The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life.

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I moved out of home when I was 18 to go to university, I’m now about to turn 27 and I’m moving back for the first time. This year has been one of the hardest yet, it nearly mentally broke me, it’s left me barely able to make rent and set me back a long way. I don’t want you to feel sorry for me, all of this has been self inflicted and it’s not all bad either. There’s been a lot of good and many things that have made me grow as a person and learn valuable life lessons. This is the story of EscapeAoE.

I’m fortunate, things could be worse, things can always be worse. The fact that you’re reading this now and that I’m able to create YouTube content to get by speaks to that fortune; and without those things none of the opportunities over the last year would have existed in the first place.

Escape was a stupidly ambitious project. We wanted to create a tv studio space where we could host LAN events for over 150 attendees and stream it live. The space could be used for daily streaming of any kind of content and could be used for all sorts of events given the chance.
Escape also succeeded in doing that, we held the New World Championship for AoE3 and ECL finals for AoE2. Both the largest gathering of communities in the history of both games, something which may not be surpassed for a long time.

It started in 2018 when I was sat in the Kitchen at Tills’ house. Till has been a friend for a long time, he lives in Germany with his wife and children and works in the family private equity business. He loves Age of Empires and teaches his daughters how to play and has fond memories of playing with his brothers as a child himself. Age of Empires brought us together and started me on this road.
We were having lunch and Till is inspired by Rocket Beans, the German variety gaming channel, and he wants to create something like this with a focus on Age of Empires. He has the money to set it up and wants me to run it, after all, how hard can it be? He says that we could use £100k to get started and build something great. I know that Till has good intentions, he wants to give me an opportunity to build something and do something big. I’m 25, I have nothing tying me down and it’s better to take risks while you’re young and have less to lose! So how could I say no? I now had the opportunity to do something for Age of Empires that hadn’t been attempted before, and maybe create something successful that would bring the game forward tremendously.

I couldn’t do it alone, so I set to work building a team to help. This led to the full-time employment of robo, ham and interjection. Next we needed a space, and so I rented a warehouse unit on an industrial estate. Finally, we needed a studio and after two months of research we moved into an empty warehouse on 21st December 2018. By mid-January we had ran over a kilometre of cables, built three stages, bought cameras, lights and PCs, set up microphones and connected it all together. Countless 14 hour days were spent in absolute chaos and after just three weeks the space had been transformed into something serviceable. From zero to one.
Many criticised how fast we did this part, but there was good reason for it. First Of all, time was a huge limiting factor with this project. £100k sounds like a lot of money, but when you’re paying 3 staff, rent and have the up-front setup costs it disappears quickly. I knew we had until September to earn a reasonable amount and starting sooner meant that we could learn faster.
I also subscribe to the ready, fire, aim philosophy where the sooner you make mistakes (fire) the faster you can make corrections (aim). Up until that point I hadn’t even had 5 spare seconds to stop and reflect, we had jumped into the deep end and the blinkers were on, full steam ahead. So needless to say, when the launch stream came around and it was a complete disaster, reality hit me like a ton of bricks.

I can only describe the feeling as an overwhelming sense of dread. I buried my face in my pillow as my head spun, my mind was racing in all directions trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do. I wanted to run, I wanted hide, I wished I could rewind time and re-live the last year and change everything. A sense of panic washed over me and gripped me. But I was tied to what felt like a sinking ship that had only just left port, with no way out and the responsibility for others keeping me there. I couldn’t abandon the team that dropped everything to come and do this project, I was contractually bound to the building for at least a year, I’d taken £100k in funding to build the studio. This was the lowest point I’ve ever been in my short 25 years. Leaving at this point would be shameful, disrespectful and would haunt me for the rest of my life. There was only one way and that was forward.

I’m going to talk about the viability of the project later on and what we could have done differently. But this story is just getting started, because what happened over the next months was remarkable.

