The Truth About MMO Content Creators

the mmorpg genre has millions of players across multiple games from major studio releases to the more niche markets and yet as a genre it has relatively few content creators there are a handful of general mmo channels covering the genre as a whole several video essay channels who touch on mmos from time to time and then specialized channels who focus on a specific game but when you compare the mmorpg content creator roster to larger genres like first person shooters or battle royales even individual games like minecraft or league of legends we are relatively small the truth is i want more people to start making mmo content but there are some harsh truths you should know before starting so why aren't there more general mmo content creators why aren't new up-and-coming youtubers flooding into this market and what's affecting the quality and quantity of the content that the current content creators can put out let's find out welcome i'm josh streif hayes and in this video i'm going to pull back the curtain on mmorpg content creation full expose style i'll be talking to several other mmo content creators about their process and the challenges they face if you've ever watched any mmo content creator either general genre focused or game specific and thought ah why do all these guys suck we need better creators then this video is for you because put simply we want more people to make mmo content but we also need to be honest with you about what you're getting yourself into this isn't me complaining about my job i think i have the best job in the world and i'm privileged to be able to create content on a genre i love so much this video is simply a look at the reality of the challenges you will face creating content within the mmo arena for this video i reached out to and interviewed several other youtubers who cover general mmo content several who specialize in one specific mmo game and several general entertainment channels whose work includes mmos these channels include asmon gold kira tv the lazy peon mmo bite work to game ginger prime callum upton zeppler brosem wicked whiz many kudos rage darling the mighty teapot and nerd slayer i sat down and spoke to each of these creators at length about seven specific issues i feel mmo content creators face one the actual audience size of the mmo market in relation to the general gaming world two the toxic response of extreme fans to critique of their game three the risks of being a general genre channel versus specializing into a single game four the sheer amount of time it takes to finish an mmo rpg five the time-sensitive nature of mmos pushing creators to make repetitive videos or focus on speed over depth six the viability of first impression videos and why the genre is strange in its celebrated design trope of end game and seven the difference in playing to critique and playing to enjoy unfortunately i haven't been able to include the complete interview with every creator because doing that would make this video over seven hours long so i've had to edit them down to succinct answers no one has been edited to appear out of context or to provide a false narrative away from their true feelings the lazy peon was unable to talk via audio but he did provide a complete list of answers to me so those will be read in because of the need to be thorough and give each creator time to explain their position this needed to be a long video so grab a drink and settle in as we discuss the truth behind mmo content creators as usual a massive thank you to all the supporters on patreon and twitch who help keep this channel alive more information on how you can support at the end for now let's begin the first issue is the total size of the audience actually consuming mmo content let's start simple why don't the mainstream gaming news have detailed coverage on mmorpgs well you might get the occasional review on final fantasy 14 and its massive multi-million pound expansions or the cinematic trailers for the elder scrolls online you won't find pc gamer discussing the monthly runescape patch notes or print newspaper articles about the nerfs and buffs of neverwinter as an mmo fan it can be important to step back and realize while the genre has passionate fans the average person may not even know what the acronym mmo means games like call of duty candy crush and fifa simply appeal to far more people if gaming magazines were still the primary form of distributing gaming news the editor would have to make a decision about what news deserves front page space or even major article space within the magazine and the mmo genre would never be the first choice now print media is dying but the principle remains the same with digital front page space is still limited on a website while a gaming news site may be able to host an article about mmos it just won't get as many views as an article about say apex legends or minecraft this means reporting on mmos is often too niche for major news sites so you have the more focused sites like mmobomb or massively op while these sites do a great job of reporting on the mmo world they don't have the funding of the major sites what this means is while individual creators can find levels of success there's far less fame and fortune in mmo content than in other genres mmo videos are often produced by individuals not teams and this impacts both the quality and quantity of content the individuals need to play the games themselves record the footage write the scripts record the voiceover edit it and then upload it and all this takes time now large corporations can crank out endless daily content with extremely high production values about popular games because they know those videos will be consumed by the gaming masses while there are standout creators who have been able to produce high quality content like settled with his old school runescape series those videos take weeks sometimes months to create and a career on youtube needs you to make consistent high quality videos the mmo content creation landscape is simply much smaller scale than many realize oh absolutely and and that's the same with anything it's it's basically like concentric circles that become smaller the more that you get into it and i use this analogy whenever i was talking about pay to win in games it's that you know you have like the circle of people that play the game to circle people that consume content for the game the circle people consume content for the game that they play that care about this topic and then inside of that are the people that are actually willing to do something about it so whenever you actually get down into it i think that's very much the case and the mmos i think are a very interesting type of uh of genre because a lot of people that play mmos are i think a little bit more like nostalgic for how things were versus like maybe