How to become a good gaming YouTuber?
- Thread starter LEGOMYEGGO
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There are many things you can be doing as a game focused youtube type, youtube also makes life somewhat hard for some people and people coming up both by its own rules and by market saturation.
People can smell dishonesty in seconds so avoid that.
You can cover news. News is a wild field including drama, new games out, new hardware, upcoming games and hardware, historical news that just came to light, business, legal, interviews with devs ( https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025782/It-s-Still-Emulation-Saving ,
arstechnica war stories being two good examples) and can be narrowed to a given field.
I have a little guide to information sourcing and the bigger players here
https://gbatemp.net/threads/lets-play-game-journalist.558254/
You can do reviews
This can be of new games, be the massive or from small indie devs that just did something you find interesting. Some will aim to have it out as soon as possible, others might take a week or two and do a proper deep dive into it where the launch day stuff might be more on the superficial side.
Can be of old games, often people will find ones with a following or that are about to be rebooted.
Can be of mods ( https://www.moddb.com/ https://www.romhacking.net/ )
Generally if you are doing reviews then I would say make the review you would want to hear for you. Don't try to copy someone else's style, though by all means take pointers. Personally I would say also avoid the dull as dishwater IGN/gamespot/... review format where it is graphics, music, gameplay, final score type thing.
I have massive misgivings with a lot of what that guy says in many things but that is an interesting way of looking at game review approaches.
There are many styles of game review, some go in for the more edgy and meme focused approach ( https://www.youtube.com/c/SsethTzeentach/videos and
https://www.youtube.com/user/MandaloreGaming/videos?disable_polymer=1 being prime examples of that style), some will go more typical gamer (which might still get you called edgy), some will go for "kotaku and such have the right philosophy" approaches and others will go far more "family friendly" still.
Can also make mods (be they classic PC mods with tools, full bore hacking or something in the middle), and break games (though this is something of a technical skill).
Can also cover technical aspects of say map making (sight lines, AI pathing, how strategies work)
Some do play of games itself. This can be simple longplay (or supercut of longplay to highlight interesting parts), speedrun (normal or tool assisted), for a more creative game (minecraft is pretty saturated but think that) or competitive (helps to be competitive, though some cover it as news and others do intro to it all -- I have been doing games for 30 something years at this point, properly pulling them apart for some 15 of that, and would have no clue what goes for a competitive match of League of Legends for example), some do challenges (can you beat using only, without taking damage...).
History of those sorts of things, sometimes people will collate data, sometimes they will do their own research ( https://towardsdatascience.com/predicting-hit-video-games-with-ml-1341bd9b86b0 ). Companies, games, franchises, events (think history of E3), business, law making, and movements within games as a whole being viable targets for this one.
If you have a history in the game industry (dev, artist, tester, manager, business guy, marketing...) then many quite like hearing such stories, if you have other stories then talking over gameplay telling those is often done.
Capturing footage can be something to ponder in this. Newer hardware with HDMI is usually not so bad (I would even consider this for PC but software capture is a thing there), older stuff on the other hand is rather harder to do well (even more so as most older hardware these days have some devices that increase the quality considerably over old RF and composite), as are handhelds in many cases. Some go for emulation which might also have its own capture options and spare you messing with screen capture.
Editing videos can be done with more basic software, I like avisynth myself but I am weird so maybe consider kdenlive if you want to go with free software (it is very powerful when all is said and done).
TV shows tend to fail when brought to youtube and such. This is as most people seem to have adopted a truly information dense style where TV shows have to pad it out to fit within their slot and have advert breaks.
Most, myself included, would say get a good microphone and learn how to use it if you are going to be talking -- I will watch a 240p video but if it sounds like you are down the bottom of a well or are blowing my eardrums out then I am not coming back). There are some cheap ones out there (I quite like the playstation eye) but due to current world events such things are thinner on the ground. Showing your face or not is up to you and does not make an awful lot odds.
Getting yourself out there from scratch is hard. "Build it and they will come" is not really a thing and "the algorithm" is a fickle mistress indeed. Collaborations can work, exclusive news might get you something, cross posting on forums is generally seen as self promotion so harder to do, pitching a show for a magazine ( there are not many of them when you consider their various owners https://gbatemp.net/threads/the-201...-troubled-media-collection-sold-again.535563/ ). If you want to try your hand at getting popular on "alt tech" sites like bitchute, lbry and such then that is an option.
People can smell dishonesty in seconds so avoid that.
You can cover news. News is a wild field including drama, new games out, new hardware, upcoming games and hardware, historical news that just came to light, business, legal, interviews with devs ( https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025782/It-s-Still-Emulation-Saving ,
arstechnica war stories being two good examples) and can be narrowed to a given field.
