Newsletter, September 2018

Hi, my dear patron!

How have you been? We've been busy. We are finishing up our first
historical battle animated video, the Battle of Midway. It is to be
released this Friday. The concept is to cover all the main points of
the battle itself, including various tactical moments, without
going too much into the broader picture, as we believe there are many
videos already covering that. So it's not so much an animated
documentary but more of a rundown of the
battle itself. If you've somehow missed out on reading about it and
would prefer to watch a video, this one is for you. :)

Then we have the August poll winner. US versus Turkey. It should be
released on 5th of October. Given how US is obviously more powerful,
we've constructed the scenario in such a way that US is not allowed to
use other countries for staging areas for a land invasion. Of course,
not giving US any overseas bases would mean scenario would be quite
dull, so US will be able to operate from most of the existing bases it
has in the neighborhood. The video will include both the air war and
ground war component, though.

Two weeks after that video we are prepping France vs Italy. A
classical "vs" scenario, where two sides will fight over control of
Mediterranean as well as fight over the Alps.

Oh, and as for that blog of ours, https://binkovsbattlegrounds.blogspot.com/
it's already been put on a hiatus. That's why there's been just one
week of new posts on it. The idea was to have short, daily news. But
we realized we're not good at doing just short news. We always write
more, research more. And then each of those blog posts takes an hour
to make. Which is an hour less to make videos. So that's definitely
not sustainable. We will either have to resort to simpler news
reporting, or somehow get someone else to upkeep the blog for us.
Ideally, the blog should be moved to our website one day, but various
technical difficulties mean we don't know when that might happen.

Now about that video poll. As you might have noticed, our Iran vs
Israel forces comparison video had a poll asking what sort of Binkov's
video game would you want to play. So, does it mean we're making a
video game? Not quite. We got a lot of responses, which is great. And
that's exactly the purpose of the poll. We need lots of responses so
we can continue our negotiations with some game producers, that we've
already been having. If we can show that a game would have enough of
built-in support, enough of a fan base, then maybe the producer might
be persuaded to actually finance or (more probably) partly finance a
game.

Why even make a game? Well, we've been brought up on strategy games.
We are pretty sure we know how to design one. One of our core team
members is actually a video game developer. Well, he was, before he
quit and started working for Binkov. But we still can't actually code
and make the game ourselves. Not only would that require time we don't
have, as our priority is to continue making videos, but assembling a
game developer team and have it make a game is pretty darn expensive.
It varies from a country to country due to wage differences, but lets
just say a 4 member team might hope to make a game within two years
for something like 150-200 thousand dollars. That's absolutely way out
of our budget, as Binkov gross revenue was something like $30
thousand last year, so finding a producer/developer is a must.

Anyway, enough about that. We'll keep you posted on new videos in the
next newsletter. Until then…

Salutations!

Commissar Binkov