shooters or rpg games as a whole and because of that i think that you see a lot more of an aversion towards like the social media you know phenomenon and like the youtube videos and content creators and i've seen more pushback towards content creators in mmos than i have in a bunch of other content and a bunch of other types of what do you call it types of genres of games you will sometimes run into people that play the game or have played the game but it's not so big that it's all encompassing everyone's heard about this and i feel like generally especially even for like very um experienced warframe players people are pretty comfortable with that warframe is a game that is kind of one of the ones that's it's big but nobody talks about it yeah i think it's massively overestimated the size and for for one key reason the players play multiple mmos but they only really have one mmo that they call home whenever we see like new mmos coming out you see existing like player bases just moving from mmo to mmo and i think it's unfair to look at the population size from like a net total of all popular mmos because most people are jumping from one to the next and i think that's the main factor for me at least in thinking that the the audience isn't as big as we think because like you say it's an even smaller audience that watch the content but that's a more true audience because it's it's one youtube account you know to watch all the mmo content i think that's why we see a much smaller sample size in content creation the idea that within just the label of mmorpg that there is actually any idea of a community i think the term mmorpg community is in and of itself an oxymoron it's not to insult people who love mmorpgs but you can just go out to any heck the main subreddit but any uh you know space mmos are like i think almost in a way tribal by nature and by business model but uh within that space then you're also you could talk about within people who enjoy the content like not just play the games but enjoy the content people who then go about and share their opinion in a comment or a tweet or even post on the reddit or even the fraction of a fraction of a fraction and so mmorpgs are very niche in general whenever you're doing anything you're basically a niche within a nation it's you're talking about fractions of percentages of player bases it's definitely much smaller than what people would would think from the actual player numbers i think the twitch viewer numbers whenever a new mmo has released has shown there are a lot of people interested in mmos waiting for the next big thing new world plus lost arc or examples 1 million players at launch close to 1 million twitch viewers the interest is there however the next gen quality mmo that people are waiting for isn't the hive leader who used to do mm-hmm oriented videos and then he left to pursue more comic related more generalized gaming videos because he knew that the mmo scene was continuing to stagnate and my hairdresser that i go to every month she has uh friends that have children they're all gamers they play things like fortnite like pub g he's pursuing uh content creation himself he has a channel that's got i think like 20 or 30 000 views so she asked me hey mark what did what what kind of advice do you have for him and i'm like well what kind of videos does he do because i do mmo related content and then asked her to clarify with me what exactly an mmo is so then i said it's it's a massively multiplayer game and he goes oh so it's like fortnite we live in a bubble it feels like everything is so massive and big to us and popular especially when we get a new game now it's like even if it's not a triple a game we're just like wow look at this new game like it's like but when you look at a lot of our barriers which i think are just some of them natural right progression takes time some more time investment you look at the difficulties of the games in many cases have been too hard to even attract the right kind of audience and having a stable internet connection and in some cases being willing to pay the subscription fee has been things that have been huge barriers that have kept the audience smaller and feels like that content is big because our influence is big right we influence every other genre every other genre wants to be like us in some ways but i don't think we actually move the needle which is kind of what you're saying as much as people might think if you were talking to like a mum and you were like hey um i play an mmorpg they'd be like what's that is that like fortnite because a concept of an mmo is massively multiplayer online so it gives that false perception that there are so many people to populate but in reality it really isn't i think there's a small amount of gamers that play mmorpgs regularly it's interesting that 50 to 70 000 seems like a lot of people because it actually isn't i think there's like eight million people playing fortnite right now and that's that's a lot of people even just talking to a friend his idea of an mmo came from what was that show big bang theory i know i mean i've not really watched much of it but i can already tell that it's it's probably toned down quite a lot it it's probably a lot harder for the general audience to understand what an mmo is and then to describe that in a very simplistic way i can see that being a challenge in of itself because i i don't really see mmo's being talked about too much to be honest besides youtube if you have five six seven friends an mmo can feel very lively it can feel that's not 12 million like we're talking six i could fit in a large suv like it's that's what it takes and some of these games call for 25 like they don't take this big thing um but there's so many ways to play and they're such big games that you end up honed in with your little group of like eight or so and that ends up defining your experience somebody can have a bad guild experience and can quit an mmo even though that was really based on probably two or three out of like 20 people that put the bad taste in their mouth so i think not only are they not that big but they don't have to be that big i think in recent years that has started to shift a little bit i think i felt like that more longer ago than maybe in the past couple years because i mean recently we've seen a lot of hype and a lot of publicity around lost our new world like last year there was a massive media frenzy about the wow exodus i don't know maybe my perspective is distorted because i'm in this community and i'm and so when i see a lot of news about f-14 i'm like oh well everybody's clearly talking about my game is big and getting bigger uh but that i'm not sure if i can give an honest answer to that while i'm so entrenched within this bubble right like can i can i be really objective about that when i can't i'm like i'm i'm knee deep in