Above: Studio MDHR’s Maja Moldenhauer accepts award for best animation at DICE Awards.
Chobot: See, this is why we make a good team.
Miller: It’s what I deal in every day. Textbook, yeah, we’re influencers, but I think we all think of each other differently. I think of myself as, for any one of my audience members, I’m their best friend. I’m just telling them about what I’m playing, what I’m doing, this adventure I’m on, in the same I would tell a kid I grew up with.
Miller: Me too. I kind of just approach Twitter or Instagram as, “Hey, this is a cool thing I like for whatever reason. You can like it or not. That’s totally fine with me.”
GamesBeat: Something different from journalists or entertainers?
Miller: Oh, yeah.
Chobot: I don’t consider myself a journalist, and I haven’t for a long time, because I’m not one. I’m a host. I don’t really—if I give out, for lack of a better phrase, a “gamer score” or an opinion on a game, that’s just my personal opinion because that’s how I approach it. But no, I’ve never really considered myself a journalist. I think maybe I did when I first started, back in 2006, because I didn’t know any better. That was kind of what I was going for. But once I shifted gears and did more on-camera work and made that my career—at this point, yeah, I’m an entertainer.
Miller: That was a big thing from me. I went and got a journalism degree and worked at a newspaper knowing that I was trying to get into Gamespot, IGN, EGM at the time. I started, definitely, with that bedrock foundation of what I was doing. But that first month of IGN was like, “Whoa, this isn’t what I was taught. This isn’t how this and that worked.” It gave me great ethics. It saw me go from a games journalist to a games critic to then a games personality. I think of myself as a personality now.
GamesBeat: The category just seems solid now. There’s lots of influencers all over the place, very established. It has its own rules. That’s a good thing, it seems like.
Chobot: There are more ways to reach an audience.
Miller: It’s just like games journalism, games media, enthusiast press. Those rules have become more solidified. You know a bit more. That’s why, when it is like, “Aw man, Activision paid IGN off to screw this EA game,” no, they didn’t. That’s not how this works.
Chobot: I always do big eyerolls when I see that.
Miller: Now, with influencers, especially just people on YouTube or Instagram, I think it’s another wild west. The reason we’re successful, Jess and I, is the fact that people know us. When they come to us and get an opinion, they know it’s an un-doctored opinion. If they are going to do a sponsorship or an ad, we’ll know about it and it’ll be different.
Chobot: I’ve done that. Not necessarily for games, but I have on a few occasions done sponsored work. By law you have to put that on your post, that it’s sponsored, you have to whitelist that, all of that. There’s the law in place first and foremost. But I also like to do a pretty good job of vetting the sponsorships that I take. If they don’t make sense for the demographic that follows my accounts, I don’t pick it up. I’m not going to try to sell a bunch of gamers belly-flattening tea.
Miller: That’s what’s worked out so well for us, and it’s kind of funny. When they come to us with these sponsorships, they usually come ahead of time, or we’ve already used them. When Omaha Steaks wanted to sponsor us, I was like, “Great, I sent my dad some of those last year!”
Above: Greg Miller and Jessica Chobot at the DICE Awards in 2017.
Chobot: We had that at Nerdist, too. Hell yes, I am absolutely eating these steaks.
Miller: When we finally landed MeUndies, I was like, “Yes, I am wearing MeUndies right now!”
Chobot: Oh my God, I’m trying to get MeUndies to sponsor Bizarre States. I was talking to my co-host on the podcast, Andrew Bowser, and he’s always – he’s gonna hate me for saying this – he’s always farting, so I said, “Let’s get you some of those charcoal fart briefs, see if that works!” It makes sense for our demographic.
Miller: Even now, with Games Daily, I wear a shirt and tie every day. We had done Stitch Fix months ago, and then it ended, and then I started paying for it myself. When they came back and said, “Hey, let’s sponsor you again,” I was like, great!
Chobot: Not to kill your Stitch Fix sponsorship, but I also—
Miller: You gonna talk about Bomb Fell? That’s the other one.
Chobot: I was actually going to talk about Trendy Butler. Blair signs up for them, and I swear to God, I have not seen him put something on from them that doesn’t look stunning. Definitely reach out to Trendy Butler. Their stuff’s really good.
GamesBeat: I think a lot about this idea of the leisure economy, the notion of people getting paid to play games. Is it only celebrities that can do that, or is it a wider group of people?
Chobot: It’ll probably layer itself out.
Miller: Yeah. There will be different strata to it, I would imagine.
Chobot: That’s already the Twitch model, the YouTube model.
GamesBeat: You have tips, streamers, modders, cosplayers.
Miller: Yeah, there are all these different ecosystems.
GamesBeat: I just wonder where this goes. Do we as humans wind up as nothing but players?
Chobot: I wouldn’t be against that. I’ll play all day long. I hardly have any time to play anymore.
Miller: The more segmented it gets is what’s always interesting to me. We were one of the first major Patreon success stories. It was like, “Will this work? Will people be there?” It did and they were. Then others came in, and the question was whether our numbers would dip. They didn’t. The more people came to the platform, the numbers went up.
Now there are all these micro-communities. When I meet people I say, “Yeah, I’m going down to Austin to be on Rooster Teeth,” and they’re like, “What’s that?” They’re this gigantic thing that makes movies and gets millions of dollars on Indiegogo, but people don’t know, because now you can be a fan of something, support that creator, give them the life they want, and the rest of the world has no idea what’s happening.
GamesBeat: It’s a long tail of people who can benefit from what you’re doing today.
Miller: Hopefully. Hopefully everybody ages up with us. That’s always my hope. When I’m 50 years old I can still sit there and talk to other 50-year-olds.
Chobot: As somebody that–normally you don’t see a ton of 40-year-old women continuing to speak on camera to a very male demographic in regards to video games. I have to say, I do feel like the audience ages up with us.
Miller: That’s why it works. It’s fascinating.
Chobot: When you’re going through your major life milestones, they’re going through them as well. There’s always something to identify with in the personality. I feel like it helps in a lot of ways.
