Crowdfunding $22,000 a Month, He Made Seven Game Documentaries in a Year | 100 People With Ideas

"I'm not doing anything nobody has done before. If Noclip has shown the world anything, it's that you can talk to developers about their games and have genuinely great conversations."

Until he announced the crowdfunding campaign for his documentaries, Danny O'Dwyer had no idea how many people would care about films on how games get made.

In the end, his documentaries on DOOM and Final Fantasy XIV drew 1.55 million and 490,000 views on YouTube — comparable to the 1 million views for the official documentary on the making of The Last of Us, a game with an intensely devoted following.

O'Dwyer spent nearly five years interviewing and reporting for GameSpot, a games-industry outlet built on news and information. His idea for game documentaries came out of a video series he and his colleagues tried there the year before, digging deeper into game history and development; the Overwatch series ended up with more than 1.2 million views on YouTube. "People told me then that I should be doing more of that kind of thing," O'Dwyer told QDaily.

In fact, the Heroes of Overwatch video report O'Dwyer made at GameSpot already looked a lot like his later work. The hour-long The Story of Overwatch covered the failure of Blizzard Entertainment's Titan project, the games that inspired it, such as Team Fortress, and the 21 heroes in Overwatch. But it was only a resemblance: the game hadn't shipped yet, and the development team didn't go far into how it was made. Once he saw that he couldn't push any further while staying at GameSpot, O'Dwyer quit. "I joined GameSpot because I wanted to change the way people talk about games."

In September 2016, three days after leaving GameSpot, O'Dwyer launched a crowdfunding campaign under the name of his new company, Noclip, and announced that he was going to start making game documentaries.

It wasn't that no one had made game documentaries before.

The ones you can find today fall into roughly two kinds. First, documentaries made by game companies themselves — the official The Last of Us film, for instance, which Sony's studio Naughty Dog commissioned from the San Francisco media company AREA 5, in which Naughty Dog staff walk through the making of the game in detail. These are not badly made, but their "official" status makes them feel like promotional films.

The second kind is the feature-length documentary with games as its subject. The best known of them are no different from documentaries about anything else: most take a long time to shoot, cost a lot, and run over 40 minutes. Indie Game: The Movie, which toured theaters across the US and won the Best Editing Award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, is one. The nearly two-hour film followed the development and release of three indie games for more than a year and shot over 300 hours of footage.

What O'Dwyer wanted to make, he said, were standalone films that were "high-quality, but not so high-quality that they'd take months or even years to finish." That ruled out complicated productions, and certainly the kind that swallow huge budgets.

His plan was to find the core members of each game's development team and talk with them about the whole arc — greenlighting the project, development, launch, live operations. Each game's documentary would be split into several short films, each about 30 minutes long.

This wasn't hard for him; what he had built up at GameSpot helped him "get his foot in the door." Three days after posting the crowdfunding video, O'Dwyer — long active in games media and with a following of his own — got Psyonix, the studio behind the indie game Rocket League, to agree to an interview. He and cinematographer Jeremy Jayne then spent a single day filming the company's CEO and three team members, and six weeks later Noclip released two finished films running about an hour in total.

The Story of Rocket League trailer

After that, Noclip — O'Dwyer as the only full-time employee, Jayne working part-time — kept up that pace, releasing a new documentary series every month.

"It's hard to convince people to pay for documentaries like this," O'Dwyer thought at first. Far more people backed the model than he expected. Before he started raising money he guessed he might get about 1,000 backers; a day after the crowdfunding video went up he had 3,500, pledging roughly $5,000 a month. After the DOOM documentary came out last December, Noclip's backer count jumped by about another 500.

The number of backers, and how much they give, decide Noclip's fate.

Because he had no idea how long Noclip would last as a project, O'Dwyer chose Patreon rather than another platform. Patreon's funding model differs from Kickstarter's: most backers don't hand the creator a lump sum, they pledge a set amount every month. Pledge $5 a month to Noclip and you get the rewards reserved for $5 backers every month. You can also pledge for a single month — Patreon lets backers cancel or change their pledge at any time.

Which means that to keep Noclip running as a company, O'Dwyer has to produce enough every month to hold on to his backers. To buy better equipment or shoot more abroad, he needs more backers, or existing backers willing to pay more each month.

That is the direct reason Noclip's videos run about 30 minutes. O'Dwyer says the short length has something to do with today's shorter attention spans, but more to do with the edit: from the same footage, cutting one 90-minute video is far harder and slower than cutting three 30-minute ones. "You have to be much more deliberate when you edit."

"Made for the backers," the phrase O'Dwyer used in the first Q&A video he posted for supporters, comes close to the core of how he makes his films. Every finished Noclip documentary is free to watch on YouTube; O'Dwyer says a high view count makes him happy, but he doesn't put much weight on those numbers. His backers are the audience he actually has to think about.

What's odd, O'Dwyer says, is that while his inbox and Twitter replies are stuffed with suggestions from all kinds of people, requests from his own backers are the rarest of all. He has never run a poll on Patreon; every time he has asked backers there what game they'd like him to cover, the comments come back the same: "Just make what you love," "tell a story you think is cool."

O'Dwyer reads that as trust. "I don't think they're pledging for the videos — the videos are free. I think they believe in the idea more, and want to see it keep going."

His criteria for picking games are simple: whether the development team is interesting, and whether it overlaps with what Noclip has covered recently. After telling the stories of several AAA games in a row, O'Dwyer will pick an indie one next.

The first five games Noclip covered were all games O'Dwyer loved himself — he knew the games, their teams, and the stories around them well.