After a week of mourning the failure of the launch event, with criticisms flying in from all directions and the sense of dread lingering in my stomach, we pulled ourselves together and went back to work. It was clear we had a lot to improve, and boy did we learn a lot. We spent the next months taking what we learned from the launch event and preparing for the New World Championship. It was a total transformation. The cameras looked better, the sets were improved, the technical side of things had been figured out. Audio issues had been resolved, running orders had been determined and overlays had been perfected.
What the team managed to achieve in those 5 months is astounding, and I’m incredibly proud of what we managed to create in time for NWC. I was starting to feel hopeful, we were happy with what we had made. The studio saw constant tweaks and improvements right until the end, but at that point we were ready for NWC.
If you’re reading this you might not have heard of NWC, I don’t imagine many of you are aoe3 fans. The New World Championship was the biggest event in age of empires 3 history, and their first LAN event in over ten years. We made it happen with the help of the ESOC team who did a lot of admin work, and the LAN finals was hosted and streamed from our studio. It was a huge success, the viewership smashed all aoe3 records, we had over 50 aoe3 community members in attendance and we earned an amazing amount of revenue from the stream. Enough to cover 75% of our expenses for that month.
But most of all, the stream looked great, the event ran smoothly and we were ready for the big one, Age of Empires 2.

Again, we received a lot of criticism for doing aoe3 content, and I understand why. We had an exclusively AoE2 audience up until that point and it’s a well known fact that there’s not really much of an intersection between AoE2 and aoe3 players. The reason for doing aoe3 first is because it served as a test bed, the community was very warm to us and would be more forgiving of mistakes. We learned a lot from NWC which allowed us to make significant improvements for ECL, and as you can imagine, nailing ECL was our number one priority. Everything ended up being pinned on that since we figured that NWC was so successful and ECL should be more so. Maybe enough to push us over the 75% revenue needed and prove that the studio could be a success.

I should note that if we were able to break even in one month then unlocking more funding to continue to studio for a longer time would have been possible.

New World Championships left us with a feeling of hope and success. Age of Empires 3 is 1/10 the size of AoE2. If we replicate that success for ECL then the studio might just work. We might just make a 360 turn from the disaster launch event and have a future to look forward to. With more lan events, more big projects and more regular streams for a new audience.

In the run-up to ECL we were acutely aware of the need to stream regular content on the Escape Channel. Unfortunately for us we didn’t have the man-power to do it. For the weeks prior to ECL all four of us were working anywhere between 10 and 13 hours a day with no weekend in order to get prepared. Organising a LAN for over 150 people is a monumental task. This isn’t just about logistics, but also having the stream assets ready, having plans for everything, briefing casters, players, volunteer helpers. Booking hotels, organising flights, opening channels of communication for the community, booking catering, making promotions. I could make a list 10 pages long of all of the jobs and tasks that needed to be completed in time for ECL, streaming in tandem with that would have been disastrous for the event, an event which the entire future of the studio essentially rested on.
We also had plans in place for what our follow-up after ECL would be. There was a lot in the pipeline which we wanted to bring to life once ECL was over and we had a free schedule.

Unfortunately, none of that got to happen.

ECL was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. It was actually a dream come true. Ever since 2011 when I started my YouTube channel with the goal of helping AoE2 to be a real esport like Starcraft. Sure, it wasn’t Starcraft level of production or scale. But for AoE2 it was on another level and after 8 years of starting youtube with that goal I finally got to host the ECL lan, with 3 teams consisting of 15 of the best players in the world, and over 120 community members watching live. The cameras looked great, for the most part the audio was good and the technical side of the event ran smoothly with the exception of the delays between games which I will explain later.
What an absolute turn-around it was. To be able to make the ECL happen in the capacity that we did, with the limited resources and experience we had is something that still amazes me. I don’t know how we did it, but we did.
The event was tough, I think I managed about 10 hours sleep between Thursday and Sunday and a 30 minute nap somewhere on Sunday morning. Being the first to arrive and the last to leave definitely has its drawbacks. But I wouldn’t change it for the world. I heard nothing but great things from the event attendees and having the opportunity to meet so many people from the community is priceless, definitely worth paying a few hours of sleep for.
The stream started well too, with over 4000 viewers by the time we started the first match. Excitement was high as we dreamed about what the weekend had in store for us and believed that the ECL might just be our ticket to year two of the studio.

