Using YouTube as an Accelerant for the Video Game Business

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/technology/personaltech/using-youtube-as-an-accelerant-for-video-games.html

by danso • 9 years ago

69 21 9 years ago

anc84• 9 years ago

My takeaway is not that videos were the key to popularity but the release of a public demo, something playable instead of promises on kickstarter.

throwanem• 9 years ago

You still need to find a way to make people aware of your free demo, and get them to want to play it. That's where getting traction with popular Twitch streamers and YouTube LPers really pays off, because they have the audience reach to give your game a level of exposure it'd be most unlikely to achieve otherwise.

leggomylibro• 9 years ago

Yeah, I think the limiting factors are both time and attention.

Twitch and youtube are great for when you have some time, but not much attention. Maybe you're doing something tedious on the side, or you just got back from a long day and aren't in the mood to spend the mental energy learning a new system/paying attention to dialogue, whatever.

And things like audiobooks and podcasts are great for when you have attention, but no time - you're stuck on the bus, out on a jog, whatever. You can pay attention to something interesting an novel, but you probably don't have time to dedicate to sitting down and focusing on one thing.

To pick up a new game, you need both time and attention. How often do those two things overlap? I'd guess not very often for most people. During the week, work takes a lot of time and drains a lot of mental energy. If you also have a family, you might not have many large empty time blocks to dedicate to anything.

So compared to picking up a new game, youtube and twitch videos are super cheap. A lot of people already have sizable backlogs of titles that they are pretty confident they'll really like.

had2makeanacct• 9 years ago

I concur, tons of Kickstarters dupe people out of their money and deliver a really bad product. Pewdiepie once played a game like that and trashed it rightfully which lead to the developer crying online and throwing a fit like "I give up" which was sort of big news in video game forums and websites. Seeing a good product is what helped.

Off topic, they're still calling them "anti-semitic videos" straight faced which would lead someone to believe they weren't "jokes" but serious posts which is not cool.

CM30• 9 years ago

Yeah, YouTube marketing is certainly a big part of making your game popular now, especially when you don't have a well known brand to back it up (it's also at least partialyl how the likes of Minecraft and Five Nights at Freddy's found their own audiences).

But in this case, there are other factors too. For one thing, Kickstarter is really crowded nowadays. As a result, it can be pretty hard to stand out on the site, let alone get anyone influential to cover your game on a media site or their YouTube channel based on that alone.

Approaching the influencers and getting their help took them out of that situation, and turned them from 'a bunch of nobodies trying to get support for a non existent game based on trailers and marketing promises' to 'the team behind a game played by millions of people'.

xemdetia• 9 years ago

It is also a weird symbiotic relationship- most channels seem to only have interest in making one video for a game so you really only have to polish the first 5 hours of gameplay into something video-worthy. The game-to-completion train has been dead for a while it looks like so just spamming first run type videos generates a lot more views.

amelius• 9 years ago

Using YouTube as an Accelerant for Video Games

I thought this was about performance. Title should be:

Using YouTube as a Marketing-accelerant for Video Games

unwind• 9 years ago

Isn't this just new-speak for "advert"? Or product placement, or something?

Using a communication channel to sell a product, seems like advertising to me.

SmallDeadGuy• 9 years ago

It's only advertising if the positive review/comments were actually payed for. It's completely different if the review/gameplay video wasn't payed for and contained unbiased opinions.

confounded• 9 years ago

In most cases you'll see, it is a type of advertisement commonly called sponcon, or sponsored content.

Creators are now obliged to differentiate sponsored and non-sponsored content, though there is almost no enforcement, and it rarely happens.

animal531• 9 years ago

In the modern gaming market there are now hundreds (to thousands) of new releases per month. The trick has become to stand out and sadly many great games never make it big, simply because their developers aren't that interested in marketing.

Steam introduced curators which allows you to see special reviews or tag-lines/scores from the curator for specific games; but it seems to not be doing as well as just looking at the product's general score/rating (ie. Mixed vs Positive vs Overwhelmingly Positive). Even so you still need to search for (or randomly stumble upon) the game.

Youtube videos are exactly the same thing except the youtuber has gone out to find the best (or worst) game (or which were recommended by enough of their viewers). On the positive side your game can now be seen by 1k-1m people in one video, some n% of which will buy it. On the negative side if your game is too linear, then that percentage might be quite a lot lower (all the way down to negative sales, where people who would have bought it will now skip it, because they feel they've experienced enough of it).

But at the very least it's offering a new medium for discovery for smaller teams, with a very low buy-in cost/effort.

falcolas• 9 years ago

Someone pegged the number at somewhere around 200 new releases on Steam each day. The problem is that many of those titles are not worth the bandwidth to download them. I recommend Jim Sterling and Sid Alpha if you're curious just how bad they are, and for background on how they make money.

FTA• 9 years ago

I think Steam's exploration queue is a great tool for finding off the beaten path games. While some may only go through it during an event where you get cards or something for doing it, I go through a few iterations every week.

It keeps track of games you've seen and up or down voted, so you're able to really explore the library without completely mindlessly walking around.

I've found some niche, not reviewed often games over the course of a year or two. I haven't explored how you actually get your game listed (so perhaps there is some required marketing by devs) but I'd recommend that effort if you have indeed made a game.

AndrewKemendo• 9 years ago

The trick has become to stand out and sadly many great games never make it big, simply because their developers aren't that interested in marketing.

I mean this is the reality of every product. It's just not the case that you can build something great and people just flock to it. They need to be marketed to.

sksareen1• 9 years ago

Great to see major news outlets discovering the gaming industry finally

bitwize• 9 years ago

I was thinking today about Sonic Forces and how the create-a-character feature was a brilliant ploy by Sega. The diehard fandom will attempt to recreate their original characters in the game, while Twitch streamers will attempt to create Sonichu or Coldsteel the Hedgeheg, for the lulz.

It made me think of what would happen if companies started creating games for streamers to stream rather than for players to play. Stranger things have happened in the business. It will create a different dynamic between game developers and game players that I'm not sure I'd like.

eropple• 9 years ago

It made me think of what would happen if companies started creating games for streamers to stream rather than for players to play.

Oh, my child, you have not seen Five Nights at Freddy's yet, have you?

The games that exist for streamers to squeal at already exist.

klondike_• 9 years ago

While top-tier YouTube influencers can help put a game in front of tens of millions of eyes, their celebrity can also be a double-edged sword when fans are more interested in watching the player than buying the game.

Maybe this is why there seems to be a lot of open-ended sandbox style games being developed at the moment

Using YouTube as an Accelerant for the Video Game Business

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