Now Ye're Talking - to a video game journalist

Boards.ie: Mark

Our next AMA subject is video game journalist Danny O'Dwyer who founded Noclip, a crowdfunded video game documentary channel on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhXiJMZGkBs

If you have any questions about the video game industry, Noclip's work, or the usage of crowdfunding to enable the creation of content, fire away!

Can you give me a brief synopsis of whatever the hell "Gamergate" and the recent Micro transactions controversies were and are. Everything I read about it so far seemed to assume some level of starting knowledge whereas I am completely clueless.

Is the new game from the Witcher 3 people going to be any good or will their own hype ruin them?

Are AR games like those from Niantic ever going to amount to anything - or is something always going to hold them back and make them only ever able to hold attention spans for short periods of time. What is limiting them?

Stone Deaf 4evr

Excellent Guest!


Danny - thanks for taking the time to do this, a couple of questions

1. How guarded are developers when it comes to giving you access?, its rare we get a glimpse behind the curtain in this industry and recent dissent at CD projekt red, shortly after your doc was published would seem to indicate there is a degree of glossing over how hard it is to actually make videogames (crunch, etc). Do you feel that Devs are fully upfront in what they present / give you access to?
2. When you were coming to the end of your time at gamestop - how hard /scary was that decision to go out on your own? I tip my hat to you for putting it all on the line and going after your independence!


best of luck in the future, and its always nice to see you pop up on the Bombcast / Beastcast every now and again.

Edit - also, big thanks for the doc on DOOM, I would never have played it, but for the funny and enthusiastic look at the people who made it. Its definitely one of the best shooters of the last Decade.

Sabre0001

Thanks for doing this AMA

Couple of questions to start off:
How many people are on the NoClip team?

Just watched The Hillbillies of Grand Theft Auto Online, which was great. How did you find this group and were there other gaming groups that were considered / may feature in the future?

How scary is it (especially when you started out) to depend on Patreon to be able to create these documentaries? And was there a Plan B initially if funding wasn't great to be able to prove to people that you were not only willing, but able to create interesting and engaging videos?

Pac1Man

Was your current venture always the end goal or did it develop naturally from the excellent work you did on 'The Point' series with GameSpot?

dannyodwyer

Hey folks,
Morning here on the East Coast of the states - sorry to keep you waiting but thanks for the questions.
1. How guarded are developers when it comes to giving you access?, its rare we get a glimpse behind the curtain in this industry and recent dissent at CD projekt red, shortly after your doc was published would seem to indicate there is a degree of glossing over how hard it is to actually make videogames (crunch, etc). Do you feel that Devs are fully upfront in what they present / give you access to?
At the start it was a bit of a struggle. Our second project was DOOM and that involved getting Bethesda to allow us to post footage of the unreleased and unseen version of DOOM 4, but mostly it's an open dialogue about what we want for the project and what the company is willing to talk to us about. For instance, when it comes to CDPR and the crunch issue - we didn't fly to Warsaw to tell a story about crunch. We weren't interviewing people about it, we had a week to get as much information about the development of W1-3 as possible, and that was difficult enough. To tell the crunch story, you have to do an entirely different production, you can't just lob in a question - because you know what the answer will be. We work a lot during the pre-production phase to make sure that we get what we want once we've left the studio, so if that involves asking hard questions and talking to people they might not want to give us access to - we're pretty up front about it. The FINAL FANTASY XIV ONLINE doc was a good example of that. We knew we wanted to tell a pretty negative story about Square Enix and talk to the President of the company about how it affected business. We opened a dialogue with them about it, and it happened. It's all about being up front. We don't shy away from telling negative stories, but there is enough investigative journalists in the world of written gaming news. It's a whole different challenge trying to do that on video. That's not to say we're not working on some stuff.
2. When you were coming to the end of your time at gamestop - how hard /scary was that decision to go out on your own? I tip my hat to you for putting it all on the line and going after your independence!
Thanks so much. When I left GameSPOT* (don't worry, we all did it there too) I wasn't really scared so much as I was scared of staying and getting rusty. A lot of folks have told me they think it was brave to me move country for work so many times, or to leave my dream job to try something else - but honestly it was more scary to not do it. It's not a case of being brave, it's just that my fears of not doing something that matters were what was driving me. I imagine a lot of people are like this in society. Folks who work two jobs to pay the bills, or sacrifice their dreams to raise kids - it's all about what motivates you. At the end of the day it took me five years to break into games journalism, so I don't want to waste the opportunity I've been given - I want to make something that genuinely benefits the industry. At a certain point I realized the corporate stodginess of GameSpot wasn't a good fit for me. I wanted to get control of that site's video output and turn it into something amazing. When I realized that wasn't going to happen I decided to start my own company. In five years we'll be a bigger name than GameSpot. That's the goal anyhow.
Thanks for the questions!

