made a transition. Like last year for Christmas, he asked for a gaming PC. Like these kids now, like his friends and that, they're moving more. They're trying to get away from these consoles and stuff, and they're going to a PC. They want to build it themselves. They want to add the hardware to it to play these games and buy the subscriptions.

10:24 I hate to say it because dad's putting the bill for it, but they are. They're doing the subscription thing because it's what everybody's doing. For so long, high-level gamers were obsessive about processing speed and everything else. I mean, if you wanted to compete in a group game, the fact that you had milliseconds better responsiveness than the players you were against was a significant factor.

10:50 do you see that continuing is there still this hunt for competition level you see that a lot with esports and my son did esports for a bit not so much for casual gamers like a lot of guys there's guys that go out there and buy specific tvs for their consoles right because of the refresh rate and everything right um i'm more of a casual gamer in fact i have more fun collecting

11:12 at my age uh because i don't always have time if you will um to play these games like people come down they see my basement they see all the the games that i have because i showed you one room you didn't see the console room oh okay yeah so they think that i play video games all the time and it's it's the furthest from the truth a lot of a lot of it is i enjoy the collecting part but i

11:34 but i enjoy when we have people over and even kids kids especially like my when my my daughter and my son's friends come over and they see a game that they've never seen before and they're like Like, hey, this is actually pretty cool. You know, just to see that excitement in them when they really don't have a lot of excitement with some of these new games that are coming out.

11:55 They're all like carbon copies of one another. Well, and that brings up an interesting thing. I mean, we're hearing so much about the change of software creation. Everybody's talking about vibe coding and talking yourself into a software construct of some kind. Are you hearing any rumors about people who are doing that in the gaming world who are kind of creating little bespoke games?

12:21 Or is the big development world of the things that you've mentioned, these huge world building games that are massively online, is that still the province where most of that energy is? There's it's all over, Bill. I mean, there's there's there's conventions that I go to that one of which is called GDEX. And it's specifically for indie developers making games. And they're actually keeping physical alive.

12:48 Going back to, there's indie developers making games for the Atari. You know, everybody remembers the Atari, right? They're making games for that. They're making them for Nintendo. Speaking of space invaders. Exactly, right? But they're also doing VR. VR is huge right now. VR is something that, you know, these guys are making games for. So it's tough to say, man. There's so many different options of games out there from the indie developers. It really depends on what the indie developer really wants to create. I find whatever their favorite system was growing up, that's what they're creating the games for.

13:26 Nice. Since you go to so many conventions and things like that, is there talk about the development environments people use to make the games? Do you think that is something that is getting more accessible than it used to be when you needed a 300-person team somewhere to make a major game? A lot of these guys are building these games themselves. They're developing them themselves.

13:46 I don't particularly know the platforms. I go in and I talk to them, and they'll always say, we're using stuff that probably go over your head right now. And I get it. I do because I don't get into the development side of things. But there's a guy that's making a game right now that's over 100 and some hours to sit and play to beat the game.

14:04 And he's been building it himself for two years. That's his whole team himself. Artwork, everything. He's building everything. So is he using a lot of AI to, like, design screens and stuff like that? All coding. He's coding it himself. All coding. Yeah. Wow. He's coding it himself because that I at least know. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it makes me feel good because, you know, everybody's concerned about displacement

14:27 when these computers are smart enough to do some of the coding that people used to have to do. Yeah. We're all looking for seams in that where, hey, if I know how to do this stuff, this is something that the automated systems are not going to be quite as good at. So I may be protected from being tossed out of my ear.

14:46 and that's kind of what happened with this right so um my kids wanted me to start doing content on on these arcades when we got them because they're like dad you used to do stuff with tech and broadcasting like why don't you do why don't you do your youtube channel like rebuild it start it over and and do it in the you know these arcades and stuff like i'm like i don't know

15:09 you know what happens when you take your hobby and you make it something that's like a Yeah, it's either a great joy or an absolute disaster as you turn what you love into a day job. Exactly. Like I was at the point where I was just enjoying it with my family, you know, and just kind of doing that. And so I did an unboxing video one time and it just kind of blew up in a sense.

15:31 Now, mind you, when I was doing the tech and broadcasting stuff, I had, and I had done it for years. years. Like, you know, I think it was early 2000s I started and, um, you know, I had almost 75, 80,000 subscribers on YouTube, you know, but we didn't worry about thumbnails. We didn't worry about any of that stuff. It was just like throw content up there and whatever sticks. Right.

15:54 Yeah. But then for those two years, I lost a lot of people and I basically destroyed my own channel on purpose to start. Oh, tell us the story. Cause that sounds fascinating. You ran into to obviously some kind of big threat to what you were planning and all the efforts you did. Yeah. I burned out, man. There's no other way to put it. I burned out the tech and broadcast space.

