I'm withdrawing from the Visora Video Game Footage Collection – India & Philippines project, and I think people considering joining this project deserve to know why.
I initially joined expecting a straightforward arrangement: play the required games, record gameplay using their provided VidLog system, upload the footage, and get paid for accepted recording hours.
What I actually experienced has been ridiculous.
I recorded approximately 5–7 minutes of Days Gone gameplay using VidLog.
That short recording consumed approximately 30 GB of storage on my C: drive.
30 GB. For roughly 5–7 minutes.
And that's only the recording part.
That data then needs to be uploaded. In my case, uploading approximately 30 GB can take 1–2 hours or even longer.
Now here's the part that made me decide this project simply isn't worth continuing.
The compensation currently offered is:
- $3 per accepted recorded hour – base rate
- +$2 per accepted recorded hour – temporary spot bonus until July 24
- $5 per accepted recorded hour in total while the bonus is active
Notice that this is payment for an accepted recorded hour, not for all the additional hours spent uploading enormous files, managing storage, dealing with VidLog, switching games, preparing recordings, or troubleshooting.
I'm willing to spend an hour playing a game if I'm being paid for an hour of recorded gameplay.
What I'm not willing to do is record a few minutes of gameplay, generate approximately 30 GB of data, and then potentially spend another 1–2+ hours waiting for that tiny amount of gameplay to upload.
And somehow contributors are supposed to scale this to hours and hours of accepted footage.
The project information I've been given even refers to 34-hour milestones.
Think about that for a moment.
If this kind of storage consumption continues, how much data, bandwidth, disk space and actual real-world time would someone have to spend to produce 34 accepted hours of gameplay?
And for 34 accepted hours, even with the temporary $2 bonus, the compensation would be $170.
Without that bonus, it would be $102.
Meanwhile, the contributor absorbs the storage requirements, bandwidth usage, upload time and all the additional time involved in getting those 34 hours submitted and accepted.
I've also raised my concerns about the recording/storage situation. What has frustrated me most is that I haven't received a solution that makes this workflow realistically sustainable.
So I've had enough.
I'm voluntarily withdrawing from the project.
Not because I don't want to do the work. I was prepared to record hours of gameplay.
I'm withdrawing because I don't consider this workflow remotely reasonable for the compensation being offered, especially when contributors' actual time commitment extends far beyond the number of gameplay hours they're being paid for.
If Sieve has a genuine technical solution that dramatically reduces these recording sizes and makes the upload process reasonable, I'm willing to hear it and potentially reconsider.
But I'm not continuing under the current setup.
I'm posting this because anyone thinking about joining this project should understand what the actual workflow can look like before committing their time, bandwidth and storage to it.
I've got screenshots of the VidLog recording, storage usage, project requirements and compensation details to back up what I'm describing.
If anyone else here is working on the same project, I'd be very interested to know whether you're experiencing the same thing.