
Using YouTube as an Accelerant for the Video Game Business - danso
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/technology/personaltech/using-youtube-as-an-accelerant-for-video-games.html
======
animal531
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.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
_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.

------
anc84
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
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
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.

------
CM30
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
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.

------
sksareen1
Great to see major news outlets discovering the gaming industry finally

------
bitwize
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
_> 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_
>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

------
amelius
> 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
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
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.

~~~
Retric
Advertising need not be paid, viral campaigns are based on this idea.

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.

~~~
jasonlotito
Its ad for ad(vertisement), not add. Not that you are wrong or this lessens
your comment, I just saw the mistake repeated, and figured you just didn't
know. =)