I have a little guide to information sourcing and the bigger players here
https://gbatemp.net/threads/lets-play-game-journalist.558254/
You can do reviews
This can be of new games, be the massive or from small indie devs that just did something you find interesting. Some will aim to have it out as soon as possible, others might take a week or two and do a proper deep dive into it where the launch day stuff might be more on the superficial side.
Can be of old games, often people will find ones with a following or that are about to be rebooted.
Can be of mods ( https://www.moddb.com/ https://www.romhacking.net/ )
Generally if you are doing reviews then I would say make the review you would want to hear for you. Don't try to copy someone else's style, though by all means take pointers. Personally I would say also avoid the dull as dishwater IGN/gamespot/... review format where it is graphics, music, gameplay, final score type thing.
I have massive misgivings with a lot of what that guy says in many things but that is an interesting way of looking at game review approaches.
There are many styles of game review, some go in for the more edgy and meme focused approach ( https://www.youtube.com/c/SsethTzeentach/videos and
https://www.youtube.com/user/MandaloreGaming/videos?disable_polymer=1 being prime examples of that style), some will go more typical gamer (which might still get you called edgy), some will go for "kotaku and such have the right philosophy" approaches and others will go far more "family friendly" still.
Can also make mods (be they classic PC mods with tools, full bore hacking or something in the middle), and break games (though this is something of a technical skill).
Can also cover technical aspects of say map making (sight lines, AI pathing, how strategies work)
Some do play of games itself. This can be simple longplay (or supercut of longplay to highlight interesting parts), speedrun (normal or tool assisted), for a more creative game (minecraft is pretty saturated but think that) or competitive (helps to be competitive, though some cover it as news and others do intro to it all -- I have been doing games for 30 something years at this point, properly pulling them apart for some 15 of that, and would have no clue what goes for a competitive match of League of Legends for example), some do challenges (can you beat using only, without taking damage...).
History of those sorts of things, sometimes people will collate data, sometimes they will do their own research ( https://towardsdatascience.com/predicting-hit-video-games-with-ml-1341bd9b86b0 ). Companies, games, franchises, events (think history of E3), business, law making, and movements within games as a whole being viable targets for this one.
If you have a history in the game industry (dev, artist, tester, manager, business guy, marketing...) then many quite like hearing such stories, if you have other stories then talking over gameplay telling those is often done.
Capturing footage can be something to ponder in this. Newer hardware with HDMI is usually not so bad (I would even consider this for PC but software capture is a thing there), older stuff on the other hand is rather harder to do well (even more so as most older hardware these days have some devices that increase the quality considerably over old RF and composite), as are handhelds in many cases. Some go for emulation which might also have its own capture options and spare you messing with screen capture.
Editing videos can be done with more basic software, I like avisynth myself but I am weird so maybe consider kdenlive if you want to go with free software (it is very powerful when all is said and done).
TV shows tend to fail when brought to youtube and such. This is as most people seem to have adopted a truly information dense style where TV shows have to pad it out to fit within their slot and have advert breaks.
Most, myself included, would say get a good microphone and learn how to use it if you are going to be talking -- I will watch a 240p video but if it sounds like you are down the bottom of a well or are blowing my eardrums out then I am not coming back). There are some cheap ones out there (I quite like the playstation eye) but due to current world events such things are thinner on the ground. Showing your face or not is up to you and does not make an awful lot odds.
Getting yourself out there from scratch is hard. "Build it and they will come" is not really a thing and "the algorithm" is a fickle mistress indeed. Collaborations can work, exclusive news might get you something, cross posting on forums is generally seen as self promotion so harder to do, pitching a show for a magazine ( there are not many of them when you consider their various owners https://gbatemp.net/threads/the-201...-troubled-media-collection-sold-again.535563/ ). If you want to try your hand at getting popular on "alt tech" sites like bitchute, lbry and such then that is an option.
When you need artwork created and video edited, do not offer to "promote" them or "work for exposure" or to "collab". You have to pay them or you will find yourself ridiculed on /r/choosingbeggars. Again, do not try to get people to work for free because it will not work. It's become a problem in the past couple of years where people expect artwork, among other things, for free.
Great quality camera, good voice, high quality sound, effects and animations. Talk about games without showing your face too much.
Again that varies depending upon what you are doing.
