Production Costs

So let’s talk about production costs. Production costs are expenses specifically related to streaming/recording. But it also includes tools, for the simple reason that I have only used these tools when streaming.³ At the risk of information overload, I am going to present all of my expenses for 2021 in the table below. It’s a lot of information, so I’ll break it down after the table if you just want to skip over it.

In total, I spent £1,346.33 on production costs in 2021 for my stream. I have also categorised these expenses, as shown in the chart and table below.

There’s patterns in my purchases above. I tend to buy something cheap, then replace it with something more expensive if it doesn’t suit my needs. I buy a lot of second-hand stuff from eBay. My purchases are a bit all over the place, rarely buying all the stuff I want together. For example, there is a 3-month gap between me buying the Sony Alpha a5100 camera and buying a Macro lens. That’s primarily because it takes me time to figure out exactly what I want to buy. That time has let me snag some good bargains, such as the Elgato Camlink 4K for £50.

I’m also willing to throw a little money at some experimental stuff. When I realised that I needed better lighting, I decided to try and make my own by buying cheap LED ‘Vanity Lights’ and making my own camera and lighting rig out of some scrap wood. Unfortunately I didn’t really know what I was doing here. I figured it was the same principle as a ring light, but that doesn’t really carry over when you’re trying to film something highly reflective like a circuit board - it just ended up with the lighting all over the place. I eventually bought the two Neweer LED lights, but they weren’t the improvement I hoped they would be. I think I just need to accept that I’ll probably need to spend some money on better lighting. I also need to keep in mind that my setup isn’t a conventional streaming configuration, so things targeted at streamers might not be suitable.

I spent most of my money on Recording Equipment: a total of £1,006.14. This has resulted in a pretty significant improvement in the overall production quality. The biggest improvement here was the Sony Alpha a5100 coupled with the Elgato Cam Link 4K. Using either the kit lens or the 30mm Macro Lens gives me significantly better image quality, although it was a few streams before I got the hang of it.⁵ The camera is also small enough that I can put it in awkward positions and easily move it mid-stream for better visibility of what I’m working on.

I spent a lot on tools as well, but that’s an area where I basically have zero regrets. I started out with a cheap unbranded soldering iron and solder sucker. I had several streams where I was running into trouble getting solder out of joints or issues getting it to flow. These were painful moments for me, as it felt like I was embarrassing myself in front of an audience. Upgrading to the Hakko soldering station and the Engineer solder pump were frankly game-changers. I still distinctly remember the first time I used the Engineer solder pump; I’d spent about an hour in the previous stream trying to get some components off, and the Engineer solder pump sucked it out in the first try with no problems. Investing in the right tools has not only improved the flow of my streams, but also my confidence on camera.

The purchase I regret the most is the Razer Ripsaw HD. I bought that intending to capture console output that’s been passed through the OSSC. Unfortunately, the Ripsaw can’t seem to handle output from PAL consoles, rendering it useless for what I bought it for.⁶ Even more irritating, it doesn’t seem to want to co-exist with the Elgato CamLink or the cheap-as-chips USB-HDMI card I bought early in the year. Both of the other cards seem to be able to capture the output from the OSSC without issue⁷ (although the latter drops frames), but trying to add the Ripsaw into the mix seems to cause all other video sources in OBS to crash (excluding the Logitech webcam, for some reason). I contacted Razer support about this, but got passed off from person to person with increasingly unreasonable demands for more information. I’ll try and trade it in for the Elgato equivalent at some point.

Project Costs

As I mentioned above, I want to keep my production costs separate from my project costs. These projects are things that are primarily for personal use, so I’d like to keep them separate from the expenses related to streaming. I’m not sure if this is a useful distinction from a financial perspective, but it’s definitely useful to see how much each project costs.

Note that my ‘Retro Hardware’ streams are not all associated with a specific project. Many of the streams just focus on fixing small items, doing experiments, cleaning things, etc. If it’s a general expense and it’s something small, then I’ve just included that in the production costs above and categorised it as a consumable. Maybe that’s not the best approach, but it’s essentially impossible to take a roll of solder and figure out how much of it I used for a given project.

In total, I spent £620.27 on project costs in 2021. It is important here to note that this is immediately misleading, as I started buying parts for some of these projects in 2020. There’s also some stuff that I got for ‘free’, either because it was gifted to me or because it’s something I’ve had since childhood.

The most expensive project I had was the Ultimate Playstation, which cost me £193.99. Oddly enough, the Playstation itself was the cheapest part of this project. It was in spectacularly bad condition when I got it: yellow with age and/or nicotine and not working. The ODE that I installed was a significant expense, but the thing that really messed with the budget was the capacitors. Normally it’s easy enough to buy capacitor kits online, but a global parts shortage due to COVID meant some components were hard to find. As a result it took me 5 months to get all the capacitors that I needed. While the sellers of capacitor kits still had them in stock, Brexit meant that many of them had issues shipping to the UK. While some would refuse to ship to the UK, others charged exorbitant postage fees while asking the buyer to accept that it might disappear into a customs hellscape and never arrive. Sourcing my own capacitors was time-consuming, and meant I had to buy a lot more than I really needed.

The cheapest projects here are the Atari 520ST repair and the XBox 360 Controller repair. I’ve not actually started the repair on the Atari because I don’t have enough space to work on something so large. The 360 Controller was a single, simple, short-and-sweet stream. That said, I wasn’t very happy with the results, and I eventually just bought a new controller for my son to play with. It was a good experience though, learning how to repair frayed/damaged controller cables.