it so the people and few organizations who are making mmo content are often much smaller but now let's look at who we're making content for and i'd like to focus on the general mmo content style overviews of many games and not specializing into a single game yet an mmo is designed to be played for many hundreds or thousands of hours they are multi-year-long experiences and because of this it's difficult to fully commit to multiple if you're playing world of warcraft for eight hours a day seven days a week you're not going to be able to find the time to also play eight hours of the elder scrolls online every day and guild wars 2 and runescape this means the most hardcore players of any mmo are often committed to that one game while they may dabble in others they do not know it to the extent of their main game they know every aspect of that game they are in effect an authority on that game the real danger with extreme fans is when that game becomes more than a game to them it becomes a character trait a lifestyle or in extreme cases a lifeline mmos are designed to be able to exploit addictive personalities and in some cases players with anti-social personalities or social issues in real life will retreat into the mmo world and the mmo world can become more real to them than reality meaning any critique or review of their mmo is seen as a personal attack against them now all hobbies have the toxic extremists within them but the mmo genre is uniquely designed to be played for thousands of hours and to give you a second reality to immerse yourself in while hobbies such as painting or running or cooking can be immersive and people can certainly build personalities around them they don't encourage or facilitate the creation of a totally separate reality in the way mmos do this can lead to hardcore players becoming so deeply isolated within their game's subculture that it can begin to feel like the game is the biggest thing in the world everyone they know plays it everyone they know likes it existing within that social bubble of an mmo game can slowly warp a player's perception of how important that game is or status within that game is to everyone else and then a reviewer or content creator comes along and makes a video on that game unless that reviewer is one of the hardcore fans themselves and already has thousands of hours in that game the fans will look at the review and ask what gives you the authority to review my game hardcore fans will want to be represented and critiqued by someone just as experienced and committed as them and while that's totally understandable from a gaming content perspective it can mean any review from a reviewer with fewer hours invested than the hardcore player base gets immediately discarded hobbies are of course important and a variety of hobbies allows you to experience a variety of things in your life but a hobby should always enhance your life and not become it or trap it extended time inside a virtual world can sometimes blur the lines between virtual and reality i'm not saying you shouldn't be proud of the achievements you have within games but you shouldn't confuse them with meaningful life progression outside of the game when an mmo game becomes someone's main source of socializing or of personal pride through virtual achievements reviews especially negative ones can be met with extreme abusive or in some cases dangerous backlash i think i've been dealing with that for the last five years probably longer than that i i think it's just the case is because it's again like it's what you said whenever you attack the game you attack their identity because so much of their identity is tied up with the game that whenever you say that this game is bad well whenever you've invested ten thousand hours into a game but then somebody tells you that it's bad you started getting a little bit of effectively buyer's remorse what did i spend ten thousand of my hours for what i spend my life on the past 10 years if it's bad you can't tell me that i wasted all my time on something that's bad so i think people do take it very personally i think that also content creators there are just some nuances to making content with like mmos that are more unique than it would be for other genres so like for example uh you know people gift you items and people are able to like help you get certain things and i think that does create a certain amount of animosity with people that want to use mmos and video games as a whole is that video games used to be that great equalizer for a lot of people who didn't necessarily have a lot of opportunities to maybe be successful in real life or do something uh you know that's noteworthy in real life they could go to a video game and be put on an even playing field with somebody who made a million dollars a year or somebody who was six foot eight or something like that the big issue with the hyper and franchise players and i was this at one point i mean i've been covering warframe for for honestly a large part of it i was out of touch with the usual player and i feel like that's where most people will get to whenever you have spent enough time in a game that you kind of don't remember learning how to play it and you spend a lot of time around these friend groups like you said that are also in the game and very experienced you can begin to see yourself as being the average player when in most cases if you're a long-term member of a community that is spending you know multiple days a week on a game you are not the average player of that game and the other side of that which is the much more unreasonable and very toxic which is that you will begin to view yourself as the player that matters most where your feedback is the one that's important it's the one that the devs should pay attention to the new content should be for you an mmo becomes your your second life you know this is where you want to spend all your time and with mmos just shifting and dying constantly it's like this big cycle of just churning through the next mmo people don't want their mmo that they've found as a home to die and that they they almost like protect it like a child and it leads to like you've said this before tribalism where your opinion may be completely valid but they don't want it to be valid if there are big flaws in a game like new world which there were we both exposed humongous flaws with that game the community will rally and try and you know pull it under their wing and protect it and say yeah but it's early days where we're actually advocating for them to get a better version of the game that they bought you know the version that they were promised they don't see it that way they see it as us you know slowly knocking the nail into the coffin have i felt the like the sting uh from the mmo community well yeah like not maybe just their identity but it's their community the perception