16:18 I didn't want anything to do with it. It wasn't anything that happened. So, you know, there was no drama behind it. It's just that I just burned out and I was done doing it. I felt it ran its course in my life. And then I decided that when my kids said to do this, I thought, okay, well, if I'm going to do it, my son had an, you know, an ambition to become a YouTuber.

16:39 So I wanted him to see the work that you got to put into it. Right. First 10,000 subscribers got to be the most grueling that you possibly could get. So it was like 2019. I rebuilt, started the channel from zero. Like I had nothing, uh, going into, I want to say 20, 20, 21, 22, I was getting, I got to like 8,500 subscribers.

17:05 I felt like I just hit a brick wall. I was losing more subscribers than I was gaining. And I'm like, why am I doing this? Because I was trying to reinvent myself. Everybody knew me from doing live streams and broadcasts, things like that. And I wanted to do that, take that stuff that I already knew and bring it over to the gaming

17:25 space because all I ever saw in the gaming space was people with shaky phones doing live live streams and, you know, back in the day where they were, when live streaming just first started happening on a cell phone, right? People, I don't know if you remember Meerkat. It was kind of like a, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. The little chap. Yeah. Yes. And people are standing there with their

17:44 phones doing this and shooting video. I'm like, man, I could do this so much better with multiple cameras and guests and talk about my passion in the gaming space, but talk about things that that people don't normally talk about in this space because they don't have the ability to do it with the technological side of it. Right. And I was just grueling. So I got involved with a couple of guys.

18:06 We were doing the home arcade stuff we were talking about. We had, you know, we did really good. But then again, I started the burnout from that, too, because like like I said, it felt like it was a chore. It wasn't it wasn't fun for me. Yeah. Yeah. And then I started making the transition to doing all things gaming, console gaming, the arcades, everything.

18:28 And I hadn't done a podcast probably in two years from when I started that stuff up. And I joined with a co-host, which we now do the Game Masters, which we talk about things that people don't necessarily like to talk about in the gaming space. We talk about the some games that you can buy that are fake, that not everybody knows how to check for stuff like that.

18:50 how do you know okay right in the church things like that stuff that's not normally talked about but i had started gaining some steam and i just crossed the threshold i'm like finally i got over the 10 000 subscriber mark i got about to 12 000. one day i got an email it was from dji they wanted to sponsor me i'm like this is great i use dji cameras so i'm like this is great

19:19 I had game night going on. I'm looking at this email and the email says, oh, we just need you to link to your YouTube and Twitter and all that stuff, channel, so we can validate your subscribers and validate your followings. Seeming a perfectly reasonable thing to ask for. Exactly. I clicked on it and it should have hit. It should have sparked to me that there's something not right with this.

19:41 When the verification screen was moving around, it wasn't embedded into the site. it was moving oh so it was a toxic link as soon as i clicked on it as soon as i clicked on it like i i turned white as a ghost and i was like oh my gosh because immediately i started seeing and getting notifications that my youtube this was being changed on my youtube that was being

20:05 changed on my youtube and i didn't do anything so basically someone got kind of root on your channel I got hacked and it was one of those Bitcoin mining operation. They went live. So I'm freaking out. I'm calling my co-host up and I'm like, you need to change your password right now on YouTube. Because I said, this is what happened. Because I had access to her YouTube channel for vMix social.

20:32 So I could bring in her chats. So we could have two copies of vMix to bring those in. so I could bring my chat in and her chat for, I'm like, you need to change your password right now. They got access to my YouTube channel. I don't know if they've got access to you through this. Change your password before I even tell you anymore.

20:48 So she did. And then we were like, what do we do? And there was some other YouTubers in the community and they were reaching out to me, telling me like to, you know, hit up YouTube on Twitter. And I'm thinking, oh boy, this is going to be a disaster in itself. But I did. I hit them up and in the DM they told me, okay, we could see that it's not you because of the Bitcoin.

21:15 They shut them down before they did any kind of damage to it. I think they only had the live stream going for like 10 minutes. Oh, wow. But it felt like an eternity. And then what they did was they locked the channel down for 48 hours. But one of the things that I can give as a tip that helped me was the fact that I was verified. And, and, and, um, I know people don't like to spend the extra money for the little blue check mark on you on Facebook. If you're not to that point yet, or Twitter, or you don't have enough, that saved my butt because I was able to go to YouTube and tell them I was verified. This is an actual channel. I'm a brand. I'm a, you know, public figure, all that stuff.

21:54 they went on and validated through that and they said you know okay we'll get this taken care of in 48 hours we're gonna send you a link you can get your channel back we just got to go in and you know do some stuff and within 48 hours it was the longest 48 hours of my life because i'm like here i am i'm busting my hump for the last eight years finally hit that threshold and then right

22:18 Right when you get over the berm, expecting a sunny horizon, boom. You get hacked. Because I'm a guy that was in tech for 20 years, man. Like, I should have known better. And my point is, like, if I could get duped, anybody could get duped. So some of the safeguards. Bill, I even have one of those thumb keys. The USB thumb keys with a thumb.

