Posted in: Games, Movies, Recent Updates, Video Games | Tagged: crowdfunding, entertainment, games, Greg Miller, Kinda Funny, Patreon, video games, youtube

Talking To Greg Miller About Leaving IGN, Youtube Ethics And His New Venture: Kinda Funny

If you've been to IGN in that last few years, you've no doubt encountered Greg Miller. He has been a big part of that company's persona for several years now. Whether it was his brash, late night talk show host persona on Up at Noon or the gregarious voice on Podcast Beyond, his input helped define IGN's personality.

This week, he left the company, along with long time co-host Colin Moriarty and video producers Nick Scarpino and Tim Gettys. The four quit to explore their Youtube channel Kinda Funny which has been gaining a respectable audience for a while now.

Normally, I wouldn't be super interested in covering news about a personality in the games media leaving their job, but in this case, this is a really big deal for the wider gaming community. The group are currently supporting themselves on Patreon and it could prove to be a real turning point for games media. Patreon has transformed the way personalities and journalists can be paid, now able to be financed by their audience rather than by a company. Cara Ellison was the first to jump and be successful on the service, Jim Sterling was the first huge name to move to the service and now Kinda Funny have made that jump too.

This follows a huge reshuffle in the games media of late, with a myriad of journalists, hosts and writers all changing places like it was the NBA off season. I wanted to try and figure out why, so I've gone directly to one of the sources.

On Wednesday, I sat down with Greg to talk about this changing landscape, why he left IGN and what he hopes to do with Kinda Funny. We talked for about 40 minutes, in a session where my internet was shorting out constantly and there were 20 second delays between a question and an answer. It was hardly ideal, but there is some really interesting stuff below. I think you will get a kick out of it.

Without further ado, here is what we talked about.

Patrick Dane: Why do you think there is such a reshuffle going on in the games media right now? Is it purely coincidental?

Greg Miller: I think it's coincidental. I was telling people we were getting ready to leave, we were going to start on January 5th or whatever, they were like, "New Year, New Start" and I was like, "is that a thing?" They were like, "Oh yeah, it is totally a thing, people quit their jobs all the time around there." I guess it makes sense. There is just a natural end point to be like, "Right, now I'm going to do this". And you look at everyone who is leaving are names you recognize being associated with the a site. Whether it's Hamza (Aziz, fromerly of Destructoid) or Max (Scovile, former Video host at Destructoid) or it's whoever. Or it's Patrick (Klepek) from Giant Bomb. These are all people who have put the time in to become a personality and then go try something new.

I don't know if there is a problem in the games industry as much as there is anywhere else. People want to hop around and be challenged and invigorated to go to their job. I can speak for myself. As much as I loved IGN right, I was ready for a new challenge and this is definitely it for me

PD: How do you think the games media should interact with Youtube going forward? Both don't seem quite sure what to do with the other one yet.

GM: I mean, for me it's something traditional games media has to figure out or they will die. Right? It's very, very, very reminiscent of when magazines looked at the internet  and IGN and went like "Pfft, whatever. These guys aren't going to do anything, we don't have to worry, we don't have to change course."

And you jump ahead and that is what it is now. The Youtube generation and Youtubers are the 'new media' and the old media is online websites. They are looking at each other in the same way magazines did in the very beginning. So I don't know if it is going to be as dire or as drastic, but you are already are seeing sites fall away right? Even on IGN, you're looking at GameSpy, you're looking at 1Up, you are looking at all these different things that are shutting. You have to figure out the personalty thing, and you have to figure out the new economics of this world. It is easy enough…like you are looking at us right now with Patreon, with Youtube, with band camp, with revenue streams from our t-shirts.

You're seeing how you can jump out and be like, "oh, we can make a go of this. You look at Pewdiepie, you look at Ijustine, you see all these people. We don't have an audience that big, but knowing that we have a fanbase who support us… and what's interesting for us is in particular is the fact that, unless you can think of someone besides now Jim Sterling a little bit, we were the biggest people mainstream who have gone to work independently. The reason this is so different and so interesting now to the rest of the press is the fact that we are doing it in in the inverse. A lot of people come up on Youtube and then jump over to a big site. We are doing it in reverse. We are going to try going that way and see if our community who knew us from IGN will come to support us as we come over here and do this.

PD: How do you feel about Patreon as a platform for games journalists and personalities? Can it actually be helpful for newcomers? What does it really offer the Games media?