that you might be preventing others from checking out their game it is there's a risk it's this weird gatekeeping mentality where you're going to say what we want you to say within this here's the approved space and we're also not going to let we're not going to talk about it in this way because we don't want these type of players you know coming into our space you know like i want and i believe that honesty and authenticity within content is more important than somebody's feelings about a game i'm not sure i'd say that it's it's drastically more i think maybe percentages i think once you get into like the hard cause then then probably and they're they're probably are more hardcores in mmos just because the time investment but yeah i think it's probably worse than other games in general i would just say just do whatever makes you happy and then just don't read the comments there were death threats a few years ago when i made a negative video about final fantasy xiv the video was awful to be fair but still so gaming was an outlet for me i made a lot of friends in them i ended up preferring that to the life that i was living so i can understand how these people are going from their life you know they might live uh work a nine-to-five job that they hate they come home and they get into this game where there's someone powerful the more the kind of scene that we paint is different to the to the grand image that they have of the game so i can understand how they feel that we're personally attacking like a part a major part of their life with regards to how that's going to potentially affect new content creators if your views don't necessarily align with the vocal majority then they are going to crucify you it doesn't matter what you say what kind of defense that you have they will hate on you and attack your views and your opinions regardless uh so this is i feel like you and i both probably have a similar answer in the sense that we probably have a lot of experiences with uh this sort of thing so i'm gonna try to keep it as short as i can because unfortunately uh we both have series that basically even just by reading the name um can make you mad um negative experiences that come to mind for me specifically have to be a fantasy 14 fans um in almost any capacity they mean well but sometimes by meaning well they do so much harm and i think that that's uh obviously something we're probably talking about here in a sense as the hyperend franchise fans can actually make their game a lot less accessible um so i'll say like final fantasy 14 fans were an example of that and also um i find it a lot in role play-centric games like spotor for example it's a very role-play-centric game so for role players they're looking and trying to play the game in a completely different way so they don't care about a lot of the same concerns that i might have or you might have or someone else might have right who's playing it for more than just role play i've got quite a unique position i think creating content with world of warcraft because the overall perspective of wow is quite negative you know hyphen in franchise fans actually not liking the game and so when i do say something positive about the game because the game is actually really good in certain elements they don't like that if you think something else is good or something else is bad your opinion is invalidated if your opinion doesn't follow the cult group opinion of the game you're alienated and it almost feels like you're causing trouble by speaking your mind it's kind of like going against the grain and if you go against what they are already thinking then it doesn't matter what you say your opinion's invalidated it doesn't mean anything because it's not what they already think of the game yeah this is an absolute classic one this is a topic i actually really like to talk about on stream i try and push back against it as much as i possibly can because i think it's ultimately incredibly uh self-destructive actually to mmo communities like when you look at you know if you look at a game and you go wait these guys are like a cult or you're like wait do i really want to play do i want to get into this it looks a little bit weird right and for sure i definitely think this happens with uh mmo's a fair bit right and i think you hit the nail on the head right it's because it's such a big part of your identity right a big part of your life uh you're like wait have i wasted my time did i pick the wrong game what am i doing right this is not you know this isn't right this can't be right you know this is my game i play this game so or if you are going to be uh very critical of the game it's not going to be interpreted in good faith and that's that's putting it politely my latest upload on starbase right and it's just it's a self-proclaimed mmo right they say that it's an mmo make your own fun kind of thing player-based economy it's all about the players now the game was already kind of dead i mean it it's on life support okay so with about let's say 200 players max even then i was terrified because the amount of hours you would need and the amount of hours you see on some reviews you know coming up to nearly thousands of hours you look at that and you think to yourself well i'm coming in i want to tell a story i don't i also don't have thousands of hours to make this video i don't want to risk just looking at links online and trying to put two and two together and missing something else that's hidden that everyone's gonna call me out on why not just speak to the community almost kind of turned into well yes this game has gone downhill but there is a really good community behind it because i think we get really tribalistic because we've allowed this hobby to become maybe more of our life than it should be escapism on its own is healthy i think it's nice to be able to get out of your own skin from time to time and every hobby does it but i think when you let it get to the point that you need to like physically threaten or attack somebody you've i don't know where the line is but you're way past it mmos are unique and that they do tend to encourage that human nature that tends to want to join a tribe and protect the tribe and be part of the tribe because they're so community german because there's their social that's the thing that really makes mmos unique and it is a double-edged sword for sure there are people who do make the mmo that they're playing their whole identity their whole personality revolves around that and so uh recently we've seen some problems with that with you know but there is definitely a subset of mmo players that we don't like it's it's us versus them it is our tribe against the other tribe which is bizarre and unsettling because they forget you know this this is a product if you do decide to create content within the mmo world either on youtube or