A weekly discussion of a portion of a videogame, recapping, reacting, and responding to the portion we play, like a bookclub.

I've been playing RPGs since I was in 5th grade, having discovered Legend of Dragoon because a friend recommended it to me at school. I instantly was hooked, and RPGs have been my main gaming passtime ever since.
RPG Bookclub is like a bookclub, but instead of reading a few chapters each week, we play a few hours of a video game. Then, we get together, discuss it, react to the coolest parts, and talk about how it makes us feel.
I started RPG Bookclub with some friends from work back in texas, focusing on people who I loved talking at length with. We have had a few host change ups since then, and I'm the only one still around from the original line up, but my current co-hosts are amazing, and I think the podcast is the best it's ever been because of it.
We also have a fantastic little community, with our discord working like a group chat with best friends all hanging out.

The Idea for RPG Bookclub came about around 7 years ago, when I was playing Tales of Graces F with my coparent, which is a multiplayer RPG. So both of us were playing this long game at the same time, and were able to have "Whoah that was awesome" and "I wonder what happens next" conversations throughout the game, and it really amplified the game as a special experience between us. At the same time, Game of Thrones was on the air, and for 10 weeks straight every year, Monday mornings at work, everyone would be talking about the episode of Game of Thrones, and what they thought would happen next, and saying "Whoah! That was awesome!" and I thought that videogames should have the same thing. But videogames are usually a "one and done" thing. You can't really talk about it until the person is completely through with it. I don't want to spoil the twist at the end of Disc 2, so I can't really gush about it until you're all the way done, which makes it a solitary activity. So with these three ideas swimming in my head, I thought about using the Podcast format to artificially chop up a videogame into weekly installments, then meet up and discuss it like a Bookclub would discuss their chapters, or how everyone talks about TV shows the next day at the office. I reached out to some of my coworkers, and some friends from college, and with that RPG Bookclub was born. We had a few false starts as our launch window was when my firstborn child was tiny, and many of our recordings were scrapped because of the crying noises in the background.

We release an episode weekly, with one episode for the bonus feed, and for a while, we had almost 4 shows running concurrently. This made it be somewhere around 16 hours of playing, 6 hours of recording, and 12 hours of editing every week. This wasn't sustainable with a day job, so we have recently created the bonus feed for our supporters to get a bonus episode per week, but the main feed is down to just one episode a week, and it's been a much better work-life-podcast balance.
Our supporters are awesome, and we make just enough to keep our expenses paid for based on their Ko-Fi subscriptions. We keep our expenses down, at around 80 bucks a month, and we currently make around 90 dollars per month from ko-fi, so our only other expense is our time.

We mostly just podcast because it's very easy in this day and age to forget to do the things you enjoy, and to isolate yourself from your friends. The podcast is a guaranteed weekly game session, and an hours-long conversation with our friends.
We do have a ko-fi, where we collect both donations and monthly subscriptions, as well as have commissions for one-off episodes, and we have a small merch store as well, but we only barely break even, and that's not counting our labor as a cost, which, a reminder, you should never not count your labor as a cost.

For our episodes, we individually play the agreed-upon segment of game, and one of the hosts (it changes who each season) writes notes to guide the discussion on the podcast. Then, we record our episode as a discord call using Craig, the discord bot, and then we use Adobe Audition to edit the episodes. Then we post it to Libsyn, which automatically puts it out on all of the various episodes.

We mostly rely on word of mouth recommendations for our marketing, as well as fulfilling the exact niche that we do. A lot of game podcasts will discuss Final Fantasy Seven, but few will cover Rogue Galaxy or Brave Story New Traveller, so a surprising number of listeners that have joined our discord say that they were searching for an OST on spotify, and our podcast showed up, because no one else was talking about the games that we do.

Don't do it to make money, because you won't. Just do it as a structured way to have fun and talk to your friends, so that it's worth paying the hosting costs because it's a fun thing you do each week, and you'll have a great time.

Our main website is www.rpgbook.club, which has a link to all of our socials on it, as well as where you can donate and check out the episodes on the bonus feed. You can also drop us a line at rpgbookclub@gmail.com, or by joining the discord. We're always looking for cool new people to talk about games with, so come on by!