22:42 So it wasn't anything that I did it. I physically clicked on it. And I was distracted. I shouldn't have done that. Hindsight's 20-20 right now, right? Well, and you're not alone. This has happened hundreds of thousands of times. And it's not because they haven't run into crisis. This didn't work. Let's try something different. That's the problem with bad guys is they just iterate and iterate and iterate until they find something that gets through the cracks.

23:09 And they got me. And then it was after that, I don't know if I was in the algorithm for the home arcade, but like, even after like getting to that point, I was growing a little bit, but not as good. Right after I got my channel back is when I really started to grow and we couldn't figure it out. My, my, my cohost was like, Hey, ride that wave.

23:30 Cause you don't know how long it's going to be. You don't know if YouTube just kind of like, Hey, we gave you your channel back. We're going to help you by, by, you know, promoting your stuff or whatever and putting it out there. so i just started throwing videos out there and it started to grow and and i continued i continued to grow and i'm still on that growing pace i have no idea what i'm doing and why it's working this

23:52 time and it didn't work before i can't tell you that but i can tell you there's tools out there with the verifications do it if you don't already have them pay for them they're going to help you in the long run if something like this happens if you're a bonehead like i was and click on that that link, you know, all it takes is that one time and those things can save your socials and save

24:13 your hard work that you've done all this time. Extremely important message to get out. Things do happen and the more protection you have, the better. Speaking of stuff like this, let's get to Q&A a little bit because I know people, we've already got a bunch of questions backed up here. So Cindy, what's our first question? Here's a good question for us from Rajan S. in Los

24:32 Los Angeles. What changes are you seeing in the game world now that anyone can spin up a version of Doom and AI? Could we all become game creators? Pong, Mario, Call of Duty? This is so crazy. I mean, this has been so fast between when AI got to the level that it's at now and all of a sudden we're seeing these things like, yeah, I vibe coded a whole version of the Adobe suite on Tuesday.

24:58 Everybody's talking about it on Thursday. It's insane out there. What do you think? I do. I think that more and more, I mean, my son's friends, they're building games for their Oculus Quest that they have, and they're playing them, and they're like, my son's like, hey, I'm beta testing my friend, and they're 13, 14-year-old kids. So yes, I do think that. it's it's going to be an a big change um do you think it's going to get significantly harder to

25:27 what's the right way to frame this question to it not make a living but to to have a satisfying gaming experience when i would guess that if your friend says hey you want to come over and play fill in the name of a game here are you going to be playing their version of that game well i i think it's going to be just like what we deal with with content right you're going to have

25:51 all these creators out there right building stuff and you're going to sure weed through the good and the bad to find you know things that you want to play within the genre that's what i honestly think i think you're going to have guys building games like you can build a youtube channel or you can build a you know yeah any other uh like an etsy shop right like

26:13 Like, anybody can do this. So I think that's what it's going to get oversaturated at some point. Yeah, it may be the same kind of thing. I mean, it's like saying I have a YouTube channel. Well, you and about a billion other people in the world. Exactly. The problem isn't having one. The problem is how do you get eyeballs to it when there's a billion places you can play?

26:32 Exactly. So that's what I think. I think that's what's going to happen. Okay. Let's dive into the next question. And this one is for me. steven please talk about your views on where the live streaming landscape is heading next you got all the occasions for us man if i had the answer for that i'd probably be a rich man right now um you know before i was doing youtube and focusing on uh curated content where i'm editing

27:04 and stuff like that my live stream views were through the roof now it's the opposite i can't buy i can't get people the same amount of views that i had years ago doing live streams that i can that watched the videos and i think it's because in the early days bill when this was the wild west of doing live streams people made time for it because nobody was people are like

27:26 wow these guys are going live they look like cnn and fox on yeah it was a novel they want to watch it live and they want to interact where nowadays they're like i'll catch it on the demand or they're not making they're not making time for it you know like they were 20 years ago when we were live streaming that makes good sense to me plus i how do you feel about the authenticity of

27:50 it seemed to me for a lot of times people who were too slick were not particularly grabbed grabbed onto by the communities who were used to seeing things that were shirt tail kind of productions. And that, that spoke to them as being something that maybe one of their peers might've done. And they felt, you know, it seemed to me for a while,

28:11 if you got too fancy, nobody cared about you. Yeah. And, and I, I see that it used to frustrate me to no end because I would put all this work into production. I would put all this work into graphics and things like that. And people would just go live from a cell phone. It's shaky. And they'd be like getting 10 times the numbers that I was getting.

28:32 And I'm like, what is going on? And it's just like they wanted that here and now. What was the content type? The content type was they're showing a comic going across the sky. People don't care about graphics for that. They want to see or there's a building that blew up in downtown Manhattan. Didn't really happen. I'm just making that up. But my point is, yeah, you know, you had these what did we call them?

