DF Direct: our weekly show celebrates 200 episodes

DF Direct, our weekly news and Q+A show, recently celebrated its bicentennial – in the sense of reaching 200 episodes, not marking a 200-year anniversary! All four not-on-holiday members of Digital Foundry assembled for the occasion, sharing stories of those early episodes and other highlights from the show’s nearly four-year run thus far.

As part of the on-holiday contingent, it was a lot of fun to watch the show back – I heartily recommend viewing at least that initial segment if you’re a fan of the channel, as it contains some nice reminisces from Rich, John, Alex and Oliver.

It also got me thinking about the show from my own perspective, as it has perhaps a bigger impact on the way the DF team operates than most people realise. For example, our weekly show is the biggest source for the DF Clips YouTube channel that started in 2023 and is now on the cusp of 100,000 subscribers. As DF Direct has gotten longer and longer over the years, being able to repackage segments into more shareable chunks has been a godsend – and allowed us to ensure that the most critical information is in the wild without the need to produce a whole scripted video.

DF Direct Weekly #200! Switch 2 Pricing, The NEW Battlefield, Monster Hunter Wilds Perf Concerns! Watch on YouTube

With five full-time members of Digital Foundry testing, scripting, recording and editing their own videos – Rich, Tom, John, Alex and Oliver – we only have the capability to cover around three or four topics a week, which just isn’t enough when we have to contend with the volume of game releases and updates. Having the Direct means that those smaller topics can be tested by one or two members of the team over the course of minutes or hours, then reported off-the-cuff, enabling much broader coverage than we’d otherwise manage.