Using YouTube as an Accelerant for the Video Game Business
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
Maybe this is why there seems to be a lot of open-ended sandbox style games being developed at the moment
I thought this was about performance. Title should be:
Using YouTube as a Marketing-accelerant for Video Games
Using a communication channel to sell a product, seems like advertising to me.
Creators are now obliged to differentiate sponsored and non-sponsored content, though there is almost no enforcement, and it rarely happens.
In one twist you may have an add in front of a movie trailer online. So, in effect the add is content and you get paid to show your add.