dannyodwyer

How many people are on the NoClip team?
The core team is Jeremy Jayne and myself. Jeremy films and color corrects, I do everything else. We also collaborate with various online artists who create artwork, music and other promotional elements for us. We hire folks to do the captioning on our videos, but right now it's just the two of us. We'll be expanding pretty soon though.
Just watched The Hillbillies of Grand Theft Auto Online, which was great. How did you find this group and were there other gaming groups that were considered / may feature in the future?
I have friends over at Rockstar who originally told me about Knox and his crew. I knew about them for a good 18 months before we actually approached them and filmed the doc. Long before Noclip started. And yea, when Noclip launched I wanted it to be about "the people who play and make games" so we've got some other fun stories to tell over the next year. Wouldn't want to spill the beans!
How scary is it (especially when you started out) to depend on Patreon to be able to create these documentaries? And was there a Plan B initially if funding wasn't great to be able to prove to people that you were not only willing, but able to create interesting and engaging videos?
This is going to sound really arrogant, but I was hopeful that we'd get enough funding that I'd be able to create something - if not at the scale we are now. I'm a massive advocate for advertising-free media. I think advertising has had a caustic effect on the media and the way in which content in created. It has an impact on form, length, tone, presentation and so much more. I wanted to create a media company that was entirely divorced from advertising and free to make decisions based on creativity. So for me, Patreon was the only choice. I had original goals that said if we reached 5k we'd do THIS, and if we reached 8k we'd do THIS, so the idea was somewhat scalable. I had saved up enough of my own cash to work on two projects as proof-of-concepts if some folks were on the fence, but thankfully that wasn't really necessary in the end and we were able to fund over a dozen projects since we launched 14 or so months ago. I've been really lucky.

dannyodwyer

Can you give me a brief synopsis of whatever the hell "Gamergate" and the recent Micro transactions controversies were and are. Everything I read about it so far seemed to assume some level of starting knowledge whereas I am completely clueless.
Oh boy! I really don't know if I can without being incredibly reductive. I'll tell you my opinion on it and you can take it for leave it. Gamergate for me is a total crock of ****. Within my job at GameSpot, and before then, I'm about as vocal a person about journalistic integrity as you can get. I've stuck my neck out many times, and even not gotten jobs because of my stance of what journalists should and should not do. To the point where I run a media business that doesn't do advertising. 
Gamergate is supposedly about a games journalists sleeping with a game creator and giving them a positive review. However it's really about the fact that the reviewer in question was a woman, making games that some gamer's didn't think are "real games" and being vocal about the abuse she was getting. The game she made was a free flash game about depression (I made a short doc about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kLdNHiSVjU) so it never got a review, and the reporter in question stopped covering any story she was connected to immediately. So in short, Gamergate is a bunch of angry man-babies making up a load of bull**** to justify their hatred of women and text-based story games. I should mention that the person in question is somebody I consider a friend. I also met the guy who "leaked the story" about her and he was a creepy piece of ****. It's a real "jilted lover makes up a story to make him feel better" sort of thing. 
The Micro-transactions thing is too big to summarize, but if you're talking about loot-boxes - a lot of players are angry that tactics utilized in casinos are being used doll our in-game rewards piecemeal rather than based on their own progress. I sort of did a video about that general area of design too, but this is from two years back now and a lot has happened since: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g79dWuqXe5o

Is the new game from the Witcher 3 people going to be any good or will their own hype ruin them?
I think Cyberpunk 2077 will be good. They have a lot of folks working on it. I think them not talking about it for years was a good idea too.
Are AR games like those from Niantic ever going to amount to anything - or is something always going to hold them back and make them only ever able to hold attention spans for short periods of time. What is limiting them?
I think Pokemon Go was a really popular game in spite of the fact that the "game" part of it wasn't a very good. AR could absolutely have a breakthrough, but it needs more games that marry the open world nature of the genre, with quality game design. Pokemon Go! just didn't have enough going for it to keep people hooked in a strong game loop. Sadly on phones, the idea of "quality" comes after a cute icon on iTunes and a catchy title. But hopefully somebody will get there.

dannyodwyer

Pac1Man wrote: »

Was your current venture always the end goal or did it develop naturally from the excellent work you did on 'The Point' series with GameSpot?