If playing on a PC then screen capture is possible in software (your graphics card might even have an option for it, https://obsproject.com/ tending to be the basic one these days if not using graphics card based ones, older guides might use something called FRAPS, I am sure you have seen other video saying captured with unregistered hypercam or captured with bandicam but both of those are probably not what you want), or in hardware (I will cover external devices shortly, or you can make another PC, get a capture card, put an HDMI cable into it and use that, bonus there is the main PC then does not have to play games and capture at the same time)
Old PCs are a thing some do and these can be harder to capture -- VGA port capture is a thing but very expensive, and while they did make old graphics cards with HDMI they were generally laughed at when they were new, sold about 100 over the whole world and now all the kids are doing old PC games on old hardware said AGP cards but with DVI-D or HDMI out are now worth a fortune.
If doing emulators then they often have video capture all of their own, sometimes better than what a PC might give (note what button presses are happening, better quality maybe, if you get some slowdown it still knows what frames were happening so it in turn can store them)
If doing consoles then you want some kind of capture device, though it will depend what you are doing. There are standalone capture devices (el gato tending to be the bigger name, I don't like them myself and prefer more serious companies like Black Magic but I am prepared to have to buy extra stuff for that) and PC based ones that are just another card you put into your PC. You can use the standalone ones for PC as well. They tend to take HDMI in, capture things to SD cards or USB drives (possibly stream it as well) and go from there. Newer consoles might also stream video to something which you can capture and use for your final edits.
If doing older devices with RF cables, composite, SCART, component and various weird mods that people do to make better video output (see N64 RGB)
If doing mobile phones/tablets then many will capture things themselves, some precious few might still have some form of HDMI out but those are few and far between these days.
If doing handhelds then that varies. Some will have official forms of playing on the TV (see the GB player, also https://www.gc-forever.com/wiki/index.php?title=Game_Boy_Interface for what most use for GB, GBC and GBA games). Others will need hardware mods, newer devices (play DS on 3ds and use the hacked or hardware modded 3ds to capture play) which can be hard to find.
If you play multiplayer (one of my favourite series is the survive the hunt series) then you can record that for others to watch. You probably want to be good at it, or have an audience for something else that sees people just want to see your footage.
Some will capture footage from people they are playing with, some might have another player acting as a ghost or watching a map, if you want to capture voice chat from the games then yeah).
If you play creative games then you can do creative things. This is what a lot of Minecraft content will be about.
You can also follow updates to games.
If you play mods and have a laugh with friends ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3TjPHEcv_7tuT4eb7dO7KA has some nice example of this) then you can do that.
Some will use the footage to make short films in it, classically this is known as machinima.
If you want to play through a game then you can do that. Generally this is known as a longplay (contrasted usually to speedruns).
People will tend to make a distinction between runs with commentary and without.
Some will do a longplay but cut out the boring bits. Some will cut together all the times they died doing something silly.
Some will do it as a guide to a game as well.
If you want to do challenges in the play then so it goes.
Anyway once you have your video you can edit it how you please. I covered a few editors before. If you want to put a title card, credits and whatnot then you can do that, clip out the boring parts, maybe a subtitle or two to note what part of the game it is, clip out the parts where you died pointlessly, clip out the part where you sneezed,..., it makes it look a bit more professional (hopefully you can do animations, use GIMP/photoshop/paint.net/whatever to make such cards). You can do this with an utterly basic video editor. http://avidemux.sourceforge.net/ will do that happily.
If you want to add in other effects on top of the game then that might warrant a more potent video editor, and might start getting into the sorts of things people pay for. Though again I will point at kdenlive https://kdenlive.org/en/
If you need audio editing to fiddle with something (make it sound louder, get rid of some noise, add in a little sound effect, mute you when you sneezed...) then https://www.audacityteam.org/ is the general thing most start out with.
I would generally say it is hard to stand out in the videos of gameplay market. The hardest part for most there is they are 14 and want to do it but capture hardware costs a little bit of money, as does getting all the latest and greatest games that the kids are going nuts for. News, reviews, commentary and more are about the easiest thing you will probably get any growth in.
If you still want to do simple gameplay then commentary, challenges, silliness and more can offset that, and maybe you will just have really nice footage of games people want to see (though things like world of longplays have been doing this for a very long time).
Anyway that should cover that part.
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Really it boils down to one of two things: Having a fun, likable personality, and/or being really good at the games you're playing. People will stick around even if you're bad if they just enjoy the personality that comes through in your videos. Likewise, you'll likely retain an audience even without that personality if you're wildly good at the games you're playing. Generally personalities tend to be the more notable YouTubers, but because of that there is a ton of competition on the platform.
The best route would probably be to just make videos as a hobby, because you want to. If you keep at it, be consistent, and engage with the audience that you do have, your following has a much better chance of growing.
The best route would probably be to just make videos as a hobby, because you want to. If you keep at it, be consistent, and engage with the audience that you do have, your following has a much better chance of growing.
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Sonic Angel Knight:
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