twitch you've got two basic channel types there are variations between these but broadly you'll either be general genre focused or specific game focused general creators are able to give a broad overview of the genre at the expense of specialist knowledge within each game these are creators like myself the lazy peon or kira tv we're able to paint with a broad brush but this can mean missing the finer details so instead of being a general mmo creator you could specialize into a single game it's absolutely possible to do many people have found youtube and twitch success as champions of their chosen game zeppler plays final fantasy xiv the mighty teapot plays guild wars 2 brosem plays warframe and each of them have lots of detailed content around that specific game but even specializing is not without risks the benefits of specializing are the community come to see you as an authority and you're always able to make very specific nuanced content you're able to fully explore the depths of a game's systems that a general creator will miss or not have the time to explore but the risks are how you are connecting your youtube or your twitch or even yourself as a level of celebrity to this game specifically you're binding your career to it and if the game fails so do you the larger specialized channels we have now are very talented and they also happen to choose the correct games to bind themselves to to find success if wildstar had just released and you went all in on being a wildstar content creator you're going to be pretty unhappy when the game shuts down and your youtube back catalog is now irrelevant or the twitch streams you've been relying on for income suddenly see a massive drop in viewership because the game people know you for is gone and people valued the game more than you specializing into a single game as a full-time creator is only an advantage if the audience who cares about your specialist knowledge is large enough to sustain you every time a new mmo comes out we see waves of people decide this is the one they specialize and they build careers up around terror or eleon or neverwinter or more recently new world and if the game flops so do they now new world is still going but the creators are not seeing anywhere near the amount of views they were when the game first released general mmo content creators know this and have to make a decision on general versus specialist for example while i'll happily make a silly video on say swords of legend online i won't pour thousands of hours into it to become a specialist before i do because i simply do not think that would be a smart use of my time i am aware this means my content will sometimes miss the more esoteric details of a game and anger the player base for it but that's a choice i've made as soon as you see like a game losing popularity you can look at the directory and see that all the people that used to be getting you know let's say 5 000 viewers now they're getting 1 000 viewers and it just keeps going down so i think that the biggest risk whenever you're becoming a specialized content creator is that whenever you're playing a game that doesn't really have an audience large enough to necessitate you only playing that game so for example people that only play minecraft they can do it because minecraft is like the biggest game in the world people that play fortnite many of them can do it too but i think that once you get into smaller smaller games with smaller audiences that's whenever it becomes less sustainable and a lot more volatile because you're much more at the whims of the current state of that individual game like i know this for a while is that in wow like there would be sometimes back in like legion where i'd have you know ten thousand viewers or i think during the tomb of sargeras release i had 25 000 viewers it was insane and then the next couple of days i went back down to four and so that's a huge difference and that's what happens whenever you're just making content for one specific game is that you are your popularity is tied to that game the reason that i started creating content the way that i do which is entirely about warframe is because i completed warframe i decided that the end game of warframe now for me which is still a thing that was up for debate the end game for me now is that i am a content creator now and i am going to help the new players i became that type of creator purely based on the love of the game and whether or not it was going to succeed or fail i was just gonna go in that direction because i really like warframe a lot it is my favorite game the difference for general creation is that you do get you know a much more narrow view at any game and the unfortunate bit about that is that it means that if you do stumble across that game like if you stumble across your warframe you probably won't be able to spend as much time with it as you'd really want to and also it would be hard to focus in your you know large general audience into the specifics of what you now want to get into it's a tough thing to do because as you said uh you you miss out on some of the the more specific details that you know hyper fans of that game would expect to see but at the same time you actually have a lot more knowledge of the general uh genre and that can be invaluable in the sense that when i'm reviewing new world i can use my knowledge of mortal online my knowledge of runescape and terror um not terror yeah well not terror anymore but um any of those games as a kind of cross-reference right and i can review it in a more unbiased way however you are correct in the sense that being a specialized content creator gives you all these extra details all this information that's super important to a lot of people if a content creator starts out with new world and they ride the massive hype train at the beginning they're going to come crashing down with it as well if they don't diversify it's like you know saying don't put all your eggs in one basket i think algorithmically you're setting yourself up for a world of depression and anxiety and even mental health problems that they're going to challenge you and push you and make you question your own sanity so the thing about being generalized it's very valuable to your mental health the thing about being specific is that as a as a career that's a niche within the niche within the niche within the niche and so the solution that i've actually developed is actually i'm what i do is multi-channel so i have a new world focused channel i have a final fantasy focus channel when it comes down to it like yeah i think a handful of games is the best way but algorithmically you have to actually multi-channel because the algorithm is going to hit you you have more freedom to do whatever you want because it's not just tying your your channel to that game it's also tying that you have to make videos