The Business: Big Corporate Entertainment No Longer Has A Lock On Tie-Ins

Lueten09 dropped another massive 40K lore video the other day. This is, as usual, pro-level audiobook stuff. If you're a fan, have at it. For the rest of us, skip below.

Lueten09's lore videos, the BattleTech lore Black Pants Legion does, and more like that are evidence that making pro-quality audiobook w/ visual accompanyment (and yes, I say it that way because you don't need the visuals; it's icing on the cake, not part of the cake itself) is no longer prohibitively expensive save in terms of time. This is a big deal, and I'm going to spell it out for you.

• The means to make this stuff is now cheap enough to be affordable--if not free--to common users.
• Which means the skills to use them competently is now widespread (and growing) so learning is easier than ever before.
• The means to distribute them is now easy to acquire, so getting an audience is easier than before.
• The means to hire help to cover skill gaps--Lueten doesn't do that VO work--is easier than before.
• The means to exploit what you create while maintaining full control and ownership now exists.

I am dead-ass serious when I say that Catalyst Game Labs, Games Workshop, et. al., ought to be cutting these lore channels fat checks for doing their marketing for them. This is time spent, as a hobby, putting together professional-grade productions that attract and retain audiences that then go on to spend real money on the corporate property that these channels promote via their hobby-done lore videos.

Maybe you're a writer. Maybe you do comics. Whatever you've created, if you're making a property--regardless of its medium or product category of origin--that has this sort of lore quality attached to it then you really ought to be thinking about making use of those massive notes that otherwise gets made into content for a wiki and then forgotten about.

These lore videos demonstrates that what formerly was the exclusive domain of Big Corporate entertainment is not any longer. As with merchandise and tie-in products, small indie creators can now pursue these options and add more value to their creative output and extend that long tail even longer so that what you produce today still pays you years down the line (and, hopefully, becomes passive income for your heirs).

This means that you no longer need to sell out. You can keep full ownership of what you create and still exploit it to full effect, and that should scare the hell out of Big Corporate if they were at all paying attention- which they aren't.

To appropriate the enemy's language, you now have full access to the means of production. What are you going to do with it?