The Death of the Video Game Let's Play

flashback to the year 2009 Obama has just been sworn in as the President of the United States the hit single of the year is the Black Eyed Peas boom boom pal YouTube still has a 15-minute time limit the most prolific things in the website are videos like Charlie bit my finger or Charlie the Unicorn the idea that anyone could turn making YouTube videos into their full-time job is barely a blip in anyone's imagination as the website remains primarily a place to share funny or interesting videos with your friends at the time I was still a starry-eyed kid free from the cynicism of adult life my biggest gripe at the time was that my parents wouldn't let me play video games on school days like many other kids I turn to the next best thing watching other people play video games on the internet I have very fond memories of rushing home from school immediately sitting myself in front of the family computer in the living room and hastily pulling up the newest episode of Chugga Conroy's Paper Mario the Thousand-Year Door let's play to this day Paper Mario ttyd remains one of my favorite RPGs it's always amazed me how this experience became something of a cultural Touchstone among a certain group of people born in the late 90s and early 2000s so many of us have fond memories of watching video game Let's Plays back when we were kids at a time when screen capture of technology for game consoles wasn't widespread so creators had to Point Physical cameras at the console to record the video so many of us made our own terribly recorded and narrated gameplay videos in our own feudal attempt to become hit let's players ourselves but now in 2023 the let's play is effectively a dead art form choco Conroy is one of the few of the Old Guard of that era that has continued creating strictly let's play content over the years I have a lot of respect for Chugga Conroy in an age where internet Fame seemingly drives so many people to the most bizarre narcissistic attention-seeking borderline sociopathic Behavior choco kanawa has always seemed refreshingly grounded and wholesome for someone of his degree of Internet Fame at his core you can just tell he's a guy who loves playing games and sharing that passion for video games with others at the same time it's an undeniable truth that his channel is far from a red hot success these days despite having nearly 1.3 million subscribers his videos rarely break into the six-figure view counts most of the other creators who got famous doing let's plays like PewDiePie or Markiplier have soared past trigger Conroy in subscriber and view count largely by abandoning traditional Let's Plays and diversifying into other types of content given the current landscape on YouTube it's hard to conclude anything other that the let's play is a relic of a bygone age of the internet much like Rage Comics or grumpy cat but why is this how did Let's Plays rise to such success in the early 2010s only to become almost completely irrelevant by the end of that same decade for starters I want to Define what I mean by let's play for our purposes a let's play is a pre-recorded long-form video of someone playing a video game typically with a voice commentary that features limited editing tokano's videos are pretty much the platonic idea of this conception of a let's play the moderate idea of the let's play a way of sort of spiritually sharing and unadulterated experience of playing a video game with some third party is said to have originated on the something awful Forum with the user slow beef he and other users on the Forum would go on to post screenshots and text descriptions of themselves playing various games eventually this idea would make its way into video with people like choco Conroy beginning to experiment with uploading videos of themselves playing games or making voice commentary and uploading those videos to YouTube the biggest draw of this kind of content is in the name let's play or let us play if you're interested in some game but can't play it for whatever reason let's say you're a kid who doesn't make their own money or maybe you don't have the right console or maybe you just want to see if the game is right for you watching a let's play was the closest you're going to get to playing that game in question while I found let's players like Chugga Conway very entertaining otherwise I wouldn't have watched so many of his videos it was ultimately always still about the game I basically religiously watched every episode of Let's Plays from Paper Mario the Thousand Year Door unto Okami I stopped watching during his Okami playthrough largely because I just wasn't that interested in Okami as a game in an age before internet distribution cross-platform releases readily accessible emulators and piracy watching a let's play was the closest you could get to playing many types of games you wouldn't ordinarily get access to but we really started to see Let's Plays explode in popularity during the early 2010s I suspect this was due to changes in YouTube's recommendation algorithms and business practices in the early days of YouTube the platform had a big issue with click bait not in the way we currently use that term to refer to videos with titles and thumbnails that are overly hyperbolic or provocative to the point of obnoxiousness but more so in the conventional sense where people would upload videos so it promise one thing like Titanic full movie part 1 and then you would click into it and it would just be a JPEG or something but because the algorithm put a lot of emphasis on clicks and view counts these kinds of clickbait videos would become widely circulated at some point the algorithm was tweaked to emphasize click-through rate less and to put greater focus on retention rather than just needing to get people to click on your video you also needed to get them to stick around and watch the video the longer the average viewer watches your video The Better YouTube thinks that video is so they recommend that to more people as a YouTube as a company became more mature and more focused on generating sustainable Revenue longer videos logically fit into that business plan logger videos allow the platform to run more ads and thus generate more Revenue so it's no wonder that that's the kind of content YouTube started to push nowadays long form videos of 30 minutes or even several hours in length are very common but back in the day YouTube still had a time limit on video uploads users were originally restricted to uploading videos 10 