After all the fights over copyright infringement fell away, one of the greatest forces in gaming today emerged, and YouTube became dominated by gamers more popular than the biggest music acts. What does it mean for the future of gaming and how is the industry adapting?
Who’s more famous? PewDiePie or Cliff Bleszinski? Who is more likely to be recognised walking down the street by a group of 14-year olds, Stampy or Hideo Kojima? Only a couple of years ago such questions would have been completely ridiculous and even now they carry a faint aura of absurdity to them. The answer feels like it should obviously be the developer, but a shift has taken place in the way we consume our games and there’s a generation of players who know their gaming commentators better than the creators. YouTube is changing gaming forever.
But don’t take our word for it. When we spoke to Cliff Bleszinski about this very topic, he was the one who suggested younger gamers don’t know who he is anymore. “We’ve been visible, but never underestimate the amount of ADD the world has,” he warns us. “There are plenty of people out there who know who I am, who Arjan [Brussee, Cliff’s co-founder of Boss Key Productions] is and some of the various employees here, but does your 14-year old who’s watching PewDiePie on YouTube give a shit? No. In many ways we have an established legacy, but we’re very much starting over.”
Is it about culturally having a short, easily distracted attention span, though, or simply the shifting sands of a fast-moving industry that’s quick to embrace new technology but sometimes a little slow to fully understand it? There is a new force and voice for gamers building and it’s one that only a few developers and publishers have successfully engaged with. But success in the YouTube arena can mean success beyond. Can there be any doubt for instance that Minecraft’s gigantic explosion into the mainstream was aided and abetted by streamers and Let’s Players around the world?
“It’s nice to see that a lot of game publishers realise the potential of YouTube gamers in relation to marketing their games,” YouTuber LaurenzSide tells us. “Usually they will send you an email explaining a new game that they’ve released and give you an early access code to get it for free with the hope that you will play it on your channel to showcase it. It’s really a win-win for both sides, they should do it more often!”
Others, though, are perhaps a little more cautious. “We don’t always do it, as we don’t want to flood the channel with advertisements, but sometimes we do!” JonTronShow presenter Jon Jafari explains. “It’s actually rare that I hear back from the actual developer of an old game, but sometimes it happens.”
And it is a growing concern that, while in many ways YouTube content creators are becoming the new front line for gamers to get information and opinion on games, there’s a blurred line between genuine endorsement and advertising. The parameters of what is considered ethical in games journalism aren’t necessarily as tidy for YouTube.
“It’s a tough area to get into because on one hand, you want YouTube videos and creators to retain that ‘homemade’ video feel, which you lose once you start working with companies,” LaurenzSide admits. “On the other hand, you want to be truthful to your viewers to say whether or not your opinion on a game is your own and not a paid advertisement. I try to be 100 per cent transparent in saying, ‘I got this free from a company yes, but this is my honest opinion on it.’ I personally have never accepted being paid to say what they want to hear about their game or company and I intend to keep it that way.”
Really up until fairly recently, the greatest concern with regards to relationships with game makers has been that they would pressure videos to be taken down. “Yes, that has been and I think always will be a concern,” Jafari tells us. “It’s why I think this style of video is extremely limited without huge legal teams backing you up and talking directly to the companies that made the games, and it’s understandable. But I started doing it because I wanted to try something new, and it’s been worth it every step of the way!”
Jafari’s videos have tended to be reviews, while LaurenzSide leans more towards Let’s Play style experiences. Both are likely to be encountering far fewer copyright infringement notices from publishers now as they embrace video sharing. There are risks involved, but for the most part getting your title seen by gamers on YouTube can only prove to be beneficial.
Ubisoft is perhaps a good example in the last year of a company that has felt the good and bad of YouTube sharing. On the one hand, word got out pretty fast about issues with Assassin’s Creed Unity and Watch Dogs, in large part thanks to gamers posting their glitches and bugs on YouTube. Conversely, though, Far Cry 4 had its fair share of odd in-game behaviour, but sharing these moments only seemed to raise the game in people’s estimations. It began to reveal those hidden, emergent moments that made the game worth playing.
“The games that are going to appeal most to YouTubers are the ones that they can describe or talk about to their users,” Bleszinski tells us. “It’s going to create these YouTube moments where people make it look easy. If you go to the ballet or to an MMA event or a sports event like the NFL and Drew Bries tosses that ball while being threatened by 280lb guys… He makes it look easy. So, the more skill-based and describable your game can be the more likely you are to have these commentators commenting on it.”
Coffee Stain Studio’s Armin Ibrisagic, creator of Goat Simulator, has a similar view. “I think a good place to start would be for game designers to not just design games that are fun, but to design games that are fun to watch as well,” he tells us. “Now before people start sending me anthrax in my mail and pipe bombing my apartment – I’mnot saying that having a game that’s fun to play versus being fun to watch is mutually exclusive. I think it’s very possible to do both, as long as you keep it in the back of your head from the start. Minecraft is an amazing example as it’s by far the most popular game on YouTube, probably because there’s always something new to see due to the randomly-generated world.”