My most successful project was the Ultimate GameBoy Color. I deliberately bought GameBoys for this that were in awful condition. Unfortunately, the first had extensive battery corrosion damage that rendered it unusable for the project. The second was in working condition, but I suspect it was literally dropped down a mountain due to the extent of the damage it had - and a sticker on the bottom for “Mountain Biking UK”. I’m really happy with the outcome of this project and I’ve spent a lot of time playing Zelda on it.

I’ve had a few notable on-screen screw-ups as well. My worst mistake was probably smashing the screen on the Ultimate GameBoy Advanced live on stream as a result of putting a gasket on upside-down. A bit of a knock-down for my confidence, however I was able to get an affordable replacement from AliExpress. I just had to be patient and wait for it to arrive (and not screw it up again).

A notable entry here is the Retrobrite experiment, which wasn’t a project like the others. It was a full-blown experiment, and I had plans to write up my results with as much scientific rigour as I could. I did do some stuff on stream, but it was a different type of content from the stuff I usually do. Unfortunately I haven’t finished that article yet, although I do have all my material prepared. I’d quite like to also make a YouTube video out of that as well. The hidden cost there is time. It was a very time-consuming and difficult experiment to run. It was a success as I learned what I wanted to learn, but I really need to work on properly disseminating the results.

Income

Ok, so I’ve spent a lot of money, but how much have I made? My income from this experiment has been £0.00. This isn’t really ideal. I have made some money on Twitch, but not enough to hit the “payout cap” which is £100. I have made no money from tips or from YouTube. I have no sponsors or affiliate links (although I might want to consider looking into those things).

Analysis

In total, my expenses over 2021 were £1,966.60 with an income of zilch. I obviously can’t keep that up forever. That said, I am treating this as a hobby, and I am enjoying it. It’s pretty expensive for a hobby but it’s not as bad as some other hobbies (looking at you, Warhammer and Model Rail fans). There’s also the chance that it might return some money in the future. When I started, I had hoped that I would at least be able to break even, but that’s obviously out the window.

Viewing it as a hobby, I think it’s kind of sustainable, but I think it’s realistic to expect me to run out of projects and/or money. When that happens I’m not sure what I will fall back on. Another problem is that I’m getting more creative and more ambitious with the projects, which means I need more money to fund them. With the high cost per project, it really makes sense for me to start looking into ways of making the content less disposable and more produced. I’m specifically thinking about YouTube videos like those made by Elliot Coll.

Gameplay videos are cheap to produce, and I can make those forever. I’m not really sure I’ve found my feet yet with those. I enjoy making them, but I feel like I don’t stream regularly/long enough, and they end up dragging out. Perhaps there’s a path here to increase the amount I stream in the hopes of financing the more expensive projects I want to take on.

Future Work

In terms of production stuff, I need a bigger, dedicated workspace. I am moving house in March and I’m planning to get a new workspace when I move. That should allow me to mount the camera boom arm I purchased on the wall, which I’m hoping will improve my camera work a lot. I’ll also have more space, which will allow me to set up my VR system again. The Phasmophobia content I streamed earlier in my career was pretty popular, so I’d like to do more of that. My viewer engagement seems to be much higher when I am streaming horror games⁸ and more introspective/philosophical games, so I’d like to stream more of that content.

I’ve had the idea of interviewing other people while fixing their Retro Hardware. I had my first stream like this the other week, and I thought it went extremely well. I’ll need to do a follow-up once I’ve purchased the parts I need, but when it’s done I’ll need to figure out what I’m going to do with it. I think that’s much more suited to YouTube, and I had originally planned on it being a YouTube video, but a lack of prep time meant I ended up doing it on Twitch instead. It went pretty well, so I’m wondering if there’s an approach here where I can do both. I also recognise that there’s a very small pool of people who would be interested in doing this, so that’s tricky.⁹

The biggest thing I need to do I think is to grow my channel. I think it’s OK that I stream for such a small number of people each week, but I need to do more to find the people who would be interested in the type of content I produce. That means investing time setting up my Twitch presence (things like channel points, emotes etc.). I think the other big thing I need to do is get a social media presence. So I’m somewhat reluctantly trying to figure out how to use Twitter. Hopefully I can use this to find those people and get on their radar.

Finally, the big elephant in the room is YouTube. I’d like to take my twitch recordings and cut them up into more professionally produced content for YouTube, but that takes time and I’m struggling. I started cutting up each Twitch VOD into highlights and exporting them, and I did get a couple of subscribers, but ultimately I think this is not resulting in a very good output and it takes a lot of time. I’d rather invest more time into making something smaller and more cohesive, something I can be proud of. I’m also considering something like TikTok, which is where everyone seems to be these days.

Conclusion

This has been a fun but expensive experiment. I’m going to keep going for a while, but if I ever want to make money I’m barking up the wrong tree. The best I can hope for here is that I can fund some of my more expensive projects. Unfortunately, I can’t do that with my current trajectory. I need to do more to grow the channel and experiment with reaching an audience. I also need to think about other avenues of content creation such as YouTube. If I can grow the channel I can probably entertain other monetisation options like sponsorships and affiliate links, but that’s out of reach for now.