GM: For someone who is jumping onto Patreon out of the blue, I think they have to set realistic expectations. It is very much like Kickstarter is now. There are already so many people out there that, you're going to start out small enough to build an audience as you go. The biggest thing for us, as an example, is like, don't rely on Patreon to be your only revenue stream. There are a few internet videos, Colin will come in while I'm editing and he's working on emails or vice versa and then we'll click on what people are saying about us on Youtube and listening to these different streams. When you do that, people think that Patreon is our only revenue model and that is why we are cursed. That is not the point of this right now. Right now, Patreon has helped to bolster us during this move and then hopefully we can build the product that we can get monetized. We will get to be a million subs and that will help, you know what I mean? There are all these different things to keep us going. Right now Patreon is just a short cut. It's the short cut in Mario Kart 8 that helps me get around all the trouble and having a little bit better shot at being number 1.

PD: Do you think Youbtubers should be held to an ethics standard? Does Kinda Funny have a guideline for things they wouldn't be comfortable doing?

GM: No, no, that was the interesting thing. I was very offended with your entire country (I'm UK based) and their Youtube set up when I found out people were getting paid to talk good about Oreos. My Oreo reviews are unbiased. I've never been in the pocket of big Oreo. (laughs)

I mean yeah, that is the big thing right now. That is something interesting that even when I was working at IGN, I thought it was weird that people didn't catch that, right? "Awh, there is this guy who is doing this Let's Play for this game that is not out yet. He's the real gamer and these IGN guys, they are the ones who are paid off for their reviews", I was like, "Dude, do you not think we'd be streaming that game if we got it early". Not to necessarily foul play or anything though.

Colin and I talked about this yesterday on Colin and Greg Live. For us, the ethical standard we are setting for ourselves is just full transparency. I don't even mean it in the full transparency of how IGN is like, there is a wall between editorial and advertising, which is great. Clearly, we don't have that. We're not reviewing products; we are not doing anything like that. For us, we put on the Patreon page, at $3000 you get a month of shoutouts on the show. We say that can be a person, but it can be a company. So if company X comes in and sponsors that for a month on the GameOverGreggy show, we're going to be like, "Of course shout out too company X, they bought it on Patreon, they have this new game coming out, or a new film or you know what I mean".

Someone was asking about our shirts or something. If someone is sponsoring my shirt, which I really wouldn't do, but if they were right, I could joke about it and I would tell you about it. We've be doing integrations on the GameOverGreggy show for a while, it is just the fact that we couldn't talk about nerdy stuff, we weren't getting as much. Not too many people are into what we are doing if you are not a nerd. So a good example lately is we did one for Lynda.com which is this tutorial website, which I had never heard of and I have no experience with. I said that on the show, "introducing Lynda.com", I made a call back to one of our first episodes when we called Portillos and talked to this Linda girl and Nick Scarpino stepped up and said, "no I use it. This is what it is, it's a really cool place." For me, that is really the standard. It's the fact that, if we are going to do something, it has to have a connection to us. I want to be able to tell you something.

Clearly, people on my Youtube channel once in a while and be like, "Oh man, these BarkBox videos, I can't believe you are getting paid so much". I'm like, "Well, first off, I really enjoy BarkBox. That is an awesome idea." Then I'll sit there and explain the revenue model to them like, "BarkBox gives us no money up front. We get money if anyone activates our URL", because then it's a way of showing someone saw this and enjoyed Greg's product and he sold them on it right? I'm not trying to beat anyone over the head with any of this stuff. All of our advertising, we want it to be natural and we want it to fit with us. We don't want it to be all the sudden like, "Great! Now here is a new health food I've been eating." You know what I mean? No. Our guidelines are the same as any where else. We are your best friends and I understand after years and years of doing this, how special that relationship is. I don't have any intention of screwing that up by coming up and getting a quick buck.

PD: When did you decide to leave IGN and how long did it take for the group to come to that decision?

GM: Yeah, for us, it was a slow moving glacier over around two years. You know, I started the GameOverGreggy show when I came back from VidCon, that IGN sent me too (laughs), I came back and I wanted to do Youtube content. I wanted to do this GameOverGreggy Channel. I started it and I had this great idea for a chicken wing show, but that is going to require so much editing that I don't know how to do yet, so I'll start a show of me talking with Colin. Then I'll start with a show of me doing Oreos. As we got going, I sold Colin on the idea. At first he didn't want to do A Conversation with Colin. When we sat down and did it, we were three conversations in and I'll never forget it on the first filming. He is just sitting there in silence and he turns to me while we were resetting cameras, and he says, "I guess I do say crazy stuff" I was like, "Yes, you get it! Thank God!"