minutes in length then that was expanded to 15 minutes before the time limit was gradually phased out in 2011. back in 2011 the idea that people would one day make full-time careers out of regularly publishing long-form YouTube videos seemed like a Fantastical idea the platform was still largely focused around shorter typically humorous videos this was back when Nigahiga and Fred were some of the platform's biggest names I don't think anyone really expected that we would someday reach a point where people would regularly put out four hour long video essays about something like SpongeBob's depiction of capitalism or whatever and those videos would proceed to get millions of views back in those days there weren't that many people consistently putting out videos of 15 plus minutes in length that is except for the let's players the let's play was a format that was perfectly suited to this changing Dynamic on YouTube Let's Plays our relatively low effort to produce allowing creators to regularly put out videos of long lengths they also naturally lend themselves to binge watching as people would frequently want to watch the many parts of a let's play together in one sitting or put them on as background noise while they did something else leading to high levels of retention it's this combination of factors that propelled Let's Plays to massive popularity in the early 2010s PewDiePie's let's play of games like Amnesia or Minecraft rapidly shot him into stardom turning him into the platform's most subscribed channel for a while in 2013. others like chuku Convoy Markiplier jacksepticeye or the game grumps also saw rapid growth making similar videos during this time period but by the mid-2010s it was clear that purely focusing on traditional let's play style content was not going to be sustainable in the long run I argue that this was largely a combination of two factors specifically changes in the online video environment combined of changes in the preferences of consumers the biggest shock to the system was the development of live streaming in 2007 a group of young Yale graduates would launch Justin.tv a website that originally just featured a single video feed of founder Justin Khan wearing a webcam attached to a baseball cap four years later what's in like a quirky internet project would turn into twitch.tv now the internet's most famous and prolific live streaming platform from the beginning the biggest use case for twitch has been video game streaming Twitch Plays Pokemon became a veritable internet sensation in 2014 spawning an entire subculture of memes and in-jokes at the end of its original run of Pokemon Red Twitch Plays Pokemon accrued over 6.5 million Channel views twitch also became the go-to platform for the budding Esports industry the early 2010s were around the time that we started to see Esports evolve from being some Niche thing for sweaty neckbeards to a legitimate professional competition that could rival traditional sports leagues and of course for our purposes the most relevant development was the emergence of casual video game streamer from the beginning it was evident that twitch and live streaming posts an existential threat to the Enterprise of YouTube Let's Plays we can see this in the Google search Trends interest for Let's Plays slowly Rose before peaking in 2013 to 2014 where it started to gradually Peter out whereas at that same time in 2013 is when interest in twitch started to rapidly take off being able to watch video game live streams invalidated one of the biggest aspects of the Let's Plays value proposition namely being able to experience a game you haven't otherwise play it rather than having to wait for gameplay to come out slowly in 10 to 30 minute chunks you could just tune into a stream and watch someone play the game for several hours in one sitting live streaming is also uniquely interactive this is something I would touch on a bit more later but the parasocial value of Let's Plays was also greatly diminished in the face of live streaming in tandem with the Riots of live streaming and twitch was the rapid oversaturation of let's play and gaming content more generally on YouTube any Bozo with a 100 USB mic and screen capture software couldn't make their own Let's Plays the rationale here is rather simple to understand I'm willing to bet that basically anyone who watched Let's Plays back in the day at least thought once that maybe they could do it too after all it doesn't seem that hard you don't need to have any kind of fancy cameras video editing or cinematography skills all you have to do is be able to talk into a microphone while you play video games how hard could that be as it turns out being able to be entertaining enough to differentiate yourself from the tens of thousands of other gaming channels is actually extremely hard given the enormously crowded field of gaming channels there were a couple of ways creators managed to find success the first was that certain creators like Chaka Conroy had the first mover Advantage which is probably why he's been able to continue making almost the exact same style of videos since 2008. it sounds obvious but the way to stand out from the vast sea of gaming videos was to make more entertaining videos you needed tighter editing with your commentary better production values but in a kind of ship of Theseus Manor eventually all those changes culminated in a final product that was fundamentally very different even if you could still see some of those let's play Origins phase to have pressure both externally from live streaming and internally from an increasingly saturated gaming content Market it was increasingly clear by the the mid-2010s that let's plays were no longer a viable Niche for sustaining a large Channel or growing a new one this is also around the time that we started to see a quiet shift among consumers occur namely increasing the importance of parasocial relationships between consumers and content creators to back up and explain what I mean by this for the uninitiated a parasocial relationship is a term that was coined by two sociologists in 1956. they observed that many people formed intimate relationships with performers they saw on television despite the fact that they had never personally met or interacted with these people essentially what we start to see in the mid-2010s is that [ __ ] from people viewing content for the content itself to a more personality driven ecosystem where people are watching videos primarily for the Persona behind them rather than the content