28:56 You know, consumer reporters, if you will, where they're out there reporting on the ground because everybody has a cell phone. Sure, sure. Yeah. And I think people do feel there's a certain authenticity when you get away from the fancy news truck and you get down to Bob on the street outside the burning building. It's an interesting world we live in. Let's continue to work our way through.

29:19 we've got more questions than we had 10 minutes ago. So let's go to the next one, Cindy. This one is from Rajan S. in Los Angeles. Gaming continues to be bigger than most Hollywood blockbusters. What are those audiences looking for? And how can Office Hours Global work alongside that group? We have a lot of similarities, technical interests in streaming, interactivity, community. Have any suggestions for them? So one of the things we talked about earlier,

29:46 about going to conventions and things like that. And you see a lot of, if you've ever been to a gaming convention, you get a lot of the YouTube guys that come in there and they sit at their table and they're signing autographs or taking pictures or whatever. I did something completely different. I went into these conventions, me and my co-host, and we do, and I'm going to show you a picture here.

30:07 We do an actual live TV show game show at these conventions. conventions and the reason we're doing that is to to bridge that gap to as as he's saying here to show the high-end production but bring people up onto a stage and i build these at different conventions i go to where we'll sit there and we'll play games like like this where we're

30:29 challenging people in games and we're doing this live on camera and we'll we'll have 100 plus people with standing room only watching basically a comedy show about gaming and then having people from the audience come up to participate. And I think that is what's bridging that gap. There's a way that like he said about office, how can office hours get involved? This is a way. Don't go with the traditional

31:02 play a video game and talk over it like you see on Twitch every day. it's been there done that it's old okay uh next question coming in from seattle washington guy cochran asks what words of encouragement do you have for our community members that want to start or grow a youtube channel so we know it's crowded but what are some of the can you have a couple

31:25 maybe a handful of lessons and things that you've learned don't do this for sure um one of the the things I would say is networking. Find creators that are doing something similar. A lot of creators, they're willing to help. Talk with them, be friends with them, and they'll give you pointers. And the reason I say that is because when you might create a video and you think it's

31:48 great, but if you get those two or three people that you really trust, your inner circle, and they're like, man, you hung too long on this, or you did this too long. Those things are gold because it'll help mold you but also don't lose who you are don't watch a youtube video and say i want to do that and emulate it i'll use the example when i first started broadcasting

32:10 leo laporte was the guy everybody tried to emulate and imitate leo laporte but all you became was a leo laporte clone you weren't sure there's already a golden one right and so it was okay to use as a foundation to start but then you had to create you had to develop who you are as a broadcaster in that space so i would say the same thing for you to find out what you're passionate

32:37 about and and because people see right through it if you're not and and you know just be just find out who you are and just get in front of the camera and go you know it's really true authenticity um I do a lot of voiceover work and I've been doing audio book narration for a long time. And I remember the first time I ran into a colleague of mine and he had a very high to high and pitchy voice and it was really weird.

33:03 And and I thought, how good is he? And I looked at him and I was doing fabulously. And I thought, you know something, it ain't about whether you got a radio voice and can be the smoothest person in the world. It's about whether you can make the story come alive. And people can do that with almost any kind of voice. In fact, sometimes the weirder the voice, the more memorable and engaging you are. So it's really easy to think if I just do what everybody else is doing, that's the key.

33:34 Yep. Not so much. All right, let's go to the next question. Rajan S. is back with us in Los Angeles. Did you visit or have friends visit the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 pop-up in LA? thoughts on if it was successful for the game could this be done for independent games and there's a link they've got so much money what did they do did you hear about this or i've heard

33:58 about the pop-ups and it was one of their their most successful uh call of duty launches probably in a while since call of duty goes i personally didn't have any friends that went out to la to do that or um you know have gotten to that but i think any any you know indie game or anybody Anybody that's developing a game could do something like that.

34:19 I mean, that's the way to get the word out. And like I said, at conventions, that's the best way to do it. Get into a local video game convention that's in your area. Take your game in there. And a lot of times they're looking for people. They'll give you a booth and you can show off your game to all these other gaming enthusiasts that are there.

34:35 That's what I would recommend. Yeah, the convention industry is, you know, they've got their conventions. The convention has conventions. Yep. And one of the things I've noticed for years, I've been going to Comic-Con forever. My brother-in-law was an amateur cartoon artist. And the pop ups, the activations, the things around the convention, that is a robust and well understood and well funded set of operations.

