There is decent money to be made on YouTube these days, but the Let’s Play phenomenon had to start somewhere. HEIDI KEMPS investigates the birth of an Internet sensation.
Moreso than almost any other technological advancement, the internet has dramatically transformed the way we interface with games. Some of these ways are obvious: we now have easily available, speedy online play and the ability to download full games to our systems with a few button strokes. But the internet has also granted us a worldwide platform to showcase ourselves interacting with games. No longer are play sessions solo, fleeting experiences: in the case of the newer consoles, sharing our game time is a part of the system’s functionality. And part of what has defined this paradigm shift that’s turned watching people play games into its own form of amusement is the video phenomenon known as Let’s Play.
If you’ve searched for game videos on YouTube or elsewhere, you have no doubt come across some matter of Let’s Play video. It’s a pretty simple format to grasp: somebody plays a game and then offers commentary about the action happening onscreen. The means by which the video creators do this, however, are wide and varied, and several prominent “Let’s Players” have been able to translate their knack for playing a game while amusing a viewing audience into genuine careers.
HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where and when Let’s Play began. Most will agree, however, that the Something Awful gaming forums were a crucial part of the development of the format. Michael Sawyer, known to the internet as “Slowbeef”, was around on the forums during the genesis of Let’s Play. “The first one I can remember was back in 2005, done by someone under the name of Luigi Thirty, called ‘Let’s Play Oregon Trail,’” recollects Slowbeef. “It was a screenshot-and-text sort of thing, and the poster asked other people in the thread to participate. He’d name characters in the game after them, so you’d see funny stuff like ‘Poster X gets dysentery’… people got invested in it, and others started to emulate it with stuff like JRPGs, which didn’t really work as well.”
“I think the first ‘proper’ Let’s Play, however, was one of the adventure game I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Vlaphor,” continues Slowbeef. “He played the whole thing through, he added his commentary. It was a game most hadn’t heard of, so it was interesting to see someone document their playthrough of it. It’s the first thing that adheres of the format of what we’d call a ‘Let’s Play’ now.”
Up until around 2007, most Let’s Play threads were in text and picture formats: a screenshot, a few sentences about what was happening in-game, another screenshot, and so on. When Slowbeef posted a thread about PC action/adventure game The Immortal, however, he decided to do things a bit differently: show the action as a video with live player commentary. “It was actually kind of a happy accident,” he explains. “The recording mic was having trouble picking up game audio, so I came up with the idea of running commentary.” While the thread for The Immortal was well-received on the forums, it wasn’t until Slowbeef made a similar video in a seemingly-abandoned screenshot Let’s Play thread for Super Metroid that the video-with-commentary format for Let’s Play really caught fire.
Slowbeef also invited guests to commentate on his play over Skype, which resulted in some engaging banter over the course of play. (Full disclosure: the author of this piece was a guest commentator in one of said videos.) The format immediately drew a lot of attention, and many jumped on the idea of making their own videos for games they enjoyed.
But not everyone there was quite as enthused. “The mods got sick of it all over the Games forum,” says Slowbeef, “so we got a new subforum just for Let’s Play.” Not long after that, Slowbeef found himself as a moderator for the new forum - and viewed one of the founding figures of Let’s Play as a whole.
MEDIA FOR THE MASSES
When Jonathan Wheeler – better known by his alias, “ProtonJon” – first started to make videos, he was a college student in Alberta, Canada making videos in-between classes and his job. These days, Jon is one of three members of a group called The Runaway Guys. He and fellow members ChuggaConroy and NintendoCapriSun not only make Let’s Play videos for YouTube – both individually and as a group – but they also put on panels and make appearances at various conventions across North America. They’re backed by Maker/Polaris, who also sponsor other well-known Let’s Play personalities like the Game Grumps and PewDiePie, the most-subscribed person/channel on YouTube.
ProtonJon was one of the first wave of forum users to jump on the video Let’s Play boom on the forums. “I was bored during University, and I saw these guys on the forums doing these playthroughs… I ended up trying it out, and stuck with it as a result.” Soon after, one of Jon’s videos – part of a group effort to take down levels in the notoriously vicious Super Mario World romhack Kaizo Mario – unexpectedly became a viral hit.
After Jon started making videos of playing through various romhacks, he noticed that his Youtube subscriber counts were increasing dramatically. “I’d see four thousand subscribers, then five thousand subscribers… so I started doing collaboration videos with others, and making a secondary channel. I think the starting point [of my subscriber increase] was just creating romhack Let’s Plays on a regular basis.”
By this point – around 2008 - Let’s Play had begun to spread far beyond just the SA forums. Video Let’s Plays began to spring up all over YouTube, though the forums denizens weren’t terribly enthused by the quality of many of these videos. “At the time, YouTube was a really crappy video host for gaming stuff,” notes Slowbeef. “But people like ProtonJon put stuff on YouTube, and it really helped spread Let’s Play.”
Not everyone was happy about this, though, as many in the forums viewed YouTube Let’s Plays as sub-par imitators. “You could see they were a step behind us… certain people never got the memo for things, like ‘you can’t make a camcorder work.’” The distaste for low-quality videos manifested itself as “Retsupurae,” where forums members would watch and actively mock awful Let’s Play videos – a trend (and a channel) that persists to this day.
By this time, Let’s Play had several established names and personalities. People who frequently appeared in each other’s videos formed groups with names like The Freelance Astronauts and The Tipping Forties. It was also around this time when developers and publishers began to take notice. After completing a marathon video playthrough of the infamously awful Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 – and creating one of the most popular threads to ever grace the SA forums - members of the Let’s Play group informally called “The Posse,” consisting of forum members KungFuJesus, Pokecapn, Medibot, and IlluminatusVespucci, found themselves in contact with Twisted Pixel games.