Oh I can just do this instead my bad. My original Boards account was from about 15 years ago so it's been a while since I was on here.

Thanks for the question - it developed naturally from doing The Point and also a few projects I worked on over the years like my History of Sensible Software (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZ3qDiC4yX0) video and Gamers V Depression. Once I moved to America we were on the doorstep of so many companies that I started pitching larger features as a way of doing previews that would actually get traffic. That's where our "The Story of Overwatch" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jq-HwvYjLLg) and Witcher 3 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi8tdetuz90) videos game from. When I realized that people actually wanted to watch more of these, I pitched the idea of doing a lot more of them at GameSpot. Formalizing the whole thing and building a team around it. It almost happened but I didn't like the terms they wanted me to work within so I left to start Noclip. It was the right decision! 

Pac1Man

Great stuff! You're made for that job. Every video is informative and entertaining even if I don't have a direct interest in the subject (or game).

Smokeable Cowboy

Hey Danny,

First off massive congrats on what you've created. I've been a big fan from Gamespot through Kinda Funny and love your No Clip stuff, keep it up!

Do you think games journalism can grow in Ireland or is emigration an inevitable step that people have to take?

Sabre0001

What's been your favourite project to date?

Who is on the bucket list to interview?

And what are you getting to play for fun these days?

Falthyron

Do you think you will ever return to Ireland permanently? I know you are now married to an American, but I guess the freedom of Noclip affords you the opportunity to base yourself anywhere.

Do you hope that you can break into mainstream television? Perhaps have a thirty minute slot on network TV or see your documentaries being aired on TV? Is that one of your goals?

I know you are a huge advocate for mental health awareness and considering you now appear to have your dream job, how much has that affected your own capacity to manage your mental health? I would imagine you still feel pressure and stress, but does doing what it is you love to do above anything else mitigate mental health problems?

By the way, I have been following you on GameSpot since 2012 or so and I think most people here would agree, it was a far more enjoyable website with you on-board. I have kind of moved over to EuroGamer since you left - Johnny Chiodini is always a pleasure to read and watch!

vard

I recently successfully self petitioned and self filed for a green card. I expect to be in the US in the new year. Amy advice for someone looking to break in to the games media industry? In either production or journalism, in Los Angeles?

khaldrogo

Would you agree that Rainbow six seige is the best FPS ever?!!!

Adventagious

Cheers for stopping by, Danny. Doing great work out there.

You've obviously got a lot of connections in the industry at this stage and we see you popping up everywhere on videos and podcasts, but is there any organisation in particular that you really admire/think is doing cool stuff in the journalism/reporting area?

Related - do you ever see yourself joining up with a bigger organisation again or is the lure of independence too strong?

dannyodwyer

Smokeable Cowboy wrote: »

Hey Danny,

First off massive congrats on what you've created. I've been a big fan from Gamespot through Kinda Funny and love your No Clip stuff, keep it up!

Do you think games journalism can grow in Ireland or is emigration an inevitable step that people have to take?

Thanks so much!
I think that it's possible to do it - a domestic voice is always valuable in the media. But there's a pretty low ceiling when it comes to professional growth. To gain influence within the industry you really have to leave. The main reason I left home to live in London was to try and get a job at GameSpot. 
There are YouTubers like JackSepticEye who have done really well working from Ireland, but even he ended up moving to Brighton in the end. I used to do interviews with The Last Word and some other radios hows about gaming issues - so there's certainly a role in print / radio / TV for folks who want to be a gaming correspondent. But do to any journalism you need to be close to the story you're reporting on. Not so much geographically, but culturally. Emigration is a key part of that if you ask me.

dannyodwyer

Adventagious wrote: »

Cheers for stopping by, Danny. Doing great work out there.