35:00 now. I remember last year at Comic-Con here in San Diego, everybody was talking about two things when Johnny Depp popped up in downtown in character for the movie he's got coming up in a couple of months. And Ryan Reynolds, I think, popping, going up, just wandering around Comic-Con as Deadpool, because that was the one place he could completely be anonymous. So, yeah, what you're saying makes

35:29 Makes perfect sense to me. Understand that promotion and how you get traction for these kind of new titles has changed a lot. And you've got to keep up with what the crowd wants and where their eyeballs are. Next question. This one comes to us from Guy Cochran in Seattle. What are your thoughts on these in real life backpacks? Oh, for live streaming out of a black backpack.

35:54 Have you messed around with these at all? I actually have a few of them. I have one from Teradek. I have the backpack from Teradek. And I also have live views. I have solos, the live view solos that I take on location when I'm not bringing the TriCaster rig and we have to, like we'll go to a game store. We have a sponsor that is close to me, Stone Age Gamer,

36:19 and they have like customer appreciation events where they want YouTubers to come out. And I take a rig like this with a live view and we go out and we cover the whole floor and we're doing it live streaming it um as you're seeing here with the picture i've got like a uh uh adamos uh shogun i think i'm running on this one

36:36 with a canon uh camera with some wireless uh shore mics and wireless shore attachments on a road mic and we walk around and we're talking to people and other youtubers and we're you know we're doing this type of stuff so i 100 love the whole irl field but it but again as you and i were We're talking in the pre-show. There's the right tool for the job, and that was the tool for that.

37:02 It's a small store. You're not going to set up a whole big production backdrop. Yeah, this is not a three-camera with lights. It's not the right way to play this game. That's right. So I'm all for those. With you 100%, Stephen. Next question. Next one in is from Eduardo Augustine in Panama City. city. Stephen, do you consider professional producers are still relevant now that everyone

37:29 quote unquote can have a YouTube channel and stream? How can you be an outlier in the industry? Oh, what a good question, Eduardo. What's your thoughts on this, Stephen? I do think professional, I do a hundred percent think there's room for professionalism because one of the reasons I get invited out to these conventions is for, I'm going to show you this here, setting this up. People look forward to this. People want this, but it takes people to

37:54 do it. Right. And I enlist my kids. My daughter is actually going to be going to, she's been, she's been accepted to two colleges here in Ohio for broadcasting because she's been running the TriCaster since she's been 10 years old. She knows how to run the TriCaster all the way back to the the TriCaster 40, and even the earlier ones before that.

38:17 So I 100%, I think they're always looking for that for the main stages that we've participated in, that they do at just about every convention as you've been the one for cosplay at Comic-Cons and stuff. You're always going to have a main stage. And so 100%, that's a big draw at these places. A lot of the bigger names, we had the ability to produce,

38:43 I can show you here the actual Halo voice panel. If you guys know the game Halo, my daughter did the production for them because they didn't want to go into a conference room to do their panel. They wanted this amount of room. This is the area that I had. We had standing room producing this panel. So to answer your question, yes, 100%, you need production in these spaces.

39:12 Yeah. Actually, at Comic-Con, they had panels. That's the first place I heard about Dungeon Crawler Carl, which is this huge lit RPG thing. And the first year I was there, there were maybe 1,200 people, which freaked me out. The second year they came by, there were like 5,000. And it's just this incredible trajectory. trajectory and now i guess it's going to be a movie a hollywood movie so it's it's going to

39:36 get an even more insane so yeah there's still people writing these modern day new forms of content to great success out there next question next up is josh kaufman and josh asks what feels distinctive about the culture of gaming communities compared with the tech community you came from Ooh, are there hallmarks of the gaming community that somebody who is interested in fiddling with those people need to kind of understand or at least learn about?

40:07 The gaming community, you have to realize, are running on a shoestring budget. And I'm trying to say that as nice as possible. You're dealing with a lot of kids, right? They don't have a lot of money. Sure. Let's face it. College kids, regular kids, they're not old guys like me. you know they're they're they're they're kids so they're not spending a lot of money they want to

40:30 do this on as cheap as they possibly can elgato's really gotten you know they've they've hit that market for for the gamer yeah they understand what they were doing that's grown real fast and so um whereas you have the older generation when you go to the tech industry these guys are always wanting to buy the latest and greatest thing you have adult money you have full-time jobs just like

40:56 i feel like that's why i collect this stuff now it's stuff that i never had as a kid game systems that i never had as a kid and i collect it finally because i have adult money i have a real job a career and i can afford it and i can finally give my my take on it right yeah so i think the difference between the two spaces is you're you're dealing with two different

41:19 really types of people. It's like I said, the gaming community is unlike any space I have ever been in before. It's, I don't even know how sometimes they explain it. It's, it's interesting. Let's just, we'll, we'll, we'll say that it's interesting. And it's big enough and throws off enough money that it deserves respect for being what it is. And you shouldn't come in. And I,

41:44 when you told the story earlier about saying, I'm going to go in there and I'm I'm going to invent this up and I'm going to make everything look much better. It really resonates me because I've been in production forever and I remember the same thing. I'm going to go in with a three camera shoot with Sony. And you get there and you go, no, this was entirely wrong.

