DF Direct Q+A: Celebrating DF Independence - One Year Since Leaving IGN!

**Rich Leadbetter** (0:02)
Hello there, and welcome of sorts to this, the latest edition of the DF Direct Q&A show. It's a very special one. From a personal perspective on this particular occasion, as it is just over one year since we declared independence and parted ways amicably with IGN. So we're going to be talking about that, taking some supportive questions on that. Obviously, there's a bunch of other topics to discuss too.
First of all, hello, John Linneman.

**John Linneman** (0:28)
Who is your daddy and what does he do? And now we can answer that with you are, because we've had owned the business for a year or so.

**Oliver McKenzie** (0:38)
Yeah, yeah.

**Rich Leadbetter** (0:39)
You're tapping into my idea to do the entire direct using the Arnold Schwarzenegger soundboard, and I'm there for it.

**John Linneman** (0:46)
I think we should try to make that happen.

**Rich Leadbetter** (0:48)
And hello, Oliver McKenzie.

**Oliver McKenzie** (0:51)
Yes, I might not share the same affinity for the 80s action movies that you and John evidently do.

**Rich Leadbetter** (0:57)
What?

**Oliver McKenzie** (0:58)
But, you know, I don't mind a little bit of Terminator in my life, a little bit of soundboard action. It's not too bad.

**Rich Leadbetter** (1:06)
OK, fair enough. OK, so one year of Digital Foundry independence. The time of recordings just like a couple of days over a year since we announced that we were leaving IGN going completely independent, buying back their shares in the DF business. Just want to kick off by saying thank you really for everyone who supported us on this, because it hasn't been easy, probably a lot more difficult than we thought it would be. But whichever way you've done it, whether it's just watching our content, listening to our podcasts, sharing our stuff, supporting us on Patreon, of course. A big reaction there. Thank you so much for that. Clicking through sponsorship links, it's all worthwhile and it's kind of helped us to navigate what's been, I think, let's face it, a pretty disastrous year for the games business. And of course we've been affected by that, but support has made all the difference. We're still here. That's a good thing. So massive thank you from myself and the team. And I hope you stay with us because I don't see the challenge facing the games industry changing much in the foreseeable future and the kind of things that DF traditionally thrives on, reporting on the arrival of new gaming technology. Well, even that's likely to be something of a double-edged sword with no let up in the hardware crisis, even on the horizon, the sort of distant futures. Things are still looking pretty grim, but we're in this for the long haul, but we're fully aware that things aren't going to be easy. I think it's worth looking back at our independence video that we put out a year ago and marking our own homework, if you like, and we had a lot of ambitions. So looking back at them one year on, where are we? Well, we talked about the digitalfoundry.net website, because we really wanted to expand Digital Foundry from being more than just video, something bigger and wider, and we've accomplished that. It's not the finished article, there's still a lot of work to do on the website, but we're making progress there.
Investments that we make, because we're still a very, very small business.
Some of them are going to take time to pan out, but we're not backing out on that by any means. It's not the first digitalfoundry.net website though. Back in the day, it was the home of our Patreon download area, where you could grab high quality ad-free video downloads of everything we do. There were some question marks over whether we'd be able to bring back that archive because the site was basically using IGN technology. We couldn't take that with us. But the good news is that our partners at Hookshot just about done in returning those downloads to the site. And this is really important because it's pretty much 10 years of DF video content available to all supporters, no matter what tier, no ads, no limits. There are also more site upgrades that we're working on, which should be pretty cool. We'll talk about that in a bit. Also, spending time completely revamping our tools. I just did a presentation in the editorial meeting about what we're up to there, so the rest of the team know what's going on. And the formats of data that we're making from our tools are going to be cross-compatible between video and website.
Going back to that independence video though, we talked about producing a retro podcast. And earlier this week, DF Retro Super Show published its 20th episode. So John, how's that all going?