TL;DR I’m writing weekly RTS analysis over on Substack nowadays. Come subscribe – it’s free!

Long Time No See

Hey folks! It’s been awhile since I posted on here – September 2021! – so I thought it would be good to provide an update on what I’ve been up to. I’m grateful to all of you folks who have followed me over the years and supported my work, and I don’t want to leave you hanging.

Shortly after my last post, I spent a good amount of time playing Age of Empires IV. I wasn’t very happy with the game. Around the time I started transitioning off of it, I decided to invest more time into my day job to work on a promotion. Fortunately, this worked out; and late last year, I decided to spend more time playing and writing about real-time strategy games.

As part of that, I started writing over on Substack. I wrote up this post in late December to talk about why. Six months later, I feel pretty good about it, and I wanted to talk a bit about this for the benefit of folks who follow me on here.

The main benefit of Substack is that it’s a more streamlined experience, in terms of standing up a site and a newsletter. Everything from the nuts and bolts of writing and emailing subscribers to onboarding analytics to setting up different subscription types is easy to setup and available out of the box. Basically, Substack allows me to just focus on writing.

The newsletter format of Substack is also nice in that it encourages me to write in a more informal and relaxed style. I think this is more approachable and enjoyable for readers; I also like how it enforces a clean conversational flow to the text. I haven’t yet done a deeper dive on the platform the way I did with, say, region lock back in 2019, and I imagine I may have to adjust the tone for pieces like that. But so far, so good.

Substack also allows me to offer paid subscriptions. To be clear, all of my content is free, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. But I like this feature because it’s a motivator for me. Folks who want to go the extra mile in supporting me can take a paid subscription at $5 a month – and for my part, I want to make sure they’re getting value for their money. And this motivation has enabled me work consistently and at a high quality bar; I’m going on six months of weekly pieces now, with no signs of stopping.

I don’t write to make money. But I find having the subscription aspect to be a healthy motivation. And from the perspective of all subscribers – both free and paid – the net outcome is a healthy stream of content and a sense of confidence that they’re going to have good stuff in their inbox every week. And that seems good!

With my focus on writing I haven’t done any YouTube stuff this year, which raises up two points. One is that that the meme at the top of this post is mostly in jest; I do still plan to make YouTube videos, when I have time, and when the format is appropriate. I just don’t have a solid plan for doing so.

The other point is that writing is less time-intensive than creating videos, which gives me more time to invest in longer-term stuff – playing and reviewing a larger variety of real-time strategy games, learning from as many people as I can and building more relationships in the real-time strategy space, gathering and analyzing more data, and tackling harder and more ambitious long-term projects. I find myself doing things purely because I think it’ll make me better at what I do, rather than because it’s tied to a certain deliverable. And I think that’s good for the long-term prospects of this work.

I think this has always been true, but the advantage of a weekly cadence is that I know for sure whether I’m on track or not. When I have some extra time and get ahead of things, I feel more confident doing long-term stuff that doesn’t have an immediate payoff. I know, I could have always done that! But I guess the platform switch made it easier.

Final Thoughts

I don’t have a clear plan for Illiteracy has Downsides yet. But I do plan to keep it up for the foreseeable future, even if I don’t have any new content plans. No worries about any of the archives going missing.

I also wanted to say that I’m not offended if folks decide not to follow me over to Substack. Many of you subscribed to me years and years ago; I completely understand if my schtick is no longer something you’re interested in.

But for those of you who *are* interested, just head on over and subscribe; it’s totally free. I publish weekly, but here’s a quick month-by-month selection to get the ball rolling:

• January – StarCraft II’s Most Persistent Misunderstanding Is That It’s Not Accessible
• February – Grey Goo Campaign Review
• March – StarCraft II Is Not Dead
• April – We Should Think More Critically About The “Heyday of RTS”
• May – Thinking About Game Pass for RTS
• June – Breaking Down Age of Empires IV’s Launch Problems

Thanks again for all your support over the years. I always felt bad that my content production was hit or miss, with long droughts when my life got busy. I feel like I’ve finally solved that problem (no jinx). I hope you folks enjoy the work and, as always, feel free to reach out to me with comments, questions, concerns, or just to say hi! You can reach me at brownbear _at_ illiteracyhasdownsides _dot_ com.

All the best,
brownbear