42:01 I misread the landscape of this. So it's very valuable what you're talking about in terms of what it's really like to get in and work with this community. You would have cringed as a production guy because when we did the one we had a developer on from Australia through a Discord conversation through a PA system that was picked up on a microphone that I held in my hand.

42:26 And I'm sitting there like you want to talk about noise and cringe and you're hearing this guy through a microphone. But you know what? It was one of the highest live streams that we had done in a while. People tuned in and people were engaged with it. And it just it humbled me to the point where I was like, OK, sometimes it's not all about the perfect framing, the perfect audio.

42:48 It's about the content. And I think people lose sight of that no matter what community you're in. Yeah, absolutely. And you've got to know your target. I mean, something like you're talking about is there for the time that it's on live and nobody's going to come back and watch that after the fact. So if it doesn't have instant engagement and give people the reason to keep watching, they've got about a gazillion alternate clicks to go someplace else.

43:13 Now, if you're building content that's supposed to have legs, like a video game or something like that, different game you're playing. Next question. This one's from Guy Cochran in Seattle, Washington. Looking at your channel and the old videos versus the new, what initiated the reinvention with the link? You've talked a little about that. You want to go into more detail about what you saw?

43:37 Yeah, one of the things that I try to do, and I don't know if other creators do this, but I'm just going to give you an insight into me. I take two weeks off of work between Christmas and New Year's, like a lot of people do that at families. But one of the things I also do with that time is I evaluate the year, what I feel like worked content-wise, what I feel like didn't work.

43:55 and I'm always trying to raise the bar if you since you were on my YouTube channel look back at how I did conventions previously where I would set up kind of like a podcast table if you will like you saw those guys there you know we're all sitting at a table and we're all talking in the microphones just just like here I'll pull this up like this this is what we did at conventions and

44:19 This was a huge draw. And I said, no, no, no, no. I want to take it to another level. And I was like, what can I do that's different from everybody else? And my co-host and I, we sat and talked. And that's when we developed the whole backdrop, the whole experience, if you will. and that's what a lot of times with me with the reinvention i go through a reinvention probably

44:41 almost every year i try to take it a step up another notch because i feel like with as fast as everything's changing if you're not reinventing yourself you're going to get lost in the shuffle and you got to give people a reason to watch you you got to give people a reason to check out your channel when there's all this other noise talking about the same thing why are you different

45:03 that I want you to watch my channel. What am I saying that resonates with you to watch my channel? I don't want to short circuit your rhythm of doing this, but is there anything that you can percolate to top of mind about a couple of things from this last year's cycle that may be heading toward your list for the end of the year?

45:27 Yeah. Some of the things that I tend to do is overcomplicate things. uh for i don't understand that at all right i know it's the broadcaster in us right like it's like oh we need ifbs you know we need to you know and so i'm standing there and again i'm trying to simplify everything because you got to set it up at a convention and tear it down i have a whole

45:50 rack system that i set up that i just roll in it's got a tri-caster in it the whole nine and i'm sitting there for some some of these shows that i've gone to i'm like like this was way over the top for, for something that they really needed there. You know, like we overdid it. And so for me, that's something I need to reevaluate for next year is how can I scale it

46:12 back without scaling back the quality mind you. Right. But, but make it a little bit easier on the old back, if you know what I mean. So do you see a future with three smartphones, a pad of some kind? Hey, you know, any, anything's possible. One of the things that we were gracious, we had a sponsor with the light panels that we had.

46:33 I was bringing in four or five different light panels, and the company saw it, and they're like, why are you doing this? Like, excuse me, one of our light panels. You don't want to pack a couple of Geminis onto the show floor? Come on, dude. Exactly. Exactly. So I'm sitting here like, well, okay, if you guys are going to send them out, sure, we'll use them because that's a couple extra bags I don't have to carry, right?

46:51 So those are some of the things that I like to do. I like to also go through and check my cabling. Usually I do that. It's an audit I do in my own studio. If something's breaking and I know it's going to break, I try to baby it until I get to that break and I can fix it then or software updates and things like that.

47:15 All that stuff runs through my mind. But, yeah, every year I audit my YouTube channel, everything, and see how can I improve? You know, my wife's good at that. Again, you have your little group of creators. I'm like, what did you like that I did? And be brutal, what did you not like that I did? You take that into account and you reevaluate and fix it.

47:39 I remember thinking a couple of years ago, the fastest thing is changing. I better look at what I've been doing. If I was doing this same thing five years ago, I had a seriously can think about stopping doing it because it's just moving along real fast. You'll burn out. Yeah. Well, yeah. And it's comforting to go if I just go and set up the same gear in the same way again.