By day three that excitement was crushed.

The mood in the studio was great, everyone was having a wonderful time. I tried to ignore the obvious and enjoy myself too when I could. But the viewer numbers didn’t peak where we thought they might and the revenue coming in from the stream was a fraction of what the NWC managed to achieve. As the event came to a close NWC stood head and shoulders above ECL in terms of commercial success, and with that it became the death sentence of Escape. I knew what was going to happen, and perhaps I knew from way back in January that this wasn’t going to work, but I was hopeful in the summer that we could just pull it off.
Unfortunately there’s no rewind button. There’s no way to have a do-over and go from the top. There’s no point where I could say: damn we should have taken x or y advice. It was just me, making decisions and trying to get through the darkness and into the light.
On Friday 13th September we announced that Escape would be shutting down.

I earned a small salary from ECL which allowed me to cover my expenses during this project and nothing more. Escape pays me no salary and never has. After August this income ran out and for the rest of the year I’ve had nothing while the responsibility of closing up the studio and returning the building has bound me here. Finally at the end of November it’s all done and It’s time to leave. I could obliterate what’s left of my savings renting or I can move back with my mum, so that’s what I’ll do. It also means that I’m flexible enough to go anywhere and do anything if the opportunity comes, so living there is the best option right now.

After we announced the shutdown, another wave of: “you should have done this and you should have done that”, ensued. But overwhelmingly we received a lot of lovely messages from the community that definitely helped to keep my wavering flame for age of empires alive.
Yes, in retrospect it’s easy to say what we could have done better or differently.
The studio could have been successful, we needed 1500 subscribers to pretty much break even. That’s enough to cover robo, ham and wills wages, rent and bills at our location. We thought it could be possible, and I think it was reasonable to think that it was given the landscape of AoE2.
We sucked at promotion and communication, even though we had four of us we never seemed to find the time to keep on top of everything that we had to do. We hoped that by inviting the biggest names in AoE2 that we would get the audiences that would come along with them, but that didn’t work out as well as expected.
The ECL itself suffered from some large delays, mostly caused when the teams were swapping over and also because the average game length was way longer than we anticipated. The delays were caused by a number of reasons, from players forgetting things or being in the wrong place to me being needed in 4 places at the same time to fix things. Once the games were going we had very few problems, and the steam itself was running well. We also had to have breaks for food, this caused some problems because of the longer than anticipated games. We have a lot of stats from ECL about average game times, every set of team games at the lan had an anomalous game length. It was unfortunate and unexpected. But there’s a famous line that reads: expect the unexpected. So perhaps we could have prepared better.
I hated the ECL format from the beginning, but I don’t think it lent itself well to the LAN event. It was a bit confusing and teamgames are always harder to hype than 1v1s. Had ECL been a 3 month 1v1 event with a lan final, I think it would have been more successful.
But in the end, none of that matters. We walked the path that we walked and we had our reasons for doing so, no matter how misinformed they may have been.

I took this project knowing that there was a slim chance for success. What I got in return was a roller-coaster of a year that’s led to more personal growth than any before it. I’ve had the opportunity to complete a life dream, regardless of how successful it was I think that’s something to be happy about. It’s been possible to meet so many new people in both AoE2 and 3 communities. I’ve pushed myself to breaking and I came through the other side. All of this will stay with me for the rest of my life.

What’s next for me? Well for now I’ll continue to make YouTube content, it’s a small revenue source that can keep me going until I get my feet on more stable ground. My goals as I get closer to 30 are definitely going to shift. I want to start thinking about having a family and building a safety net for them, so there’s going to be a lot less risk taking. There’s going to be a lot less putting others first too. I want to help and I will help where I can, but I’m not going to spend any more time compromising my own position and safety to give others a leg up. It’s time to move on, focus on where I really want to go and take all of these wonderful life lessons with me.

Thank you for reading, I wish you all the best!

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