New Members
Hey Team Rokk! Firstly, a MASSIVE welcome to Sean aka Wolock who joined us yesterday as a Rokk Legend. Team Rokk is now 10 strong and growing every month! I’m absolutely bowled over – it’s truly amazing 🙂
Refocus and New horizons
As you know I recently decided to overhaul the ‘brand’ to make us more focused on cloud gaming and not one particular platform. Google Stadia is still my favourite cloud gaming platform by a country mile, but with the landscape now including Amazon Luna, Microsoft Xbox Game Pass Ultimate (they do need to sack their brand manager), GeForce Now, Playstation NOW and of course Google Stadia – not to mention other little ‘fish’ bobbing about on the edges of the pond, I felt the time was right to solidify the content as encapsulating cloud gaming overall.
Unlike Cloud Gaming Xtreme which seeks to cover all platforms however, I believe that much more value is served by having disparate, specific content for specific platforms. The first fruits of that seed has come in the form of The Luna Cast which I hope you have managed to catch (we went ‘to air’ yesterday with our first official episode). If you haven’t managed to yet you can find it at Twitch.tv/TheLunaCast or archived at www.youtube.com/Rokkster.
You will see from watching the show that it really is about cloud gaming first and we deliberately avoid comparisons with Stadia or any other platform – we’ll leave that to others.
As to whether I roll out future shows for other platforms, at the moment I feel that only Luna and Stadia are true cloud gaming platforms – the others are ‘bolt ons’ to more traditional gaming/hardware and, although worthy of debate, as such are more commercial ‘bet hedging’. Of course both Amazon and Google are in this for profit – but the teams they have pulled together are exclusively working on cloud gaming solutions and that sort of feels more ‘legit’ to me. But mileage may vary of course and undoubtedly there will be other contenders to look at in the future.
Going back to Patreon
OK, I admit it – this self-managing-Patron thing has been more of a pain than it’s worth! The plugin that I’ve used (which wasn’t cheap) has never properly worked and I’ve had to do most of the management manually. SO, we’re going back to Patreon! It’s going to be so much easier to manage and also easier for you guys in terms of managing payments etc. Ironically it will also be easier for me to create content exclusively for you too as putting videos on YouTube and sending out emails to see it is not working for some of you at all. This way I can post videos, news like this and other content and you will all be notified and be able to access it. The current plan is to start this on November 1 – although I’m still setting it up and may end up creating a free account for this month just to migrate you all over (on the basis that you have all paid your October donation – or will shortly have). Let me know if you have any concerns about this though.
Show thoughts
Finally, I’m considering a rejig of show times again. With Luna Cast now on Sunday evening (11am PST, 2pm EST) as well as Stadia Rokks Live on Sunday mornings (UK), it makes Sundays a bit tight (especially as more often than not I also guest on Brandon’s show later in the day. So, I’m toying with the idea of moving Stadia Rokks Live to 8pm Wednesdays (same time slot as Rokk Around The Clock) and either moving Clock to later that evening or dropping it for the time being. I like the idea of having it later though – albeit as an expanded round-table with maybe four or five guests (I’ve yet to ask them – but a great line up would be, Clive, Chase, Avery, Duncan, Me and one or two others). We’d cover the wider topic of cloud gaming news from the previous seven days – but not in as structured a way as CGX do where they approach each platform separately. The revised show’s remit would be to concentrate on big news stories that fit under the cloud banner – whether for one platform or many. This is still in the ‘kicking it around’ phase, so let me know what you think to this please.
That’s it so far this month. As always thank you for your continued support and do let me know if you have any ideas or thoughts!
Rokk out!