48:02 But the downside of that is that you're doing the same thing and you're not pushing yourself and becoming refreshing your brain to look at new ways that maybe, you know, adding extra agility might make it a better show for your audience than going back to the formula. And you got to look past it, like just like there's purists when it comes to broadcasting, the guys that have been in the industry, right?

48:29 Sure. There's purists in the video game space where they want to use the original hardware, the original games. Well, you know what? This is where I lean into digital. If I can have an emulated device that I can take to a convention, I don't have to bring all the cartridges and the discs. I can just have an emulated box, hook it to my TV.

48:44 These are the types of things I'm talking about that I'm reevaluating in my head going, man, if I would have just taken my $100 box that's got 10,000 cards. games on it i could have plugged it up to the tv we could have played any game instead of just right that i brought yeah right yeah so those are the types of things that i'm let's oh yeah let's

49:04 go to the next question we're getting close here to the end josh kaufman is up next in pittsburgh pennsylvania have you seen people turn skills learned through gaming streams into opportunities opportunities in live production or other fields? I think my daughter's a good example of that. I mean, she plays, she built her own Minecraft server. And I, from what I understand, she'll

49:28 always tell me, she's like, well, that's not hard to do, dad. I don't know how to do it. So I'm like, okay. So if you guys are familiar with Minecraft and you'd say, oh yeah, it's easy. Well, okay. But I can't do it, but she builds her own server and has her own stuff going on that. And she, She transitioned. She saw what I was doing with this, and I've taught her everything,

49:50 and now she's going to go to school for production because she wants to be a broadcast engineer in some capacity. And so it's kind of stuck because that same thing where you're positioning a character on the screen to get a power-up or whatever, she's doing the same thing with a talent. She's positioning them on the screen. She's looking like if she's playing a game and she goes,

50:11 goes, man, I can't see that item right or that pit that I have to jump across. She brings that same mentality into production. She'll be like, Dad, if you move one more time forward, she's like, I am going to put duct tape to your feet, and you're going to stand there. She'll go around and put tape on the floor, and she'll say, do not pass this.

50:31 Do not go past. I mean, that's – but all that's learned from doing the stuff that she does in games. She's like, we can't get a good view on this. And I remember when she was little, she used to say, stuff like that too like i can't see this is a stupid camera angle on this game she's she's thinking in three dimensions because she lived in those three dimensions her entire life which

50:52 kids unless they lived on that rim of a canyon didn't get a chance to do as much yeah it's perfect perfectly sensible to me let's go on to our next question eduardo augustine in panama city asks besides youtube do you still follow through your career in a regular nine to five or is this YouTube channel and convention production become your business? I wish it became my business.

51:17 No, I work a nine to five. I work as a marketing manager. I actually work for the company Teradek. And I'm still very heavily involved in the broadcast space, just not creating content in the broadcast space. So, yeah, I'm still doing the old nine to fiver. That's what life is now. Now you get to you get to do this thing, but you also get to do the thing if you can figure out the time and the mental bandwidth to do it.

51:45 Yeah. Let's talk about YouTubers being rich. They're not rich. I don't know where that that started. Well, don't tell that to PewDiePie and a couple of people who got there really early and set up a whole thing. But, yeah, you're you're right. Suddenly, when there was 500 of them, that was pretty easy to do. when there was 50 million of them. A little different an environment.

52:09 Let's go to the next question. This one's from Josh Kaufman in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Which supposed must-haves can you drop from a show without much trouble, and which creature comforts have you found surprisingly necessary? Ooh, that's an interpretable question. How do you interpret it? I think he's asking about what things in the production should I drop. and what things am I, uh, like I'm comfortable with that.

52:36 I don't want to drop at least if I'm understanding the question, right. Um, you, since a lot of these guys, you guys are broadcasters, you understand this in my background being broadcasting, I have software switchers, but I am, I am a fan of hardware switchers. I am, I love NDI, but an old SDI cable, you can't beat it, man. And like, I, I am right.

53:01 I, I maybe, I like to be hardwired with everything as much as I possibly can. But lately I've, again, to let go of things, I've moved to a completely NDI workflow. I'm moving more and more to, I hate to say it, but wireless audio. I have a rack mount personas that I use. So everything's wireless. I just throw that in and use the iPad to control the audio.

53:26 I've I've certain things I've gone through and I'm like it pains me but those are some things that I you know I had to I had to get rid of the old snake the 50 foot snake you know and uh podcast mic with a countryman I had to go to a wireless you know so it is what it is we have one more question to get to before we wrap things up

53:52 and wrapping it up is eduardo augustine in panama city what would you advise us to do to transform ourselves and shift on improving our content and channels it's got to be getting harder the more the more people have spent years now i mean there's a lot of youtubers and a lot of content creators where this isn't their first rodeo they've been doing this for a decade or two decades

54:17 aids uh what are the challenges you see for people who want to get into this now i think the challenge is people go into doing something that they really aren't good at and and i'm not saying that to be disrespectful to anybody so please don't take it that way but some people like just listening to bill bill bill can bill can tell a story with how he's talking okay it would be like bill going into

54:41 doing a video where he's just you're just going to see bill moving his hands around and not speaking Why would Bill do that? Bill can communicate very well, right? The same thing I'm trying to say is with a YouTube person that wants to change their content, they might be a good explainer that could do walkthrough videos and be like hundreds of thousands of views on it.

