Pozz Games Begins Daily Weekday Video Premieres
Pozz Games, formerly PwnZonez, has been a long time in the making. As PwnZonez, it had a lot to offer but not a lot of manpower to get it done. It was destined to fail, as I completely bit off more than I could chew trying to host and manage a site with cheat codes, gaming news, developer Q&A’s, and an accompanying YouTube channel all while still in grade school and with a team of just myself and my friend Richie. After high school, Richie and I brought our mutual friend Chase on board who was always super into gaming as well. This time, we were focusing strictly on a YouTube channel. We rebranded from PwnZonez (which never really made much sense anyway, admittedly) to Pozz Games and while it was always a project I was excited about, it never really clicked in a way that stood out. At the end of the day, the concept always fell back as just another gaming channel on YouTube – and gaming channels on YouTube are a dime a dozen.
To be honest, this thought discouraged me quite a bit. I floundered with the channel, not sure whether it was even worth pursuing. I still remember my friend, PwnZonez colleague, and Pozz Games co-founder Richie drilling that into me. “I’m on board, but what makes it different from any other gaming channel?” What sucks looking back is that I never had a straight answer to that question. “We’ll have episodic shows rather than just random videos”, “we’ll showcase indie titles and interview their developers”, and various other answers I could come up with on the spot were all answers I gave him. All of those things were true to my idea of the channel, but the more I proposed, the more I questioned whether or not I was spreading our team thin as I did with PwnZonez.
One thing that was never really up for debate was our charitable focus. From our earliest planning meetings, we had discussed making it a charity gaming channel. If I recall correctly, I think Richie, the other Pozz Games co-founder Chase, and I were all pretty much in agreement on that from the start. Cystic fibrosis was a close-to-home topic for both Chase and Richie, Richie having it himself, and so as their friend, raising money for CF research meant a lot to me as well. Supporting the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation is something we all agreed on very quickly.
Looking back now, my biggest regret with Pozz Games is that the project crawled along at a snail’s pace for the longest time. Every time I thought we were getting somewhere, I’d step back and think “but how is this different?”… “why will people care to watch?” It wasn’t just discouraging, it was downright debilitating. There were times when I would just put the project on the backburner and really question if it was worthwhile at all. Before long, the bottom dropped out entirely. We lost Richie to complications with his CF and (excuse my language) that lit a fire under my ass that was never there before. Then Chase joined the Navy. Him and I recorded a single video together before he shipped out. And just like that, I was alone with the project for the time being.
Being alone with the project took its toll. I tried different things in regards to content for the channel – some seemed to work, others not so much. I had a bit of a soft launch of the channel back in the summer of 2019 – the year after we lost Richie and as Chase prepared to ship out, but since then it’s been all experimentation on my part. At long last, now in early 2021, I have reached a point where I am prepared to really kickstart this channel.
I’ve come to the realization, especially through my other and currently more successful niche gaming channel The Nintendo Beast, that it doesn’t really matter if it is “just another gaming channel”. When it comes to YouTube, content is king. Quality, quantity, and personality is what I’m shooting for with this channel. And as I noted in many of the earliest Pozz Games videos, I genuinely just hope that the channel can play even a tiny part in finding a cure for cystic fibrosis – so that nobody ever has to lose a friend, a family member, or a loved one to this terrible disease again. Until a cure is found, we at Pozz Games will #NeverPause. In order to truly mean that and to truly honor our friend Richie, it’s about damn time that I press start!
This week (today, actually) I will begin premiering new videos on the Pozz Games YouTube channel every single weekday at 7pm EST. This includes new episodes of a show called Throwback where I revisit old, nostalgic games to see if they still hold up to my memories of them. It also includes debut episodes of new shows like Campaign Killer (a reimagining of a show formerly known on the channel as Friday Night Binge) – a series where I tackle the campaigns of the latest and greatest video games – and Y U SO @$$?! – a series where I put my lack of online multiplayer skill on full display for you all to laugh at.
I’m very excited to kick off this new video premiere schedule and I hope it will give me some much-needed additional insight into what kind of content works and what doesn’t. I’m aiming to fully launch the channel by the end of this year. If you want to support and learn more about the project, click on over to the official website at https://pozz.tv (which I really need to redo to be honest) or jump right to the YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIX9O1vT-BLTYKzg3K2sMcQ. I am still recruiting more gamers for the channel as well, so anyone interested, please feel free to get in touch with me at https://pozz.tv/contact.