We got a similar analysis from Jafari. “The topic of discussion in the video, first off, has to be relatable to a wide audience,” he explains. “Take my recent episode on Barbie games for an example: everyone knows who Barbie is and therefore will have a point of reference when viewing her games. The whole point of the show is to point out the oddities and absurdities that lie in these old games. I am not usually only trying to show off a bad game, I am trying to relate the crazy videogame logic back to the real world, it’s funnier that way. Another thing is if it’s possible to make a story arc out of the whole thing. We like to start strong and end strong, we don’t want the episode to be trailing off, you know. And thirdly, the most important thing, you’ve got to look for that little bit of indefinable magic. Can’t put a price on that!”
There are some other practical elements worth considering, too. “The age of the game plays a big part in whether it will be relevant in YouTube searches or subscriber’s news feeds,” says LaurenzSide. “The length of the game is important too as viewers tend to lose interest over a long gameplay series, so the shorter the better. I also look for something I like to call ‘reaction value’ and that is, does it seem to have enough things throughout the game to make me scared or laugh? That’s probably the most important because sometimes even the most seasoned gaming commentator can have trouble improvising jokes over a boring game.”
For Ibrisagic it is also about embracing the faults in your game and letting them become an asset. “Oh, absolutely, bugs are amazing,” he enthuses. “Removing bugs that negatively affect the gameplay, such as crash bugs, is something that we prioritise very highly. But in today’s game industry where there are so many triple-A games that are completely scripted from start to end, I think a lot of people welcome the surprise and unpredictability of bugs. If you get hit by a car in Goat Simulator, you’ll usually just ragdoll around like an idiot and then get back on your legs again, but once in a while the physics bug out and it sends you flying across the map. Maybe you’ll land face-first into a building and get stuck. Maybe you’ll land on a bunch of explosive canisters.
“Once, a player emailed me a screenshot of his goat hanging in the air with its head stuck in the sky after he had collected all the explosives in the game in a single place and head-butted them. It was awesome and hilarious, and I think the unpredictability of bugs is something truly magic that makes every player’s experience different from someone else’s.”
It’s odd to think of bugs as an asset and flaws as something that can foster a fanbase. It runs counter to the polished entertainment industry image that gaming has been building for itself. And yet, to us, it touches upon a classic gaming experience: playing with friends.While the modern online gaming experience is one of instant and constant connection and feedback,we are also very disconnected from real human interaction.
We’re not even just talking about playing multiplayer games, as this connected gaming experience applies just as much as when we would play a single-player game like Doom or Super Metroid with friends, terrified of what was hiding behind the next door. Or the exhilaration of battling a final boss shared with someone in the room with you. It’s not as common these days, but on YouTube you can watch it happen. We get to see those reactions to players in P.T. or see someone defeat the Ender Dragon and that simple exchange is what builds camaraderie. It’s as oddly removed and voyeuristic at times, but it’s close aswe’ve come in this new online age.
“People seem to love the horror genre online!” LaurenzSide reveals to us. “Actually, my top four videos at the moments a reall horror related videos. I think viewers like virtually having someone to play a scary game with as it doesn’tmake it seem as scary and they can actually enjoy it.” However, she also drew a parallel to the arcade scene. “I think it brings them back to the old days of kids watching other kids play games in arcades. You’d stop and watch someonewho’s either really good at a game or being really funny playing it. Same thing goes for YouTube, only on a much larger scale. It’s like hanging out with a friend at an arcade or playing videogames with them in your living room. In a sense, viewers have someone to react with, laugh with, and be scared with.”
And yet this still doesn’t explain how Felix Kjellberg, aka PewDiePie is the most followed and watched streamer on the site (above Rihanna, One Direction, Katy Perry and the official YouTube channel). A relatively unassuming, charming Swedish gamer has built an army of ‘bros’ that makes him more influential in the modern gaming landscape than Shigeru Miyamoto.
“Ah yes, we have come to the Pewds,” says LaurenzSide as we reach the unavoidable subject of all gaming on YouTube discussions. “I’m honestly baffled by PewDiePie’s success and probably always will be. Not in the sense that I don’t think he deserves it, but for the fact that I didn’t think watching someone play videogames would be that popular. He definitely hit the ‘YouTube lottery’ if there ever was such a thing. I believe he’s extremely influential now, especially to other gaming YouTubers like myself as well as prospective videogame purchasers… In short, he’s currently the face of YouTube gaming, whether other users like it or not.”
As an example, we refer you to the summer of 2014 when PewDiePie featured Skate 3 in some of his videos earlier that year. Not only did it push the 2010 release into the UK top 40 for most of the year, it also lead to other YouTubers checking the game out, hundreds more videos appearing, Skate 3 leaping into the top 20 during a dry summer of games, an extra 32.9 per cent more units being sold in the first half of 2014 compared to 2013 and retailer Game requesting new copies of the game be produced since it had been out of print.