Then Nick and Tim were slow over time too, where they were just helping us out because they liked helping us out. They like creating content and being video producers, but they walked in, they filmed and then they left. They just left the cards with me. It was one of those things that slowly over time, especially when we kicked on and started doing the GameOverGreggy show, they were like, "Oh, this is the audience that not only you have, but we have too." They never had that taste because… Colin and I knew Beyond and Up at Noon and all this stuff and what being a public facing personality was, where as they didn't. Once they got a taste of that and they saw how successful we were starting to become, that is when we got the ball rolling on, "Well one day, one day we are going to be able to break away and do this on our own, but everything is great at IGN, so we won't worry too much about that."

Slowly but surely it kept going, it kept going until we re-branded in September/October into becoming Kinda Funny. When we did that it was motivated by it being nearly a year of the GameOverGreggy show and it had all changed. When it was just me editing and coming up with every show, nobody cared that I was the one getting all the credit, but when we started taking it seriously and we started to go to VidCon and we started to do industry things, Nick and Tim would start to talking to someone and were asked if they were on Youtube, they were like, "Yeah! And there is this show we are on!" and they were asked the name they said "It's called GameOverGreggy". People were like, "…are you Greg?" and they'd go, "No, no, no, that is this other guy" It was like they were working for me, when really we were all a team.

That was the thing with the Kinda Funny rebrand. Now we are going to be this wolfpack, we are going to be this force. When we did that and launched the Patreon, it was like, lets get us better cameras, lets get us lights, lets get a better opportunity to do better quality stuff. We launched that night and I'll remember distinctly that Colin was like, "Man, I don't know if this is going to be successful. I wonder if we get $5000." I said, "We are going to get $5000 in the first day." He said, "We are? Wow." Then he walked away and I was like, "Fuck, are we going to get $5000 in the first day?" (laughs) That was the first time I had to think about it. When it came out, it blew up and we got $10,000 in the first 24 hours. That is when we had to take a serious step back and be like, "Well now we are producing all this content, we have to plan a live event, we have to do more shows.

It was like, "We could do this." For a long time we'd been having these conversations at lunch like, "Alright, come up with your number. What number do you have to make out of Kinda Funny to quit IGN?" Not because we hate IGN, but because we are clearly so passionate about this, we are enjoying it so much. It is not fair to give either product less of our time. We were going to IGN and killing ourselves and then coming home exhausted and then killing ourselves to do the GameOver Greggy Show and edit and do all these different things. So when Patreon came, it was like, "Oh, wait a second. The number you are thinking of, we are never going to hit unless we quit. Unless we leave IGN, we are never going to get to the number you are talking about. Otherwise, we will always be the side product.

So that was when that really started going and we started having conversations with IGN about what if we freelanced or what if we did this or that. It was becoming clear that neither of us were happy with the relationship as it stood. We wanted more and they wanted less, and that is totally within their right. I want to make sure I'm very clear on that and they were awesome about everything. But it was getting into a weird situation where even when we were talking about older comics stuff or older movie stuff, they were like, "Well, that is stuff you could do for us. We were like, "well yeah, but we wouldn't. We don't have time here. You don't have time here." It was just like, "you know what, rather than get worse about this, like clearly we are super into this and we are in love with this and we love you guys and we don't want to hurt you." Let's make the next step here.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlakjnrpOW8[/youtube]

PD: What do you hope to see from IGN as they go forward without a lot of core members you left with?

GM: For me, evolving into this thing so there will be new ideas, fresh ideas, fresh perspectives. I came into IGN, an IGN fan and I'm leaving IGN an IGN fan. I'm excited to go to IGN every day now and not know what they are going to be putting up or what they are going to be doing. Now when Brian (Altano) tweets, he kept giving these cryptic tweets this weekend that I know now was him and Max hashing plans for new shows. Oh man! I can't wait to see what you guys are going to come up with and what IGN is going to let you do. I obviously love The Comedy Button. I can't wait to see what you guys are going to do with the resources of IGN.

For us, it is that bitter-sweet thing of we loved the company and we loved being there and now we are leaving, but now new voices get to step up. Colin and I have dominated the PlayStation voice for eight years. I've been on camera; I've been the "Face" (I'm making air quotes you can't see.) I've been the face of IGN for 3 and a half, 4 years. I want to see who is Damon's (Hatfield) second Banana? He has been doing really, really cool stuff with Justin Davis. So, what's next for them? What are Brian and Max going to do? Who is going to step up to these roles now and be right in front of the camera and be awesome.

PD: What is a normal day working at Kinda Funny like so far?