You've obviously got a lot of connections in the industry at this stage and we see you popping up everywhere on videos and podcasts, but is there any organisation in particular that you really admire/think is doing cool stuff in the journalism/reporting area?

Related - do you ever see yourself joining up with a bigger organisation again or is the lure of independence too strong?

Any time, it's an honor to be featured!
I mean my love of Giant Bomb knows no bounds. Jeff, Ryan and Vinny are some of the main reasons I ever went into this type of work so I'll always be a huge fan of theirs. I think Jason Schreier and Patrick Klepec do some amazing work - they're some of the onyl true journalists in the field (I don't consider myself one really, I'm more of a video guy but I try). I'm a more a fan of their investigative angles than reactionary news. Every publication has good and bad people, every site has stupid videos alongside good reporting. But I do think Giant Bomb is one of the only consistently brilliant media outlets out there. I try really hard to emulate their consistency.
As for joining up with others - I want to see how far I can grow Noclip. Ideally I'd love for us to be a profitable 4-5 person team with a little more output, and a large rise in quality. I'd like to see us make feature films, Netflix series and all of that, but there is work to be done before we get there. I like owning my own company too much, and corporations are generally not helpful aside from cash investment. Right now we don't need any of that.

LanceStorm

The Irish Cream Danny O' Dwyer!

Danny I was a huge fan of you purely from your appearances on Kinda Funny and loved the freshness of having yourself, Andrea, Andy, Joey & Cool Greg after a tough time for the KF boys and was sorry to see you leave but delighted for you at the same time.

How helpful was it for you to do some (what I would imagine was great fun and non stressful) contract work for them while still spending your core time on Noclip?

Do you think you'll look to do anything similar with your new base in Maryland either locally or Skyping in?

Do you think Gary Whitta can ever really replace you in our hearts and minds on KFGD?

Is Andy's hair pretentious?

How many hours do you have spent on PUBG so far?

dannyodwyer

khaldrogo wrote: »

Would you agree that Rainbow six seige is the best FPS ever?!!!

It's a hell of a lot better than anyone expected!

dannyodwyer

I recently successfully self petitioned and self filed for a green card. I expect to be in the US in the new year. Amy advice for someone looking to break in to the games media industry? In either production or journalism, in Los Angeles?

Congratulations and best of luck with the move!

The games media is notoriously difficult to break into - especially now. There are simply not enough seats and too many people playing musical chairs. For anyone else wondering the "traditional'" online games press is mostly in San Francisco (IGN, GameSpot, PC Gamer, most of Polygon) but the cost of living up there is outrageous and only getting worse. Los Angeles has a lot going for it (as long as you have a car) and generally cheaper than the bay. It also has more variety when it comes to video jobs with YouTube and lots of production companies calling it home. There are some other places dotted around - Rooster Teeth is in Austin, Game Informer is in Minneapolis, Kotaku and Waypoint (VICE Gaming) are in NYC but yea generally it's in California.

I've done a few videos about this that may help (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcFT-77hSPc) but generally you need a portfilio of really good work, you need to get it in front of people's eyes, and you need a plan B. The odds are against you, and you need cash to survive - so don't put all your eggs in the video game basket.

Like any of us who have broken in, you also need a lot of luck. So, best of luck mate.

Asmodean

I always knew you'd make it big kid, ever since the days of the Jammy blaa! Hats off again for making such quality content over ALL the years. I see a lot of personalities in this field try to blend genuine journalism and humour into one palatable package but many fall way off the mark, you always seem to nail the perfect balance while committing to that infectious enthusiasm we've all grown to love. Onwards and upwards my friend, keep up the stellar work!

I guess I have to ask a question too, so mine would be

What would you have considered as a plan B, career wise, if the journalism never took off?

dannyodwyer

Asmodean wrote: »

I always knew you'd make it big kid, ever since the days of the Jammy blaa! Hats off again for making such quality content over ALL the years. I see a lot of personalities in this field try to blend genuine journalism and humour into one palatable package but many fall way off the mark, you always seem to nail the perfect balance while committing to that infectious enthusiasm we've all grown to love. Onwards and upwards my friend, keep up the stellar work!

I guess I have to ask a question too, so mine would be

What would you have considered as a plan B, career wise, if the journalism never took off?

