Seniors launch site

It’s not an everyday thing to see somebody from a small town like Seminole create something that can be viewed and enjoyed by people across the globe. That’s what six seniors hope to achieve with their new gaming channel on YouTube.

The channel, Broken Controller Gaming, is the brain child of seniors Royce Snethen, Neal Froese, Skyler Franklin, Chris Arzate, Jordan Lashaway and Wade Mayes. The group brainstormed, planned and gathered money for equipment to produce the channel which features the six seniors playing video games in pairs.

“We came up with the idea near the end of the school year last year,” Snethen said. “My friends and I just wanted to have some fun and make people laugh.”

While they had already come up with the idea before the summer started, they didn’t actually begin uploading videos to the channel until August.

“It took like a month and a half after we all decided we wanted to do it,” Froese said. “Then it took about a week to get everything together and a little while to get all of the games and know what kind of content we wanted to put out. We also had to figure out how to use Adobe Premiere for editing, so it did take a while to get everything completely ready to start uploading.”

Not only did it take time to gather all of the equipment they needed, Lashaway said it took an average of an hour or two per session they recorded. Time was then required to edit, cut and paste before the uploading of the video. Snethen said that it all takes about a day.

“Each session is usually about an hour,” Froese said. “In that time we usually get a solid four episodes. There’s also the setting up, so all in all it usually takes an hour and a half. That’s not including the time that it takes to edit and upload.”

Making YouTube videos is not as easy as it might seem, especially not when the videos are being edited quality content. A lot of time went into this, from learning how to use different editing programs to getting the money together to pay for the equipment. In the end, BCG managed it, and although it continues to be hard work, the seniors accept the challenge to continue distributing content that their viewers will enjoy.

“We’re wanting to put up some better quality videos in the future,” Arzate said. “It will take some work, but I think we are all willing to do that.”

Although it sounds complicated, Arzate said they are mainly doing it for fun. The possibility does exist that they could eventually turn a profit with the channel if they had enough viewers. Video gaming channels are exploding on the Internet with the success of sites like PewDiePie (39 million subscribers), RoosterTeeth (8.3 million subscribers), and Superwoman (6 million subscribers) making careers out of regularly posting videos game play and commentary on their channels. According to a 2014 article on Variety.com, PewDiePie raked in approximately $7.4 million in one year.

“Technically, we’ve already kind of made a profit,” Franklin said. “If people interact with ads then you start making some money. We’ve made 88 cents so far — almost a dollar.”

Eighty-eight cents is definitely not $7.4 million, but with enough time and more viewers, the idea may not be as big of a stretch.

“We don’t really have a goal set in mind,” Arzate said. “If we did make a profit, it would be a pretty small one.”

BCG’s content is of a wide variety ranging from Nintendo games to platform, role playing games and even obscure or retired titles. The site is mostly audience friendly with the occasional curse word during commentary. The group currently has 28 videos and 39 subscribers.

“Neal usually chooses what we play,” Lashaway said. “He picks some random game that he thinks will go over well, and we just go with it.”

The six of them have a schedule planned for the future, and while they won’t give up much information on the games they will be trying before they film, Snethen said that more good content is to be expected.

“We’re gonna play a lot more video games,” Froese said. “We might do some live stuff, but not much. We actually have an intro set up. The footage is done, but the editing is going to take a little while on that one. Mostly we’re just going to be doing video games, though.”