Ah, I sure do love never being able to find reliable information on games because honest reviews and helpful content is drowned in a sea of AI low-effort slop that can’t even sort videogames into proper categories (no, Overwatch is not an MMORPG) or low-effort undisclosed ads
Ever since CGW stopped publishing, I’ve just gone back to going by word of mouth. If a real, actual person is telling me in their own words a thing is good or bad, I generally trust them. Especially if they are someone I actually know personally, or at least have shown themselves to have similar tastes to mine.
And obviously if something becomes super popular, I gotta see what the fuss is about if it also seems like something I would like.
“Gaming Youtube” is the same as any other form of media.
If you only watch trash reality TV then “Television is dead”. Whereas, if you only watch prestige TV on FX and AMC you’ll complain that “the sitcom is dead”. And if you only watch NBC or whatever the fuck… you’ll wonder why tim allen hasn’t had his legs broken by the dealers he narced on. Err, where was I?
Anyway. It is the same here. If you just watch whoever has the most views you are going to get the bottom of the barrel trash entertainment because it is specifically designed to cater to people who are browsing, watch for five minutes, then leave it on while it is still going.
Whereas you can also put a bit of work in. Find creators you do like. Yes, there is a massive discoverability problem (that gets worse with every major update…) but watching a VOD that appeals to you and maybe googling to find out if they were “cancelled” yet goes a long way. And, in that regard, people like Mortismal and Iron Pineapple are WAY better than anything we saw a decade or two ago.
Which is no different than TV. Nobody expected the TV show about the dad from Malcolm in the Middle becoming a drug dealer to be one of the greatest shows ever made (in that it gave us Better Call Saul but…). But people watched an episode or two and then listened when everyone else on the planet said “the first season is weird but it gets REALLY good by like episode five or six”.
Or… we can just do clickbait “Everything new sucks except for me” content.
All shit like this does is indicate how little the creators think of their viewerbase… And the fact that people think this is “true” means said creators are right to assume the worst.
Major difference is that TV and your examples aren’t a firehose free for all of content. There is at least a minor barrier to entry. Which helps stem some of the tide at least.
WAY better than anything we saw a decade or two ago.
I take offense to this on behalf of TotalBiscuit, otherwise carry on.
You mean the prick who was one of the biggest voices legitimizing the Gamergate crowd who couldn’t even be bothered to speak against the harassment toward devs and games media? The guy whose entire claim to fame was screaming about “lazy devs” in an era where it was still kind of a miracle to even get a PC port of most games?
Regardless of him being a piece of shit, his content creation style was still very much “yell into a camera” similar to Sterling but with a lot fewer skits. That is still a popular style but plenty of youtubers outright build up scripts because they want to tell a narrative about the game they are playing or reviewing. Mandalore is a great example of that.
Which is similar to the old single camera sitcoms. There is a lot of charm to it but there is a reason the vast majority switched to multi-cam setups. And a lot of that is a mix of budget and just being able to do cooler stuff.
The core problem is if you have people’s attention that is worth money, and it will always be a corrupting influence in any medium.
So what you’re saying is, the core problem is Capitalism. As usual.
No… this is a human problem. Anyone with attention can wield it, people with agenda covet it
I mean the same is true of Youtube or “content creator” culture as a whole, only the money pile there is too big to have imploded (so far).
I used to enjoy Gmod/SFM animations, but that content naturally takes months of work for people to put out. That was okay because there were dozens of amateurs always releasing their own things; but now, the trend is for weekly or even more frequent videos, which means animators need to rush to put out trendy 8 second shorts, switch to low-effort mediums like Let’s Plays, or just stop getting visitors entirely.
Every so often, I find a great animator that’s sitting in the last category getting their detailed animations quashed, and I get to see the 3 videos they’ve put out in the last 5 months; still wish YouTube could put them in my recommendations.
Birth a gaming Peertube.
This solves nothing if the goal is engagement. Any engagement in corporate properties is a form of engagement which promotes the media being presented. A corporate sponsored video is a corporate sponsored video, regardless of the platform.
Why should the goal be engagement? Why not have the person provide the media for free via Peertube and accept that capitalism is bad?
Because it takes time and money to make Content.
I’ll stop you right there: I don’t give a shit if they pirate every single game they play. It doesn’t matter. Because, even amongst the streamers, you are looking at hours of prep per game (to dial in settings, weird streaming hiccups, etc) and on the VOD side it is generally accepted that you have hours of footage and editing for every minute of Content.
And all of that costs money. Being able to stay up late to write a script to make that Dark Souls run really cool? Doing insane after-effects editing to do a stupid joke star wipe? Or just playing the same cutscene over and over so that you can get the right background NPC for your gag. That takes time.
And you know what helps with time? Money. Which comes from revenue and “engagement”.
And this is very demonstrable. Plenty of youtubers and streamers have very clear differences from their early work to their new work. A great example is Michael Reeves (who I assume is not cancelled just yet but…). His early videos are awesome. They also are incredibly low budget and often rushed. Whereas his newer videos (even the one where he just drives around in a sandstorm for a while…) have ridiculously good production values and involve some real feats of engineering. The difference? Before he was part time flunking out of school and tutoring for a living. Now? He… nobody is really sure how Michael Reeves makes money but I assume OTV pays him a good salary for showing up a few times a year?
Also: People vastly underestimate how much storage and bandwidth is required for video. Which is why peertube and the like basically exist for proof of concept one offs and for companies to fork and use in their own products.
You’re not wrong.
But I point it out because a lot of these decisions to create freer platforms without advertising puts the cost of creation on the creator without a way for them to make money. People want their high quality content without paying for it.
Ideally it wouldn’t be, but corporations will use whatever video platform is popular to pump out videos designed to increase engagement because to them it’s advertising. They will try and sponsor their content on whichever content creator is on said platform with a large audience.
How does doing it again under a different URL change anything? Or do you inherently fail to understand that the problem isn’t about a specific site?
They want people to work for free to entertain them?