GM: Yeah. I wish I had that answer for you. (laughs) I told Christine (Greg's girlfriend), when we were leading into this. Like we were launching on Monday morning at 9AM. So Sunday night when I was editing to like 1 in the morning or whatever, and making sure it was working, I remember telling her in the morning, "It won't be like this all the time baby. I'm quitting my job so I can sit there and blah blah blah, blah, blah" and it has just been a complete cluster this week. I didn't anticipate… well I did anticipate the tweets and people emailing me saying congratulations. I did anticipate the tweets. We are getting hundreds of people who want to work for us. I did not at any point of time have to think that on day two, that I'd be filling out emails for internships, graphic designers and editors. It's great and I'm totally blown away and I love it, don't get me wrong. But that is taking up bandwidth. I'm doing multiple interviews everyday, which I'm totally in love with, thank you for wanting to talk to us, but I'm excited for two or three weeks from now when it is a normal day.

When we were talking about this, I would say, "Everyday I'm going to wake up and I'm going to have a cup of coffee and I'm going to sit on the back porch and read a comic book or a chapter of a book" but now I'm getting up even earlier than I did with IGN. I go do interviews. I'm getting like 5 hours of sleep, because I'm staying up trying to figure out all the Twitch stuff. It's great. Everything is fantastic, but this is just like, Wow, this is not at all what I thought this was going to be at first. I'm sure we are going to adjust in a little bit and get into a rhythm, but right now it is totally like, Okay, lets keep this going and lets figure this out. It's one of those things you have to get used to going to bed and there being like 13 things I didn't do and that is okay. (laughs) I'll eventually get to them.

PD: What's the plan with trade shows like E3? Do you still intend to cover them as media?

GM: Sure. For us we throw around the term media very loosely. We're a personalty and production company. So, our plan is to go to trade shows for sure. We aren't going to PAX South, more than anything because PAX South didn't look like it was shaping up and worth all the expenses. No offense to PAX South. I'm sure, it will be a great show and it will come together, but when we were talking to developers and we were talking to people going, it was just one of things like, "hmm…". For us, we had no idea how much money we were going to be making off of Patreon and having no steady income. Not that we don't have that going forward, but literally going from the ground floor up in January, I can't right now, put down my credit card in good faith. Everything is going to be peachy keen by the end of January, when I knew it probably would be, but still.

There on out, we will be going to all the big ones. That's our expectation. We are going to PAX East, we are going to MoMo Con, we plan to go to E3 and when you start talking about those, we are excited to go and just be personalities. Now, we'll run the floor and play whatever we want to play. We don't have to make videos there, even though we probably will. You know, a big part of the stuff is Kinda Funny Reacts. Basically the set up is, this just happened and IGN will give you the news for sure,  but then you'll get the video from us that is the commentary. Especially for PlayStation stuff, what Colin and I think of the announcement they just did etc. So at E3 I see us doing a lot of those after the conference and doing stuff like that. Then sitting on stories we come up with and doing them on the Colin and Greg Live Show, doing them at the games cast, stuff like that.

You figure for PAXs, we will go host panels like we usually do with people. Obviously, we've submitted a Kinda Funny panel. I'm going to go there and host some video game panels. The hope for E3 and Comic Con as well is that I can freelance host for anybody. So even if we aren't going to be producing daily content on Kinda Funny, I'd love to go work with IGN and go there and host a live show with Max and Damon, or I'd love to go to GameSpot and do it for them. Whatever. TheWalkingDead.com or something, I'd love to go do that for them. Those are the kinds of opportunities that I can investigate that give me the best of both worlds where we're still there, still interacting with our fans, still host stuff and then make money on the side.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WHkIC15YKU[/youtube]

PD: How much content do you hope to be producing a week when you are at full operation?

GM: Honestly, our whole… it seems kind of funny to say now that we are exploding, but our plan is to do the less is more approach. We want to do less is more for sure. You figure that if you look at what we are promising everybody, each channel isn't getting overwhelmed. I know it is hard because everyone is still trying to adjust to us having three pipelines of content a day, but you figure on Youtube, Kinda Funny, you are getting the breakout from the GameOverGreggy Show. Really, that is your only guaranteed thing. That goes up every day and some days will have a conversation with Colin or Follow the Leader, or an unboxing, or Kinda Funny Reacts. The only thing you are promised on that channel every day is the GameOverGreggy show.

Then on Kinda Funny Games, you are getting the breakout of the Gamescast and for sure Let's Plays. It's only two promised videos but again, if something crazy happens in games, we can do a reacts on it and put it out there.

