Cane and Rinse announces its desire to make twice the amount of podcasts from 2018 with the support of its incredible listeners and community
Become a Cane and Rinse patron here: https://www.patreon.com/caneandrinse
Hello everybody, Leon here. Welcome to a special Cane and Rinse announcement.
Looking back: Cane and Rinse 2011-2017
First of all, I want to tell you that making Cane and Rinse has easily been the most satisfying, rewarding and – dare I say it – successful thing I’ve done with my life so far.
With an extraordinary amount of (entirely essential) support from my friends, the incredible Cane and Rinse team, we have produced something in the region of 700 hours of, I think, mostly high quality podcasting over the past five and a half years or so.
In short, the whole endeavour is something of which I am extremely proud.
In fact, after 268 episodes of Cane and Rinse and 93 of Sound of Play (at the time of writing) and counting, far from feeling like we’ve exhausted the formats – or our passion for them – we only want to keep going and make more.
The challenge
One of our – and your – main frustrations is that at 50 shows per year, it’s going to take us forever, or many decades at least, to get around to covering some of the myriad deserving games that you (and we) really want us to dissect and discuss.
The barrier we have to making more shows than we currently do is that for each two hour episode of the show that you hear, we put in something like around 30 person/woman/man hours – and that is of course without including the playing and completing of the game (or sometimes games) in question.
These are largely happy hours for us of course, but real life hours nonetheless.
Patreon so far
Since early 2016 our amazing patrons have been kindly donating around $300 (or <> £235) per month.
This generosity has meant that all of our costs for web hosting, domain registration, audio software (Adobe suite) and hardware (decent desktop microphones for regular contributors) have been covered, as well as various other sundries.
This has been a fantastic help, and we cannot thank our ‘early adopter’ patrons enough.
Especially as – up to now – we have offered nothing ‘extra’ in return.*
*Unless you count the now weekly, previously fortnightly Sound of Play!
Our proposition and target
What we want to propose is that if we can hit and maintain a target ahead of preparing next year’s run of shows, we will be able to commit to making 100 issues of the Cane and Rinse podcast from 2018 (Volume 7).
Currently less than one percent of the Cane and Rinse listenership donates to the Patreon.
Our ambition is that by November 2017 we can increase that around tenfold and hit a target of $3000 per month.
What we ask of you is to support us with whatever you can spare and feel is appropriate for what you get in return, with the minimum being just $1 (equivalent to 78 pence / 0.90 of a € or thereabouts based on current exchange rates).
That’s over 20 hours of entertainment a month for something like the cost of a single Mars bar.
One third the price of a cup of high street coffee per month, in return for five hours of Cane and Rinse and Sound of Play every week.
That works out at 3.85 pence per hour of podcast, or 6.41p per podcast – and that’s not even including any extra interviews or bonus shows.
Alternatively, if you happen to be an eccentric millionaire superfan, feel free to bankroll the entire project … (!)
Clarity and transparency
It is important to understand that the extra money raised will – in the form of a very modest salary for each of us – support me (as main podcast presenter/host, researcher and identifier/recruiter of panellists), along with Jay who will be responsible for the lion’s share of audio editing as well as continuing to run and maintain the website, and producing all those individual episode-specific pieces of art you see for every new edition of both Cane and Rinse and Sound of Play – in allowing us to commit fully to Cane and Rinse.
If we were independently wealthy, we would absolutely carry on doing it all for nowt but the love, but our partners seem to think we should make some actual contribution towards the household bills and that.
The infamous CaR long-list
We currently have almost one and a half thousand titles on our ‘long-list’ of suggested and requested games – your donations would allow us to undertake that exciting but Herculean task at twice the pace.
For example, just some of the wonderful game series’ that we have yet to even approach for the show but would love to have the opportunity to cover include…
Resident Evil, Metroid, The Elder Scrolls, Advance Wars, Onimusha, Dragon Quest, Command & Conquer, Dead Rising, EDF, F-Zero, Far-Cry, Forza, Gran Turismo, Gradius, Kingdom Hearts, Lego, Mario & Luigi RPG, Paper Mario, Metal Slug, Monster Hunter, Panzer Dragoon, PilotWings, Pokemon, Project Zero, STALKER, Civilization, Sonic the Hedgehog, SoulCalibur, Tekken, Virtua Fighter, Wario Land, WipEout, Worms, Xenoblade and Yakuza – and even that’s betting without the many and varied individual titles from all genres, platforms and eras which make for some of our most interesting, personal and popular shows.