of the video itself I'd argued that the let's play initially emerged due to more practical concerns the internet and gaming ecosystem were very different in 2011 the idea of watching a video playthrough of someone else playing a game was a novel concept at that point for people my age who are kids or young teenagers when Let's Plays were taking off in popularity watching let's play has had an obvious utilitarian purpose presumably most of us didn't have unlimited money to buy all the games he wanted to play or we had parents who restricted how much we could play games so we had to settle for watching Let's Plays watching Let's Plays was also a good way to see how a game played and determine whether or not you might be interested in picking it up for yourself but by the mid-2010s the group that came of age during the Heyday of Let's Plays were now older teenagers and adults we can now buy games of our own money we didn't need to vicariously experience gameplay through someone else the same way we needed to when we were 10 or 12. the mid-2010s were also when free to play games and mobile gaming started to take off for the younger Zoomers who are starting to play games at this point they could play free games like Roblox or whatever ever on their iPad they didn't necessarily need to watch other people play games either this touches on another Trend that I suspect plays to get another nail in the coffin of the let's play namely the rise of live service games the early 2010s was when we started to see the emergence of the live service game model rather than producing a standalone game that's purchased once and meant to be played for 15 to 20 hours live service games are meant to be played indefinitely games like Dota 2 League of Legends or CS go all came out in the early 2010s and have become some of the biggest video games in existence this major shift of players into live service games brought with it a major shift in the video game content ecosystem namely it brought about a whole new class of creators who built their followings around playing some specific game something that was only made possible because of the intense popularity and long life spans of these new live service games this shift towards live service games only further deluded the utilitarian function of let's plays as fewer people needed to regularly discover or seek out new games if they're just constantly rage queuing up hundreds of games of solo queue the other Niche that let's play served namely being one of the few types of long-form content and you could use for idle background noise or to help yourself fall asleep or something was wrestled Away by a large number of other long-form videos whether they be video essays or challenge playthroughs of specific games or retrospective videos what we see during the mid-2010s is that many of the people who came to prominence during the let's play Boom Diversified their content Beyond just let's play videos PewDiePie is a good example of this 2014 was around the time that he started to slowly transition his content out of being purely let's play focus with the exception of Chugga Conroy who has truly stayed the path for 15 years basically the entire initial crop of let's players has moved away from this format and for good reason when you look at the types of people who are successfully able to transition away from Let's Plays like PewDiePie what you see is that people were really watching these videos for the Persona behind the videos not primarily or even secondarily for the game that was being played if the Practical value of let's plays as a medium to do things like explore new games replaced by live streaming what you're really left with is just the personality making and commentating the videos and at that point there's no real reason to continue making let's play content this is a trend that's become increasingly prominent over time that viewers are increasingly seeking kinds of parasocial relationships of content creators or at least the Persona that they give off in their videos that's why just chatting has exploded in popularity as a category on Twitch if viewers aren't primarily tuning in for the content of the game being played why even go through the exercise sides of playing a game as the streamer when you can just talk directly to chat which is really why people are there in the first place people love to [ __ ] on react content as low effort because it is but the proliferation of the widespread success of react content is a symptom of a broader change in consumption preferences because people are not often watching creators for the content itself it doesn't really matter what that content is or how lower high quality it is this is why they can get away with making so much react content I have my own beef with how the content ecosystem has evolved I don't think it's particularly healthy for either the creators nor the viewers to have manufactured authenticity in parasocial relationships become the primary draw of content creation but that's a video for another time all things considered we are inundated with high quality gaming content you can find highly detailed in-depth guides about even the most obscure Mechanics for almost any game you want you can find hours long retrospectives or in-depth analysis on basically any popular game release you can think of you can find lengthy videos where people document themselves playing any number of games in highly sub-optimal ways just for the challenge the kind of let's play s content of old is still out there but it's morphed into a more highly edited tightly paced version than the unadulterated commentaries of the past my Nostalgia for the let's plays in my childhood is perhaps a Nostalgia for a bygone era of the internet before platforms like YouTube became heavily commercialized back when people made YouTube videos as a fun hobby not because they have a financial obligation to do so in order to feed themselves and their family the quality of content that we get these days might be objectively better but nothing will really match the wholesome naivete of the late 2000s early 2010s YouTube but the funny thing about YouTube is that most content will remain on the platform form forever thus all let's players from the 2000s will presumably always be there a stark reminder of an age long since past [Music]

Channel: Gomi-San

Views: 2,074

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Id: WIggXOOa5RE

Length: 20min 11sec (1211 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 23 2023