Final Fantasy XIV was the one exception, a game he had never played and knew nothing about. He got interested in the subject after two Final Fantasy XIV fans told him how it had gone from a critically panned failure to the world's second most popular MMO (massively multiplayer online role-playing game), and after the PR team at its developer, SE (Square Enix), came to him directly. After playing Final Fantasy XIV for a month, O'Dwyer decided to build a documentary around it.

Unlike in his uncertain early days, O'Dwyer now has no trouble finding subjects to film. Game companies like SE keep coming to him, especially the large ones with PR or marketing teams. It's the small indie studios — few staff, little money or time for publicity — that he has to approach himself.

The advantage of covering well-known, best-selling games is obvious: these games have huge fan bases, and Noclip's backers have played them or at least heard of their names and content, so plenty of people will be glad to see a documentary about them.

The drawback is just as obvious: plenty of outlets have covered them already. O'Dwyer's answer is to get game companies to talk about things they have never talked about. The DOOM documentary, for instance, included footage from DOOM 4; before that, no one outside id Software had ever seen this unreleased game. "I sat at my computer, hit play, and thought about how I was the only person outside the company who had ever seen this thing they made eight years ago — something that might never have been seen by anyone again."

O'Dwyer also tries to come at the games players know best from angles few others raise. "Sometimes we need to cover topics people aren't interested in, and work to make them interesting."

Part of the documentary on The Witcher 3 is CD Projekt's localization team explaining how they delivered subtitles in 15 languages and voice acting in 7 to players around the world, and how they tried to make players feel the game had been made in their own language.

That was a subject O'Dwyer proposed to CD Projekt himself. A player who has spent years talking with others in the gaming community, he knew Western players might not find it that interesting, but he believed players in Asia and other places where English isn't the first language would. The finished film did well: 85,000 views on YouTube.

As O'Dwyer sees it, game companies agree to be filmed — and sometimes ask to be — because Noclip lets them "tell the story from their point of view, not just a reporter's." Leaving GameSpot made that easier to offer.

In a Noclip interview, members of the development team are usually somewhere familiar — their own office, the company cafeteria — and Noclip is two people, one camera, and simple lighting. O'Dwyer says he asks questions slowly, and spends the first twenty minutes on everyday things, like what games the crew play, so that they "talk like normal human beings."

O'Dwyer spent nearly ten years in web development before he entered games media, which means he understands the relatively dry technical side of game development better than most of his peers. That is how he gets technical staff — people who may never have been interviewed — to tell their stories. "People don't want to talk to developers, because they're boring, the conversation isn't very interesting, and it takes too long."

A press interview is a tenser setting; the extreme case is probably the trade show. "When you're on a stage at E3, you feel like you need to be selling your game." Companies talking to games media are usually in the middle of promoting a new release, so they use the chance to push the game's selling points rather than get into the finer details of how it was built.

Another advantage O'Dwyer likes to stress is Noclip's independence. He says Noclip takes no sponsorship from any company and pays the full cost of every shoot itself. Even the translator for the SE interview was one he hired, not one SE provided. Noclip also takes no advertising revenue from YouTube.

O'Dwyer once wrote a nearly thousand-word post on the crowdfunding platform Patreon explaining why Noclip doesn't run ads. Working this way spares him a lot of time and effort clearing the rights to the games in his films. But the most important thing, he says, is the creative freedom: it lets him care about the quality of the documentaries instead of chasing clicks the way games media does. "That level of creative freedom will lead to better work and happier creators."

Even now, O'Dwyer won't say he is running a business. Patreon is his main source of income; these days he takes in about $22,000 a month in pledges, out of which come a 5% platform fee and 14% in taxes. Beyond that, his only extra income is $25 T-shirts. Production costs vary with location and length: a documentary shot inside the US runs a little over $10,000, an international shoot around $50,000.

For O'Dwyer, about $20,000 a month is already enough to keep Noclip's work at a certain quality, and even enough to try hiring someone to take on editing, the part of the process he finds hardest. In his plan, Noclip's ideal shape is a small independent company of four or five people, fast but not flooding out documentaries every month, and still built on Patreon.

Still, O'Dwyer isn't sure how long Noclip will last as a project, or whether it will be his long-term work; he says he can't plan that far ahead. He isn't worried about losing Patreon backers, because he can adjust what a film costs as Patreon income changes. If shooting abroad costs four times as much as shooting in the US, he can simply drop game companies in other countries.

What worries him more is that Noclip's growth is bounded by his own field of vision. "I worry about stagnating. I'm 31 now, and I worry I'll keep making the same video," he said — which is why he's trying new subjects, such as interviewing communities of players.

Noclip the company is basically an expression of O'Dwyer's own taste. Its name is the noclip command that first-person shooter players know, the one that lets you walk through walls, and most of the games he covers are ones he likes himself. He hopes that hiring new people will keep him from staying inside his own world, so he can keep making new things.

Noclip is only a little over a year old, but it has already left a mark on games media. IGN has started making similar videos, and the game-documentary team Gameumentary named Noclip's influence outright on their Kickstarter page: "We'd always wanted to make documentaries about games, but didn't know if there would be an audience. Then Danny O'Dwyer started Noclip, and we saw the community respond very positively to O'Dwyer's focus on real games journalism."

"I didn't invent the format of interviewing game developers. I'm not doing anything nobody has done before. If Noclip has shown the world anything, it's that you can talk to developers about their games and have genuinely great conversations."

Images courtesy of Noclip