So many amazing games!
Extras
We will also continue to make extra interview podcasts with developers and other persons of interest as and when the opportunity presents itself, and hopefully the extra freedom a more focused commitment to Cane and Rinse from myself and Jay, would afford more flexibility to pursue these.
Ambition
I am aware that seeking to increase contributions to the Cane and Rinse cause by a factor of ten sounds ambitious, but we have six months – until November 2017 – and we know how much you enjoy and appreciate what we do from the brilliant feedback that you give us.
To offer some perspective, Cane and Rinse is now one of very few amateur, independent shows that is pretty much a fixture in the upper echelons of the iTunes videogame podcast charts.
In footballing terms we’re attempting to compete in the Premier League while operating on a part-time League Two budget.
So far we have consciously resisted other forms of income, such as sponsorship and advertising on the podcasts and the website – and with your help we would much prefer to keep it that way and remain funded by you – our listeners and the community.
Appeal
Remember, if enough of you respond to this appeal, you need only to commit as little as a buck per month (although – it goes without saying – more than that will be very gratefully received and make it far more likely that we achieve our goal) for five hours of Cane and Rinse and Sound of Play goodness every week!
Become a Cane and Rinse patron here: https://www.patreon.com/caneandrinse
On behalf of myself and the Cane and Rinse team, thank you for reading and for your support.
Podcast: Download (Duration: 14:16 — 13.3MB)
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Hi there, I am a patreon funder already – I happily fund $10 a month at the moment – a contribution I began when you announced the Zelda review series. Looking for a 10x jump in funding over six months is a worthy goal, and I congratulate you for the ambition. From a single acorn does a might oak grow, and all that.
C&R has been one of my favourite gaming podcasts for the past few years. I wonder if you’d be open to a few suggestions that would perhaps make it even better. As a regular listener, I find that the structure of the shows can vary from presenter to presenter, and I think a more consistent structure would really help regular listeners like me to have a stronger sense of what parts of a review are likely to follow, and broadly when.
In particular, I would really appreciate it if you could include a précis for each game you review, perhaps near the beginning to tee things up. I find my biggest challenge with games I’ve played is remembering what actually happens in many of them — what is the story arc, the narrative structure, the principal acts involved. I think giving that context for each game at the outset would also be useful context for everything that follows.
While you might not always discuss music, critical characters, art style or final bosses and so on for every game (especially since not every game features all of those), creating context with a synopsis of the story (where there is one) for every review will help listeners like me enjoy the rest of the discussion more, I think. Also an additional structure it would help if you bring in more reviewers, which I imagine you would do if you double the amount of games discussed.
Think kermode setting up a film review for the kermode & mayo film review, for example. That kind of thing.
Anyways, I’d be more than happy increase what I contribute, and I’ve been thinking of that for a while. I’ve also been thinking of sharing those views at the same time, so there you go. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.
Cheers
Hi Dave,
Thank you for your continued patronage and constructive feedback.
You make a good point re: plot synopses. We deliberately moved away from narrative-related matters in a lot of shows as we were getting bogged down and felt we were wasting too much time on story when a lot of people wouldn’t be that interested. However, we may have moved a little too far from discussing narrative in some cases and so we’ll endeavour to make sure not to gloss over story too much (where relevant).
As regards to the different hosts. We do all adhere to the same basic template and format (you’d see if I could make our show-notes public), however different games and genres may lead us down different paths so we try not to be overly rigid in that aspect.
Thanks again, and keep on enjoying the show.
Good stuff, thanks Leon. It’s great to see the show continuing to evolve, and I appreciate you taking the comments constructively. The whole presenting team is definitely doing good work.
Maybe to help drive the 10x stretch, you could add some interim tiers.
Happy to raise my contribution in the meantime.
Thanks Dave – we are considering interim goals so keep an eye open.
Leon