But while we could analyse the traits that have launched Felix Kjellberg into megastardom and speculate as to the formula he devised to create his success, attempting to repeat it would be fruitless. “People ask me about PewDiePie all the time,” Coffee Stain Studios’ Ibrisagic tells us. “I think he might be one of the most influential people in gaming today. I think he’s a cool guy. But I also think it’s crazy to ask people why PewDiePie is so successful. If anyone knew, they’d do it themselves too, right?”
And so people like JonTron have looked to find their own formula; a mixture of honesty, openness and no small amount of randomness. “It’s a really strange story, honestly,” says Jafari as he tells us about the time he started to see his numbers rise to his current 1.6 million subscribers. “I was leaving California to move to Texas to start the site now known as NormalBoots.com with my wonderful longtime friend Austin Hargrave (known online as PeanutButterGamer), and I decided on a spur of the moment that I hadn’t used enough of the California scenery in my videos up until that point. About a day or two before I left I decided to add me singing Katy Perry’s Firework on the nearby rocky sea cliffs to the end of my DinoCity review… for pretty much no reason. I guess this struck a chord with someone somewhere, because the video got up voted to the top of the front page of Reddit back in 2011 with a title that was something like, ‘THIS is how you do a game review’. The rest is history. I think I’m still in shock from that one fateful moment.”
Whatever a YouTuber’s route to individual success, the success of the concept means that we’re seeing game developers seemingly making their games with social media in mind. Goat Simulator, for example, must owe much of its success to how its videos began to go viral after it was announced. What’s more, its very gameplay was inspired by watching YouTube clips. “The main inspiration from Goat Simulator actually comes from me spending a lot of my office hours watching YouTube videos,” admits Ibrisagic. “For some reason I started watching funny YouTube videos of goats messing with people, head butting them, and being a general menace. It made me think ‘Hey, this looks funny as hell, someone should make a game out of this!’ After the third time I pitched the idea to my co-workers, it finally worked and they jumped on the project with me. So I would definitely say that YouTube was a big inspiration, but maybe not in the way that people would think initially.”
But what about really targeting the YouTube market? Can that be achieved intentionally? “The game Five Nights At Freddy’s is a perfect example of what can happen when YouTube videos do well with a game,” LaurenzSide points out. “That creator’s sales ended up going through the roof and he even made a sequel and two iPad games from its success! From my personal experience I don’t think ‘big-name’ developers make their games with YouTube in mind just yet, but I could be wrong. Most definitely do when it comes to marketing those games though!”
Certainly there's no shortage of official trailers and content from the big publishers on YouTube, but a recent estimate put the balance at 19:1 for community-created content versus official promotional material. “I think a lot of the bigger companies are so strict on their embargoes and keeping their secrets and following their PR plans that they’re losing a lot of good potential coverage,” was Ibrisagic’s assessment and looking at which games are really breaking through, you would have to admit it’s largely the community driven, open, indie world that’s finding greater success these days.
As games channels have seen more success, so new streamers have been drawn to the service and new models have emerged. For LaurenzSide who joined, left and then returned to her channel, the shifts were easy to see. “The biggest change I noticed was YouTubers having their channels seem much more like a business,” she reveals. “Professional graphics, professional video equipment, merchandise shops, donation buttons, schedules, etc. None of that existed back when I first joined YouTube! The second biggest change I noticed was the huge rise of gamers on YouTube. Also, a lot of the bigger YouTubers I used to watch had fallen in popularity and some of the smaller YouTubers I watched now had hundreds of thousands (even millions) of subscribers! I kind of kick myself for not staying with it when I first started because I may have been further along at this point!”
But as has been mentioned, that formula is so elusive it’s a very tricky thing to predict success, and it’s hard to predict how YouTube might affect the industry in the coming years. “I think we can all agree that it’s going to have a big impact, but in what way is very hard to say,” Ibrisagic tells us. “The game industry changes faster than any other industry I know. Six years ago, everyone was making Facebook games because of Zynga. Three years ago, roguelikes and zombie survival games were in, and they still are. I have no idea what’ll happen in the next three years, but I’m sure it’ll be interesting to follow.”
Jafari is similarly flummoxed by the question of where things will go next. “Quite honestly, I have no idea,” he admits. “This is such a transient industry right now. Everyone is trying to stage a foothold, and who knows which stone or which crevice will keep? It’s the story of human history, time and time again! It’s the ancient struggle for land and power! It’s the gold rush! It’s like that time you wished you bought Amazon stocks in the mid Nineties!”
What’s clear though is that developers are adjusting to this new force and the industry is taking note. The fears that YouTube videos would hurt the games industry like some form of soft piracy simply haven’t emerged and instead we have a new generation of opinion makers and trend-setters having their say on what games will rise and fall. It’s a fascinating and ever-evolving new world. And, thankfully, it’s quite entertaining too.