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CGB: "I'm retiring" -- CovertGoBlue talks about his (future) retirement, frustrations with Standard and 3-year rotation, and content creation plans

CovertGoBlue talks about his frustrations with the 3-year Standard rotation, and how difficult it has been lately to create Standard content.

Talks about his decaying Twitch audience and plans to move more content in YouTube. He mentions his distress in playing Arena in general, and how he doesn't necessarily want to play a different game mode in Arena.

He's will place more emphasis on Commander content. Optionally will make content elsewhere, something different or new that he is more interested in.

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5 comments

  • (Disclosure, I didn't actually watch this video.)

    This is the second streamer I've heard of moving from Twitch to YouTube recently. Did something happen at one or the other of those sites?

    I watch a lot more on YouTube than I do on Twitch, primarily because I prefer to watch on my own schedule, and it seems like there's a perception that Twitch is for live streams and YouTube is for prerecorded stuff. But there's no reason it has to be like that.

    • He mentions that his Twitch audience has not been growing, and in fact has been dropping off over the years. And the last 12 months in particular he said it's been dropping lower each month. I know Twitch is giving less $ for Twitch Prime soon but that doesn't really explain the drop off in viewers. In my opinion, as a big Twitch-watcher, I think it's their recent advertisement push that has people watching a lot less. It's very difficult, for instance, to channel hop because you're constantly hitting ads before you even see content. This definitely would make growing your audience more difficult.

      I think he also just makes more money on Youtube. He said he just crossed the $1 million total revenue from Youtube line, which roughly puts him at ~$200k/year from YT revenue alone.

  • I’ll admit to being a part of the problem, back when I seriously played for the first time I was big mad about the “short” rotations. Leaving for a bit and seeing what a long rotation actually does has completely changed my perspective. I don’t blame the guy, the proof is in the lack of viewers if nothing else.

    Thoughts on content creators growing increasingly discontent or does his clout allow him to do this? Would a Tarkov “the video” effect happen or is Hasbro just so corporate and tone-deaf nothing can make them listen?

    • At this point I think it would be worse as far as consumer confidence goes if they reverse and shorten standard again. But at the same time, I honestly think they need to if they want to keep it fun, at least on Arena. Arena is just fundamentally not the same as paper games, the fact that you can play so many games on Arena affects things like a meta feeling stale much quicker.

      I honestly don't really know what they can do -- they need to keep printing chase mythics to sell packs, but the shorter rotation meant that fewer people wanted to invest in standard paper cards so they lengthen standard, but a longer standard makes Arena too stale and too frustrating to play. It's arguable if any of this will have the stated effect of increasing paper standard play.

      I think the real solution here is to stop printing insane chase mythics in every set, but they can no longer do that even because they increased the cost of booster boxes so much, there needs to be a compelling reason to buy them at MSRP. If consumers stop buying them at MSRP and WoTC is forced to lower the play booster box price, then I think consumers ultimately win but it will come at some unknown price, either to the teams building the game or the game itself.