about that game which means if you stop enjoying it then you know what else are you going to do you're going to have to pivot at some point or like you say your channel is going to die so i think the benefit is just having more freedom to do whatever you want the benefits of specializing are if a top-tier mmo ever does come out that you get hooked into then there's new content with every update and you become the authority figure of that game and you'll likely be invited to community events or even get offered a community manager backup job as has happened with runescape and guild wars 2 content creators in the past because you're a niche within a niche and you'll find it easier to grow your content than immediately starting out with general mmo stuff however you will have a harder time branching out later on the downsides are game specific mmo channels have limited view potential if the game dies so does your channel and people that know your channel for that game will complain if you try to cover any new games if you're hyper specialized you are you're tying your success to to someone else's success which is always like a risky endeavor i mean i always think of uh say there's this red dead online tips channel first of all rest in peace red dead online you almost had something that first year or two was insane potential and now you see these channels and every week they're just putting out these very sad like here's what to do this week and read it online and it's spoiler alert not a lot i think going for the general approach which you've done is safer in terms of your own longevity and like you say there is definitely that potential for people to uh disregard your opinion because you haven't you know tied yourself down you haven't married a game per se um having an authoritative british accent does help uh so i can recommend that a creator that is sticking to a specific game to make a transition over to another game i've seen this happen repeatedly in games like overwatch where youtubers that average 20 40 50 000 views for their videos and they're averaging two three thousand viewers for their streams they they get bored when they decide that they want to transition over to another game their viewership drops by 90 that we've seen people thousands drop down to just hundreds of viewers that that is the unfortunate state of i guess being like a content creator that focuses on one single specific game because if you ever do make that transition you're essentially killing your career if you pursue it as a career with regards to having it as more of uh a general channel you're also severely limiting yourself because at the same time people don't necessarily view you as an authority and therefore they don't choose to go to you for information i think actually contrary to popular belief most of us started as a specialist youtubers and then kind of uh branched off to other things and i think that just makes the most logical sense because just like with mmos like you're saying another life many of us spend so much time in one particular game so then we become like okay let's talk about this game and like for me for example i started the channel in large part on the series based on galaxies that was because galaxies was a game that i had the most experience with and so then i realized like oh okay like there's actually other ones that i could talk about and other games that i could then cover not a lot of mmo players actually play a lot of mmos it's weird as that sounds throughout my entire life i've actually can count on my hands the amount of friends i've had that actually play all the mmos like they play everything and so i think that being a content creator in one particular game there's a lot of benefit from from it like you said you get to look more into the nuance of things versus like what we do which is sometimes less practical for some people it's harder to do harder to be a known entity and then be taken seriously in a bunch of different games and i think that's just really hard to do beyond playing a bunch of games just knowing enough to even be able to approach all of these different games um and talk about them in a good way if you want to be seen as a professional content creator with a certain amount of authority then you would focus on a specific game but the downside of that is not only is your success tied to the success of that game but also your opinion of that game is incredibly jaded because you've never experienced another mmo in detail at all so you have nothing to compare it to you also can never ever satisfy a viewer if you are a general mmo channel because you are never able to put in the hours the blood sweat tears dedication that a player that spent hours and hours and hours on that game you will never be on their level you will never have their opinion you will never be able to give them the confirmation bias that they're looking for because you simply don't have the experience in general most players just play the game a little bit uh you know they might play for for a little while but they might even play multiple mmos at the same time so going like super super deep into the analysis that's kind of not exactly what the majority of people are are really looking for right you want to know oh this is how the systems work right this is what you can do these are all the different game modes that you can participate in that really is the bread and butter of the kind of mmo demographic for sure in in terms of pitfalls i think you're absolutely right um the the big put forward with general is that you uh you know you you can't you're not going to be seen as this like omega yes this guy knows exactly what he's talking about and that might actually cause players to potentially dismiss your opinion within that community that you're speaking to it's inevitable that that game pretty much links to your success in a lot of ways when you're looking at just mmos in general when you're when you're focusing on a genre you've got a lot of room to move moving right and also you can do things like you can step out i guess with the nft situation that was a really good example of you'll do you're talking about something different but it does still relate to that so there is there are those opportunities so obviously i'm focusing on different genres that gives me a lot of room to breathe and i and i did actually i did actually think to myself you know what does actually make me the the authority or what makes my content you know what will make my content worth watching and and why should somebody watch me final fantasy 14 pays my bills i i play mmorpgs as a genre that's what i make content for i play other games i like mobile games i like shooters i like racing games but mmorpgs are what i'm known for if we're just talking analytics final fantasy 14 pays overwhelmingly for my mortgage i still