“Dan Teasdale [at Twisted Pixel] had been lurking the forums for a while,” says Pokecapn. “He saw the thread, and thought it was funny. He had this game he was working on and he just thought, ‘Since we have this game here, and it’s kind of a linear experience, wouldn’t it be great if we had some commentary?” As a result, the group soon found themselves recording a special commentary track for The Gunstringer. Dan Teasdale continues to work with people from the SA Let’s Play subforum at his new company, No Goblin: voices of several forum personalities can be heard as characters in the game Roundabout.
GROWING PAINS
As Let’s Play and livestreaming have ballooned in popularity, corporate awareness of the trends has also grown. And like many unexpected and disruptive evolutions in technology, developers and publishers aren’t entirely sure what to do with the Let’s Play boom. On the one hand, it’s free publicity: a popular YouTube personality can expose your game quickly and easily to hundreds of thousands of people for a lot less than paid advertising. On the other hand, you can’t control the message of a live player the same way you can control an ad. On top of that, it can be argued – especially for story-heavy games – that Let’s Play and livestreaming the whole experience from start to finish removes the motivation to experience it for oneself.
Even indie developers are torn: while many credit popular YouTubers and streamers for helping their games find an audience, others like the always-outspoken Phil Fish have posited that Let’s Play deprives these struggling artists of revenue. In a series of now-deleted tweets, Fish wrote “YouTubers should have to pay out a huge portion of their revenue to the developers from which they steal all their content. [Ad] revenue should be shared with developers. This should be built into YouTube. Anything else is basically piracy.”
Fish’s sentiment seems to be shared by some other devs and publishers. Nintendo spurred on a great deal of drama last year when they began flagging Let’s Play videos featuring their games on YouTube, causing ad revenue from said videos to go to them rather than the video creators. While Nintendo of America figurehead Reggie Fils-Aime commented on the controversy at that year’s E3, saying “…all we’ve done is take the first step to protect our IP,” Nintendo soon reversed their stance, however, eventually opting to develop a mutual revenue-sharing program instead.
YouTube itself has also enacted changes that impacted the ability for players to earn money from views of their videos. The evermurky waters of international copyrights come have always caused YouTube and its users some serious headaches. Most recently, YouTube’s rather capricious content ID matching system has caused rashes of false copyright claims against videos. When this happens, revenues from videos are diverted from the creators to the companies filing the claims, no matter how spurious, until the claim is successfully disputed. Occasionally, content ID matching automation can cause this process to happen even if the game developers themselves are okay with gameplay footage being monetized.
Live streaming has also become a huge part of the Let’s Play ecosystem, with popular personalities using subscriptions to stream channels as a source of additional revenue. But with rapid growth comes the need to change and adapt. Twitch, the most popular game streaming service, rolled out some changes earlier this year – a time limit on archived videos and automatically muting parts of recordings if copyrighted music was detected - that caused serious problems for some of its most prominent players. Though Twitch was recently purchased by merchandising megalith Amazon, Jon feels that that is a positive outcome. “There’s a lot of relief, actually… people were worried that if Google acquired Twitch, they would do the same things they did to YouTube. We probably won’t see any major changes until next year.”
“There are some other ethical dilemmas now, too,” notes Slowbeef. “It’s tough when you introduce money into things… People are getting paid to Let’s Play games as a promotional element. I have mixed opinions on that – I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong for getting paid to do something you enjoy – but sometimes I feel like people can get exploitative with their fans, especially the really big Let’s Players... Some of them are just outright asking for things from fans and publishers.“ One controversy that cropped up recently involved Let’s Players who were given prerelease copies of Shadow of Mordor – copies that came with a list of stipulations, including not saying anything negative about the game. “It smells a little funny when you’re given a prerelease copy but you’re not allowed to react to it.”
LET’S PLAY LEGACY
ProtonJon initially met his Runaway Guys partners when they came to him expressing their appreciation for his videos. Though he’s been doing this for a while, he still feels a little awkward – but flattered – when fans come to him, sometimes with very emotional stories about what his videos mean to them. “It’s weird when people come up to you and say you actually had an impact on their lives... It’s a little frightening in some ways, but it’s really heartwarming to hear.”
Where does Jon see Let’s Play heading? “In the future, I think you’ll be seeing a lot more sponsored streamers. I think media companies are catching on – that’s the way the money and views are going. The ad revenues don’t compare to YouTube, but the subscription revenue more than makes up for it.” He also offers advice to those looking to get into doing Let’s Plays of their own: “If you’re going into this just to make money, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. I did this stuff as a hobby for years – it was just coincidental that I eventually made money off of it. If you’re going to do it, do it for fun or do something original.”
Slowbeef no longer moderates the Let’s Play subforum on SA, he still observes and comments on the scene with frequent co-commentator Diabetus from his Retsupurae channel. He admits to having a cynical view towards the current state of Let’s Play. “When I see some of these videos… it feels like the videogame is secondary to the personality. It’s almost to the point where you don’t really need the game, it’s just a means to get videogame fans invested. And because it’s so personality-driven, people lose creativity… they do the same things over and over again.”
He isn’t entirely pessimistic about the format, however. On the contrary, Slowbeef feels good about what Let’s Play has been able to accomplish. “Let’s Play is a great way to get people invested in something they wouldn’t have seen or known about… you can expose them to new games. It’s a silly, stupid thing where we play videogames for the internet. But little things, like giving people a pick-me-up – it’s stuff like that which makes me step back and say ‘wow, we’ve really got something.’”