55:04 but they deviate away from that to be the guy that sits on camera trying the latest soft drink that comes out because they want to be a foodie channel that is reviewing, right? So I think that you've got to look at your strengths and I think that goes towards looking at and evaluating yourself, write them down and do content that your strength is behind and people are going to be

55:28 naturally gravitating to you. I'm not saying I got it all together, but there's a persona that I figured out with myself that me and my co-hosts do where we do the whole good cop, bad cop thing where I'm kind of like the Duralect and she'll be like the very serious one. And we did like some of you guys that remember the old Abbott and Costello,

55:51 the who's on first routine. Well, there's a YouTube channel out there that says that's called our feature. and now our feature presentation we came out on stage the one time and she said she started saying that and i was like okay but who are we talking to and she goes and now our feature presentation and i'm going okay but who are we talking to we we had people with just doing that eating out of

56:17 our hands in the audience laughing and carrying on we had the kids those types of things and Finding stuff that works and sticking with it and not deviating away from that. When you find something that works, stick with it. 100% agree with you. And just understand, you've got to put in the time. I mean, you know, this is 2,000 office hours show plus.

56:41 I mean, and I was horrible the first hundred. And I was slightly less horrible the next 400. And you eventually get to the point where if you continue to do things and make tiny incremental improvements, but nobody, I'm sorry, but nobody walks on to do any kind of complicated job or to try to present something. And the first time you hit the stage, you had a home run.

57:09 It just doesn't happen. I don't know. I've been doing this 20, a little over 20 years, man. And I still don't have it all together. And you're not going to. No. No. And I believe you hope you don't because I want to be better next year than I am today, which means that I'm not as good today as I can be if I work hard for the next year, even after all these years.

57:31 And if you ask yourself if you're comfortable, as Bill said, you know, when you get comfortable, you're comfortable. That's when you want to change. If you can sit there and say, you know, I'm comfortable. No, that means you need to change. Yeah. Push a boundary, push a wall out, expand, learn something new. We did have a late last question, and since it perfectly segues into our wrap-up, Cindy, do the honors.

57:56 Sneaking a last one in from Dave Johnson in Maine. What do you do to help people find your channel and for it to feel connected and relevant? element? You know, I do like a lot of people. I'll put it out there and I put it on other social platforms. I do it on my live podcast that I do with my co-host and we put it out there.

58:17 I wear shirts and stuff. I have a QR code on the back that I'm in public. Like I want it to be something where, you know, you get all these YouTubers that are like, Hey, subscribe to me, subscribe to me. All you have to do is click subscribe. But I don't want people to subscribe to me just to subscribe to me. I want people to subscribe to me because they want the information

58:36 that I'm providing them or they're into the content that I'm doing. Numbers without that is nothing. Like I don't, I don't want that. Right. So I hope that when people comment, I comment back. That's how I try to make it personable. I don't, I don't sit there and go, well, I'm too big for this. I'm not going to comment back. I literally sit there and I'll

58:58 I'll go back and comment to every person that leaves a comment. And if they leave another comment, I respond right back to it. I feel like if you took the time to comment on my video, I'm going to comment back and I'm going to, you know, build that connection with you, you know, for watching my stuff and hopefully you become a longtime subscriber.

59:16 That's, that's what I do. We've had the pleasure for the last hour of talking to Stephen Haywood. And how do people get ahold of you directly? if they want to ask you a question, Stephen, or learn more about what you do. Sure. I'll put it out there. It's public. You can email me, steve at the techbuzz.net. I still have the old email address from the old website, but you can check me out,

59:39 youtube.com slash the techbuzz. All my socials can be found, you know, sprawled all over that channel as well. So yeah, I appreciate you guys having me on. Excellent. You've been a fabulous guest, and I've loved talking to you. And I also love our crew. And I want to just say a public thank you to everybody in the back end. You'll see some credits roll here at the end.

1:00:02 These are some of the many, many, many people who have been a part of the Office Hours family for a long time. You know, we traditionally close with a Tlaloc traversal. If you had been going around to get the information that we served up to you today, not just from Stephen, but also from the people who asked questions to help us with our discussion,

1:00:20 discussion you would have traveled 24 000 miles that's 39 000 kilometers or 193 million bananas for scale uh thanks to alan robert vick josh peter and more in the background of this we'll be back next week with another thursday thursday no that's a different show tuesday focus thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on the tuesday focus take care have a good evening bye

1:00:50 you you Thank you.