play guild wars at least one day a week on stream and i'm trying to grow that because a i think it's important for my own well-being as a gamer and as somebody to have broad things and b what happens if final fantasy 14 has a down cycle i have everything tied to final fantasy and so that's that's really scary because they do have down cycles and and you see them coming that's the worst part is as somebody who becomes an expert in either one game or in one genre of that game if you're tied to pvp seasons or a raid you know when the content's coming maybe even before the people watching you know i'm making this video and this is going to be the last big thing that people look forward to for three months four months eight months or in some games they have unpredictable patch cycles i have no idea how people make full-time livings out of games that don't have a predictable patch cycle i mean by catering to a very specific niche it might be more easy to grow as a small creator compared to trying to tackle everything at once when you're brand new and you know like nobody really knows who you are yet so i have the benefit of the final fantasy franchise which seems to have quite a bit of longevity so i do have a little bit of job security from that aspect i'm also associated with world warcraft and being associated with a particular developer can help because you might be able to follow where the player base goes as a general content creator like general mmo uh content creator that you are not able to see all the nuance of a particular game but if you spent more of your free time playing not guild wars or not runescape then you would be able to learn more about particular okay i'm gonna edit that out but how dare you we're not here to take cheap pot shots at each other this is not this can lead to both types of channels wanting what the other has the general channels want the admiration and respect from the fanbase that specialist channels command and the specialist channels want the multi-game appeal and broad channel safety of a general channel but how can you do both one trick is to specialize into a single aspect of the genre so you're still niching down but not to a specific game i have my worst mmo ever series a light-hearted entertainment focused journey to play all of the mmos in a quest to find the worst it started only playing truly terrible mmos and has since included some decent ones for reasons i'll explain more in point 5. the lazy peon has his first impression videos where he gives a broad overview of the major mechanics in many games and discusses the pros and cons kira tv focuses on kickstarter scams or dodgy integration of crypto within mmos and then makes longer form essays on why specific games failed so many general mmo channels still cover multiple games but now through a slightly more specialized lens without limiting themselves to a single game but ultimately there is simply not enough time to become an expert on every single mmo so a general channel will always be limited in the depth of knowledge while a specific channel will be limited in its scope of audience sometimes people ask me because i'm a general mmo channel why haven't i completed every single mmo ever made to end game and whenever i'm asked that i'm reminded of a fantastic line from the tv show ncis a show famous for not understanding how technology works if you haven't seen it it's the show with the infamous hacking scene two people trying to type on the same keyboard at the same time to out-hack the hacker in season 8 episode 16 a detective meets a famous gamer he's expecting a socially inept guy and gets an attractive early 20s woman the detective says wait a second you're max destructo you hold the high score in practically every online game that is of course absurd no one person could hold every high score in a similar vein even if a general mmo content creator wanted to finish every mmo they couldn't do it while also producing the quantity of content the youtube algorithm demands and this brings us to point four the sheer amount of time finishing an mmo takes compared to finishing almost any other game mmos are thousands of hours long and playtime will vary massively from player to player but we can use the website how long to beat for an extremely general overview the average completion time for final fantasy 14 this is just the main story ranges from 105 hours to 1 531 hours from a poll of around 300 people guild wars 2 clocks in at between 241 and 1 500 hours and the elder scrolls online is listed as between 42 and 348 depending on your efficiency these aren't completionist times nowhere near indeed very few people will ever 100 complete an mmo achievements such as god walking amongst me immortals in guild wars 1 or a maxed hardcore iron man in old school runescape are extremely rare and you would not and should not expect a reviewer to achieve these types of things before reviewing a game the question is how much time is required and how many other games could you review in that same time and this links heavily back to when mainstream gaming media chooses to avoid even attempting to review mmos now whenever i ask around the number 100 hours gets thrown around a lot probably because it's a nice round number it's the first triple digit number and many would agree that after 100 hours even if you haven't finished the entire game you will have enough information to make an informed review and while 100 hours may sound like a long time to the average person the time-sync nature of mmos can warp what a hardcore mmo player considers a long time but let's have a look at how many other games you could review and how much alternative content you could produce in 100 hours i have a second youtube channel called josh strife plays where i replay and review older video games let's take a random sample of 10. castlevania symphony of the night took me 9 hours to beat devil may cry one took seven silent hill one took eight tomb raider took nine baldur's gates took 22 armored core was eight medieval took eight soul reaver took nine ten two took nine and rayman took seven combined this is 96 hours so when someone says to me they expect me to invest 100 hours into a single mmo before my review is considered valid as a content creator you could instead replay 10 of the most iconic video games of all time and make review videos on them which would appeal to a much broader audience as a content creator you have to be aware of how much time you're spending making content if you were to make a 100 hour review of the five big mmorpgs that's 500 collective hours put into five videos you could make 50 smaller videos in that time that's almost one video a week for an entire year which would be much more efficient to grow a brand new youtube channel youtube requires constant content and putting hundreds of hours into gathering footage for