DF Direct Weekly #100 reúne toda a equipe para seu maior show até agora

Suicide Squad and COD on Switch discussed – plus a big staff AMA.
I still can’t quite believe it, but almost two years after we kicked off a regularly scheduled Digital Foundry show/podcast, we’ve somehow managed to deliver 100 episodes! To celebrate the occasion, I invited all current, serving DF team members and close contributors to join me for our latest show, covering the most recent gaming and technology news, fielding supporter questions – and then carrying straight on into a huge ‘AMA’ section, where backers of the DF Supporter Program could ask us pretty much anything they wanted.
DF Direct Weekly started off with an idea from DF Retro contributor Audi Sorlie to underpin the expansion of our Patreon with some fan service – bespoke content that would bring supporters closer to the team. Producing a weekly show would also solve a perennial problem of ours: the Monday YouTube slot. You see, we’re trying as hard as we can to limit out of office hours working and to enjoy our weekends, all of which means that a gaping hole appears at the beginning of the following week. DF Direct Weekly sounded like an ideal solution to that challenge.
Even so, while there were plenty of good reasons to produce an unscripted show, there were also reservations too. Digital Foundry producing completely unscripted, off-the-cuff editorial could go horribly wrong in the age of the soundbite, especially knowing how much weight our carefully considered opinions carry within our standard content. What if we said something that was wrong, or something that could be misinterpreted the wrong way? We’ve fallen foul of carefully chosen clips spreading around social media and misrepresenting what we actually said, but by and large, it seems to have worked out OK.
The next challenge was figuring out the extent to which our audience actually wanted a weekly show from Digital Foundry. Initial shows delivered an audience of around 50,000 views on YouTube, which trends significantly below the average. That is slightly problematic in that preparing the show and recording it amounts to around 2.5 man days of work spread across the contributions from the participants, plus the editing work required to get the show together. We went into this one wanting to maintain decent production values, so all speakers use DLSRs to record themselves, submitting their individual feeds to the editor.
It’s a lot of investment then, but the return has happened. Over the last couple of years, that circa 50,000-view result has doubled or even tripled depending on the news topic, while thousands more download the audio-only podcast version. Keeping up the momentum has also been challenging in weeks where they has been no real news of note – it can happen! In these scenarios, we’ve dictated the agenda ourselves, whether it’s the tackling the topic of whether next-gen has actually happened yet, or how much of a lifespan the Nintendo Switch has based on the quality of its most recent third-party titles.
As for DF Direct Weekly #100, there’s genuine, palpable disappointment with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, continuing bafflement over how Sony is marketing PlayStation VR2, but some lower profile, intriguing games to discuss from last week’s State of Play. Myself, John Linneman, Alex Battaglia and Audi Sorlie also mull over the fallout from last week’s Microsoft press briefing on its Activision-Blizzard acquisition, while we also look forward to the OG Half-Life path-traced mod.
The second part of the show brings our core team together for a gigantic ‘AMA’, where DF supporters had the opportunity to pose whatever off-topic questions they had about the team. We received well over 100 of these, and managed to answer about 20 of them in the show, which hopefully reveals a bit more about what it’s like behind the scenes.
The truth is, interacting with our audience via the DF Supporter Program has been enormously rewarding with big mental health benefits to a team that – quite frankly – has been battered for years on social media. It’s not just about DF Direct Weekly either: our Discord really is a powerfully positive, collaborative place to be and if you are a member of our Patreon, I highly recommend checking it out. But wherever you watch or listen to DF Direct Weekly, I hope you enjoy it – and as the chapter listing below demonstrates, there’s certainly plenty of it in this 100th episode!
Digital Foundry specialises in technical analysis of gaming hardware and software, using state-of-the-art capture systems and bespoke software to show you how well games and hardware run, visualising precisely what they’re capable of. In order to show you what 4K gaming actually looks like we needed to build our own platform to supply high quality 4K video for offline viewing. So we did.
Our videos are multi-gigabyte files and we’ve chosen a high quality provider to ensure fast downloads. However, that bandwidth isn’t free and so we charge a small monthly subscription fee of £4.50. We think it’s a small price to pay for unlimited access to top-tier quality encodes of our content. Thank you.
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Richard Leadbetter
Technology Editor, Digital Foundry
Rich has been a games journalist since the days of 16-bit and specialises in technical analysis. He’s commonly known around Eurogamer as the Blacksmith of the Future.
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