On Twitch you're promised the Colin and Greg live show at 11 AM and then you get a Lets Play or a stream of something at 2PM. Each one of those sounds like we aren't doing that much, but when you add it up, every day is five pieces of content, let alone the random stuff, like an unboxing of this or the Kevin Smith special. That is when it starts to look insane. You look at our Twitter feeds and we are trying to manage all that. It's something I don't think even we were fully prepared for. Right now, we are in the final stages of getting KindaFunny.com up and running to be just a place where we can drop everything and direct you there and say, you know what? Any time there is a new video, it will be up on KindaFunny.com and be embedded in a blog.

So every day, five pieces of content, at least? It sounds terrible to say, "We want to do less" and then we are putting up five, but all of our stuff is niche and it's targeted. For the people who like Kinda Funny Games, for sure might not like the GameOverGreggy show where we talk about Taylor Swift. That is awesome, that is fine. We want to make sure we are being diverse and not everybody is going to like Follow the Leader. So, right now it's awesome because our fans are so cool, they understand it's a community, they understand how crazy this undertaking is and they are trying to support everything, but as we go, we expect that to fall back a little bit and be like, "Okay, I have a real life. I can only watch how much internet and I'll wait and download this podcast." That is what we want. We don't want to be in everyone's face like we are right now. We just want you to be happy.

PD: Do you hope to move around a little now that you are calling the shots? Maybe trips across seas?

GM: Oh Sure! That was always the thing. People were asking us and me before saying, "Oh man! Come do Podcast Beyond at Eurogamer Expo!" I'd always be like, that is totally up to IGN. They pull the purse strings, they have to decide. Now when people say, "Oh man, bring Kinda Funny to Eurogamer Expo", I'm like, "we're broke I think, if we can get a sponsor, sure." (laughs) What Tim and I always talk about is that it is fun to be able to pull those triggers and make those decisions now. Things that used to take a few days of emailing in a chain, we can now just look at each other and be like "What is this? What is that? Blah, blah, blah" and make it happen. So right now, even though we are bailing water out of the little rowboat we're in because so many people are trying to get our attention, and that is awesome. Again, I don't want you to think that is a bad thing, it is just us trying to adjust to a new life. We always thought that was going to be our benefits going forward, that was going to be one of our strengths.

It was that, and again, I love IGN but at IGN, there are so many moving parts to getting a video live.You know you have the idea, you talk to somebody else about the idea, okay, lets do this idea. You send it into the video production, it's in a pipeline for them. They get it. They approve it or have notes on it. Then they assign a producer and then they assign a cameraman. Then you have to figure out a time and then… you know what I mean? Now it's just like, this just happened. Let's talk about it. We talked about it. Okay. I'll edit it right now during lunch and put it up, and you are done. That is awesome, but it is stressful. As we are finding out, it means super long hours, which I knew coming in and I totally love and I was already working those long hours. It's nice to work those long hours on one job instead of two. That is the big take away right now. I'd rather be up at one in the morning working on one job, rather than two jobs.

PD: Is there an end game? In an ideal future, you get tens of millions viewers on each video. Where would you think about expanding from there?

GM: You know, that's the funny thing. People at the moment are like, "hey, can you look at this" "I'd love to help you" "Can you do this?" "Are you going to move to LA?" Right now, we are so focused on what we consider phase two. Phase one, was about rebranding as Kinda Funny and launching the first Patreon. Phase two is Kinda Funny Games and leaving IGN. Then you start looking at what we think would be phase three, and like, alright. When do we have to get our own studio space or consider moving somewhere and doing something like that.

I mean, looking way down the line to phase twelve or whatever you want to call it, in the future what we talked about is, we are building a brand and we are building a community. That is what is most important to us. If you look at people on the internet going forward, that is the big deal. It's keeping your community engaged and growing with you. So for us, there is going to come a day when Colin, Nick, Tim or me don't want to be in front of the camera. So Kinda Funny isn't GameOverGreggy because it is bigger than one person. It's bigger than four people. We can build along with the community. We can build along with people and then bring in new faces one day to take over if we want to fade back. Inevitably, that is going to happen, where someone wants to move back home or this happens or someone wants to leave the company. Their dreams change just like ours did at IGN. When that happens, that for sure will not be the destruction of the company. That is what we want. We want to have a brand and a community that can go on indefinitely and not be attached to one face or one person.

PD: You can go check out Kinda Funny here. If you dig their stuff, you could always throw them a few bucks every month here.

I really am interested to see how Patreon continues to shape this landscape in the days ahead. It has a big role to play in the future of the way games media is consumed. I'll be keeping a very close eye on the goings on in the future.

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