The door is now closing on “Season of the Evolution”, the first full season of PHTM 23′ and one that dragged on a lot longer than originally intended. It’s been a rather enjoyable past several months getting back into the swing of things more frequently; streams, youtube videos, returning to tournament organizing, and even FINALLY trying my hand at the whole short-form content thing that seems to be the wave nowadays.
With that said, with this new upcoming season, “Season of the Ascension”, much will remain the same; while also adding some necessary changes to a few of the content areas which PHTM 23′ seeks to provide. I promise I will keep things super brief this time, as I hate for these to be super lengthy, so lets just jump right into it.
Tournaments
I think the first obvious change I need to touch on is when it comes to the PHTM 23′ tournament structure going forward, at least for Season of the Ascension. This previous season, Season of the Evolution, I noticed that interest in online fighting game events has dwindled much more so when compared to last year; perhaps this is simply due to oversaturation of events, but regardless the low attendance for pretty much every event I both ran and attempted to run this past season was pretty telling that changes will have to be made going forward. This first main goal being branching out of the Fighting Game genre. With the start of Season 2 PHTM 23′ events, I will be putting my primary focus into organizing events for titles of other genres, while most likely keeping fighting game events on rotation for a more bi-weekly or even monthly basis. This obviously means that tournaments will be a bit more in-frequent that last season, which honestly, is good for me personally since I would like to find time to begin competing again myself. It’s a tricky balance that I’m still figuring out, but I feel since this opportunity calls for a bit of a restructuring, now is a better time than ever to re-attempt to balance both.
As also decided mid-way through Season of the Evolution, I will no longer be doing separate PR’s for each game we run events for as part of our official lineup. What is more likely to happen going forward is that one or two games will be selected per season for having PR’s, with those titles rotating out of the lineup during the following season, essentially putting them on “off-season”, to make room for another potential one or two titles to receive PR’s of their own; however, there is also the possibility of a season having no PR, entirely, it really depends on the title and the situation.
That’s pretty much it on tournament updates! There will of course be more special “one-off” tournament events taking place this upcoming season, similar to the “Showdown @ Sunset” 3rd Strike Fightcade event this past September; so please stay tuned for future updates!
The G-SYNCH Podcast Season 1
Originally planned for this Summer, G-SYNCH will FINALLY be starting back up again with Episode 1, Season 1 – of the podcast. It’s been really tricky to not only decide what sort of direction I wanted to take things in as I transition from the pod being an “audio format only” release, to now a video (and eventually live) format style, but as things will still sort of be built as I operate it, I have a much better idea now what I want the show to look like and I’m a bit glad I did decide to hold off on things until now for several reasons. The first of which is that I’ve been able to make some subtle, yet long over-due background changes to my room, which is where I film, while also finally securing a much better internet situation so I can assure everything runs smoothly when the show goes on. It’s going to be a refreshing and great first episode back! I look forward to opening the door for all those ears that are interested as G-SYNCH Season 1 will run from October 27th – December 22nd, 2023.
Livestreams Update
As a brief update for the streaming side of things, I think it’s important to note that I’ll once again be “attempting” the whole full-time stream schedule thing this Autumn-Winter season. Obviously things can change due to work hours, potentially picking up a new and or second job, as well as balancing between attending events and other day-to-day project tasks and responsibilities. This time around, though, I’m pretty confident and even slightly desperate, to keep up with the 40hrs streamed per-week bare minimum, as a way to not only put my channel out their more frequently, but to also get in more practice time for titles I wish to keep in, as well as catching up a bit more quickly on my list of play-throughs that are long over-due and can also be used as alternative forms of YouTube content and short-form content.
Lastly, I will also likely be giving simulcasting a shot again, as Twitch recently announced today that they are now allowing it as long as Twitch chat is it’s own separate entity when displayed on a stream. This obviously comes at pretty perfect timing as my internet is in the process of being upgraded, and while be upload speeds won’t be anything amazing, I should be able to output to around 3 platforms simultaneously whilst delivering decent quality between the three of them. The platforms will most likely be Twitch, YouTube, and Kick – but as of now I’ve made no definitive decisions on where I will be streaming to (aside from Twitch) assuming I do begin simulcasting this season.
And that about wraps it all up for “Season of the Ascension” updates. As said before, I really hope this season can be a more all-around, productive season, compared to the last. There were a few things from last season that never came to fruition that I still aim to integrate at some point during Year of the Dark, whether it be this new season, or the next. Either way, there is much in this update that will be taking place that I left out that’s on the roadmap, while other things will be a bit of a surprise I hope. I suppose this gives me more of an excuse to do even more smaller updates throughout the season, who knows.
Until next time, though, thank you for your energy, and I’ll see you all in the dark.