Gameplay videos instead of demos
Back in the day, if you wanted to try out a game before buying it, you would download the demo. But as demos are now almost extinct and most gamers just pre-order games based on faith, the Youtube gaming community has helped solve this problem out quite a bit.
Games are an expensive proposition. With average prices hovering at about 60$, it’s kind of hard to afford to buy a game purely by watching a trailer and having faith that it wont suck.
And that is probably the reason why so many gamers tune in to Youtube to check out the gameplay before they buy it.
Pewdiepie, the highest paid Youtuber, made $15 million in 2016, by mostly making playthroughs of video games.
A personal viewpoint
Of course it’s not just the gameplay itself that’s shown on these channels, it’s also the personal input of the youtuber that’s making them. Some of them (like Pewdiepie) have become sort of cult personalities whose opinions about certain games matter to their subscribers and probably influence their decisions on whether to buy the game or not.
This can make a good game look bad or a bad game look good, depending on how entertaining the video is and how much the author is emotionally invested in it. But despite this fact, these channels attract a huge crowd and in turn, games get a large amount of exposure from them.
Some clever editing and humor can go a long way
When people tune-in to a let’s play channel to see what the game is like, they usually stay for the entertainment itself. Not only does this promote the game itself, it also allows the channel to build his audience and in turn becomes a sort of entertaining review.
This, in turn, creates exposure for the game, or condemns it based on how the channel feels about it and in some cases this actually works better than a demo. Because demos used to show only a short portion of the game, they sometimes failed to deliver the same level of quality on the full release, but with let’s play videos, the player may choose to see a lot of the actual game before actually buying it.
So in short, it’s no wonder why so many people watch these videos, as it’s a mutually beneficial relationship between their need to buy the game, their want for entertainment and the channel’s need for viewership.
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