Hello!
Basically every single year I’ve worked for Shut Up & Sit Down, I’ve typed out the words:
“it’s been a weird year”
…and 2025 is proving to be absolutely no exception! We’ve just put out a sponsored video onto the channel, and that feels weird. I’ve taken some time, below, to chat about why.
It’d be quite the feat of cave-dwelling if you hadn’t seen news of the rapidly-mutating tariff situation that’s currently being imposed on the people of America – but you might not be aware of the extent to which it’s rapidly damaging the board game industry. Greater Than Games have collapsed, many Kickstarters – and even sizable publishers – have massive question marks on their fulfillment and sustainability, and Stonemaier Games are suing the President.
The unpredictability, the volatility, the pig-headedness of these tariffs create a huge amount of uncertainty for just about everyone. We’ve been asked about what we’re going to say about it all, but the pace of change makes it tricky! Are they here to stay, or will they be scrapped once cooler heads prevail? Either way, the livelihoods of those affected will have changed significantly for the worse. It’s horrible. We want to help, where possible, and we’re putting together a bit of a plan should the situation stick around.
The tariffs have had a knock-on effect on us, too. Many of the fine folks who have helped us out financially over the years have understandably had to pause their support of the site; as with the potential for huge economic pressure looming, we are a luxury atop a luxury! With board games potentially becoming a far more expensive hobby within its largest market, this drop in interest feels inevitable. And tariffs are not the sole factor, here. The gradual erosion of folks’ disposable income over the last few years is the reason you’ve seen us explore other ways of maybe keeping the lights on – though it didn’t feel like there was any way of communicating this change without feeling like we’d also be pressuring folks towards donating.
I don’t want to play a tiny violin and make this massive, scary shift about us; the publishers with far more on the line, with funds tied up in product? They have got it far worse off, and we want to put our energy behind helping them wherever possible – we don’t exist, and our hobby doesn’t exist, without them. But I wouldn’t be showing the whole picture here if I didn’t acknowledge the immediate effects on us, and how they are affecting our decisions.
That’s the thrust of it – we want to make sure that we’re sustaining ourselves as a platform that might get people to the table, when the industry needs folks playing their board games. We want to be making great videos about those board games until we’re old and grey, and the occasional sponsorship will keep us afloat to do just that.
———-
Speaking personally, I am immensely grateful for this job, because it’s something I love to do. We are all salaried at a reasonable wage, but the job itself is a lot of the reward. Whilst I personally was pretty hungry for growth, and numbers getting bigger… right now? I will have lived a contented life if this channel stays exactly as it is, with a community as lovely and easygoing as you lot. Making mostly dumb, occasionally smart videos about board games? It’s a joy, and a great privilege!
If you have supported the site over the years – Thank You, Thank You, Thank You. It’s because of your generosity that we get to make sometimes goofy (and sometimes quite serious!) videos about cardboard, for everyone.
Donations make up the vast majority of the revenue that keeps us going. To have the time to really take care with every video and podcast – to make them special, and weird, and honest? We take that honour and obligation very seriously, and as our “boss” I hope you can continue to be proud of our direction, and the work we’re doing.
Growth is neat, profit is cool, but stability is a lot more valuable to me – to us! The odd sponsored video now and again is not to line our personal pockets and juice our platform for pennies, but to stabilise the channel against instability in all forms. We wouldn’t be taking it on if it wasn’t necessary for that purpose.
———-
So, importantly, what are our big picture policies regarding this stuff?
First off – we’re never going to put anything in front of you without absolutely screaming it is sponsored. I think that we’ve done decently well with this in the past, but we’re going to make sure it’s clear as crystal where the lines between coverage and promotion lie.
Secondly – any sponsored videos we make are in addition to, not instead of, our regular reviews. We don’t want to be committing time to these projects at the cost of our regular review output, and those videos will still be the same as they ever were.
Thirdly, and more vaguely, I suppose; we want to feel good about the thing we’re actually being sponsored by. We want any of these kinds of videos to be honest, because honesty is a core part of what we do!
It’s important to us that we’re able to chat openly about the thing we just played afterwards, and we won’t lean into anything that we wouldn’t normally bat for. We also don’t want to take sponsorships for completely irrelevant things, either – we’ve turned down a lot of sponsorships for your classic Nord VPNs, your Skillshares, your Raid: Shadow Legendses! We don’t want to waste your time with things that we don’t think would at least be of passing interest to you, because they will be things that are of passing interest to us!
Finally, we are not going to be doing sponsored videos for individual board games, or publishers, that could be mistaken for reviews. It’s important to us that our editorial voice is clear as day in our bread-and-butter coverage, and that’s not going to change. SHUX Previews, that we’ve done in the past, are a slightly different bag – those were deeply important in making SHUX a reality, and we think there’s no confusing them with a standard review.
Of course, this might all be a little hypothetical – we’re only going to take sponsorships that seem like they fit, and that let us talk about the thing we’re covering pretty openly! That might be a sufficiently irritating combo of things that this could be our first and last foray into this world! And, ultimately, we do want to return to the simplicity of donors, ad revenue (it’s much less than you think), and side projects like Wilmot’s Warehouse and SU&SD Presents to be our ways of making a living.
But to get to that future, we need to keep pottering along now.
———-
That’s a lot! Reading back through it, some of the language almost seems a little melodramatic for a pretty simple tweak to the channel – “YouTube channel contains Sponsored Content” isn’t a headline you’d expect to turn heads, but for a bunch of folks – including us – this will feel like a bit of a surprise.
I think of SU&SD as a channel that’s broadly been steered by real principle and transparency. We’ve been quite unique in entirely sticking to videos free from publisher influence, and have remained trustworthy over the years that we’ve been active in the space. We’re honest about what we like and why, and I think that makes us useful.
But the site began in a fundamentally different media landscape, and things have changed a hell of a lot. We’re still a very small fish in the grand scheme of YouTube, and fighting for that same level of exposure and support gets tougher every single year.
I’ve gone from starting at the site to heading it in what feels like a blink of an eye. I don’t want to ruin the thing that I fell in love with, and I don’t think I am! SU&SD fundamentally wants to do the best by the people who support it – and to do that it needs to exist. But, please do make your voice heard below if you have questions or concerns with anything I’ve rambled about here.
I’m hoping that you can see this as what it is, to me; that anything sponsored on the channel will be a fun little extra, with our bread-and-butter tabletop coverage remaining much the same as it’s ever been, come rain or shine.
Thanks for reading! Next week’s video is our regular, daft stuff.
-tom
