Ever since Brendon, John, and I started our podcast about portable gaming – NPC: Next Portable Console – last year, I knew I’d found something special. It’s not just that the three of us are obsessed with handhelds and portable consoles; it’s that we work well together, and we’re having so much fun doing the show every two weeks. Who wouldn’t want to do even more with a project they love?
So today, we’re announcing some big changes to NPC:
- We’re taking the regular show weekly, for free, for everyone!
- We’re introducing NPC XL, a members-only version of NPC with extra content, available exclusively through our new Patreon for $5/month.
- NPC is getting its own YouTube channel. With an expansion of the show, it made sense to let it grow beyond the MacStories YouTube channel.
- NPC is joining the (awesome) TWG Discord server with a dedicated channel for community feedback and participation.
You can find our Patreon here, and we also dropped a surprise episode of NPC today announcing the expansion of the show:
Now, allow me to spend a few more words on why we’re doing this and what you can expect from becoming a patron of NPC XL.
NPC XL: Deeper Topics, Just for Patrons
It’s no secret that the ad market has been terrible for independent creators like us over the past year or so. Thus, we’ve decided to follow the same approach that has worked pretty well for Club MacStories for the past decade:
We’re going to work hard to provide listeners with extra content every week, and you can support us directly for doing so.
We have a proven track record of making this model work on a weekly basis with no interruptions. Since we launched Club MacStories in September 2015, we’ve delivered over 450 weekly newsletters and 110 monthly ones. With NPC XL, we’re going to follow the same approach: we’ll produce a separate version of the show every week, and we’ll charge for it.
I’m a firm believer in the idea that – now more than ever – it’s essential to support your favorite creators whenever possible. At the same time, I know that in an increasingly competitive market filled with subscriptions, AI-generated “blogs” and “podcasts”, and hundreds of newsletters, we have to earn people’s trust, attention, and financial contribution. That’s why we’ve been planning NPC XL for months, and I think we’ve landed on something special that will be fun and useful for everyone involved.
Besides going weekly, the NPC you know and love is not going to change. Each week, we’ll have our usual news recaps to make sense of the ever-changing handheld world, mini segments, and topics. The show will come out weekly on Tuesdays and be delivered both as a traditional podcast and a video on YouTube.
For NPC XL, we’ll record a special segment or deep dive about a particular topic to be released alongside the “regular” NPC episode. NPC XL will be a separate podcast feed with separate patron-only videos. Think of it as an addendum to NPC: extra content with a business model that – with your contribution – will allow us to research more in-depth topics and tinker with even more devices.
For the debut episode of NPC XL, we’ve prepared a deep dive into the magical world of PSP hardware with a historical PSP retrospective. Researching this topic has been a blast, and I can’t wait for people to listen to it. Looking ahead at the next few months of NPC XL, we have a wide variety of special patron-only topics already in the works, and I’m very excited to get to work on these.
If you’ve followed the evolution of NPC and the crazy things we like to do for this show, I think you can get an idea of what to expect. After all, we’re the same people who had a custom eGPU made and shipped from Las Vegas to Rome, acquired a handful of PSPs twenty years after the console’s release, put a cage on a Legion Go, and so forth. Now, you get a chance to actively contribute to this insanity.
See You on Patreon
I’m thrilled to begin this new adventure with John and Brendon. Working in the gaming industry was a childhood dream of mine, and although my life path took me in a different direction with MacStories, I feel like a part of that dream is now coming true with NPC XL.
We’re doing this. I hope you’ll join us for the ride.