Haha! Wow, there's a blast from the past! The Jammy Blaa was a lot of fun - learning how to create a community around something, and all the work that goes into keeping a message board alive. Waterford was a fun place to grow up mate, at least back then. I think we had a lot going on between the music and social scenes.

Plan B was to keep making websites. I got a job as a web designer in London that paid the bills while I was trying to work on the media stuff. I also tried my hand at making a game or two but that never really stuck. Who knows what I'd be doing now if I didn't get my break. Maybe still web design, maybe streaming - I'll never know I guess. But having a plan B is really important. It's good to have another option so you're not desperate. And too many unforeseen things can get in the way of your goals to ever count on reaching them. I feel the same way about running Noclip. Maybe our funding disappears, maybe there's a global financial crash. You gotta prepare for the worst and make hay when the sun is shining.

Thanks for mentioning The Jammy Blaa - made my day

Pac1Man

Danny, any chance of getting Kevin Vanord on as a special guest? You bounced off each other well during The Lobby segments. It's just not the same since you left!

dannyodwyer

Pac1Man wrote: »

Danny, any chance of getting Kevin Vanord on as a special guest? You bounced off each other well during The Lobby segments. It's just not the same since you left!

I'd love to interview Kevin again - he's going great work in Belgium with Larian Studios. Time will tell I guess!

I must admit my first interaction with you was when I saw your series on the newest doom. I was slightly disappointed to find it wasn't actually the cockney lad Danny Dyer who was reviewing the game. Love the content nonetheless. I'll think of a real question soon :pac:

Pac1Man

dannyodwyer wrote: »

I'd love to interview Kevin again - he's going great work in Belgium with Larian Studios. Time will tell I guess!

I'll look forward to the 'In Bruges' episodes.

dannyodwyer

Deleted User wrote: »

I must admit my first interaction with you was when I saw your series on the newest doom. I was slightly disappointed to find it wasn't actually the cockney lad Danny Dyer who was reviewing the game. Love the content nonetheless. I'll think of a real question soon :pac:

Hah cheers. Every few months I get a random tweet about how I'm a **** actor. They're not wrong.

ERG89

There has been a few stories about an unhappy work environment at CD Projekt Red did you feel anything like that from anyone you spoke to?
Very impersonal to ask but I imagine a lot of people in the game industry feel stress and strain to deliver something as large as the Witcher series.

After doing the excellent NoClip series on DOOM could you do one on the new Wolfenstein games from MachineGames?
Or is the political themes gently touched on in New Colossus putting you off it?

johnny_ultimate

Howdy Danny, appreciate the very fine work you've been doing

I've personally felt that YouTube and the culture that surrounds it has a tendency to steer creators towards quantity over quality. I think it's great to see people like yourself or Mark Brown of Game Maker's Toolkit focusing on the latter, but do you personally feel much pressure - either personally or from external forces - to make tight turnarounds to keep everything ticking over? Or, indeed, do you feel pressure can be a motivating and positive factor?

I love the care you've put into your documentaries, but I think the first time I really encountered you was through your No Man's Sky 'video essay' thing a year and a bit ago - was a really great defence of the game. Any plans to move back into that sort of criticism alongside the more expansive documentary content?

dannyodwyer

ERG89 wrote: »

There has been a few stories about an unhappy work environment at CD Projekt Red did you feel anything like that from anyone you spoke to?
Very impersonal to ask but I imagine a lot of people in the game industry feel stress and strain to deliver something as large as the Witcher series.

After doing the excellent NoClip series on DOOM could you do one on the new Wolfenstein games from MachineGames?
Or is the political themes gently touched on in New Colossus putting you off it?

I've spent some time at that studio and didn't get the impression that you read from some of those posts from the folks I talked to. But you never know. People have their own experiences, and sometimes when they are bad they don't share them. I hazard to take a guess, but if I did, I recon it's a hard working, competitive environment that is too demanding of some people.

As for Machine Games - the reason we wouldn't right now is because we did DOOM. We don't get to take on many projects a year so I try to keep them as varied as possible. We'll do another FPS sometime soon, but Wolfenstien 2 seemed a bit too close to what we did with DOOM. Those devs are amazing though. Interviewed them before, great folks.