a video is a luxury very few smaller creators have as ginger prime puts it mmos are not only tribal by game design but by business model they're designed to create that in-group and then ask for both time and money from the in-group from either subscriptions or an in-game cash shop and if paying a lot of money over a long period of time is also required to reach the minimum requirement to review something many simply won't bother for older mmos that can become an almost impossible challenge for a new content creator if the game has 10 15 or even 20 years worth of content and you approach it as a brand new content creator and you're expected to play through all of it before making a video you're spending months potentially years of your time to gather data and increase your experience to make a video that might not even be relevant by the time you get to making it the content may have changed or the youtube and twitch viewer base may have dropped off meaning your time investment into what could have been your career can be lost i think that it's very much about how you present the review like you can have a review you can have a breakdown you can have a first impressions etc so if you play a game and it's your first impressions of the game other people can kind of take that as hey this is their first impressions of the game and that's really all there is to it and i think it's also about how you compartmentalize different parts of reviews so like for example whenever you're looking at let's say final fantasy you can give a review of i don't know maybe palace of the dead or maybe a certain type of raid or you know like all the heavensward msq or something like that you can give a compartmentalized review of that without necessarily making a general statement on the quality of the game as a whole like obviously it all ties into that but those things can exist independently so i think that's one way that you can review the game but i think that it's again it's just about how somebody frames the review of the game if you're 20 hours in and this is the quest that you're on you haven't experienced x y and z and because you haven't experienced those things you don't know that oh at z it gets really bad it gets terrible so of course he loves it of course he's having a great time right now and of course usually people will tell you that in the comments that you haven't reached the good part or you haven't reached the bad part yet but what's important is just to temper expectations i think for how much time you have put in and for larger publications uh like ign and stuff it obviously does it will never make sense for them to really cover mmos because at the point where you're putting in the man hours to fully cover like do a full review of like beat the game similar to how you would say say you you beat god of war and now well i'm going to talk about the entirety of the game i have this large article here if you did a similar thing with world of warcraft it would take that person multiple years and if you're having that person on payroll for multiple years just to get one article that's never going to be worth it i would say 10 hours is probably a good baseline and it should be like 10 hours of gameplay in an mmo should introduce you to most of if not all of the systems that you're going to see as you progress through through this game but for some reason mmos have this thing now where the first 10 hours very rarely represent what the entire game is and this is where all you need to play 50 hours 100 hours if the game completely shifts after the first 10 hours the review is good for no one anyway uh you could put zero minutes into it as long as you set the context of like hey i just booted up the game and here's my initial thought uh because essentially people look for reviews to validate their own feelings you know in that regards so i i wouldn't put an hour limit on it i think when it comes down to it like a thousand hours makes you considered an expert in something of that nature so if they're saying 100 hours is going to qualify for review so it's like i'm one tenth of an expert on the subject you know that you know for an mmorpg i think it's again it's not about the time it's about the context of what you've experienced uh what you maybe have experienced before where you're coming from and then essentially kind of talking about what systems you've you've touched and engaged with let's say you did 10 hours in an mmo and you want to make a video about it well i think that essentially then the video should be then asking the question am i willing to invest another 10 hours or another 30 hours into the game right because that's essentially what i would be curious about and be looking for the criticisms you're going to have in the first 10 hours are probably going to be the same criticisms you can have later but you might have a different perspective on what is a totally different game end game which most mmos are so i don't think you you can't have an opinion if you don't spend 100 hours i think in general your opinion is probably going to help more people because they're going to quit or experience the same things in the same time that you did and most people are just looking for can i have fun in this game now not can i invest 100 hours and then have fun if you hate the core fundamental gameplay movement combat audio visual feedback or responsiveness so much in the first two hours that no amount of well-designed endgame would be enough to make the game fun then you can review it for as little as those hours but call it a first impression ideally aim for four to eight hours with the first impressions and if you're still enjoying the game push through to the end game for a full review mmos have many different parts of them the leveling process may be mostly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things but this is also where the most people quit so critique here is certainly valid you need to break up the review process into multiple videos for different parts of the experience or do one big 45 minute review covering it as a whole there's no set amount of hours but if you're reviewing games purely for your job it's only really doable with mmos if you take the first impression route as you can't really put hundreds of hours into each video for each game obviously very much depends on the game but there's something say like new world you could get to level 30 in that game and be like i've seen it all i i don't need to get to level 60. this is pretty much it and i cannot imagine what they could possibly pull out of the hat at level 60 that would suddenly 180 my opinion of everything up until that point so i feel like how much does this game respect your time and then give it that equal level of respect because if a game is a hundred hours but it's a hundred hours of incredible fun that you don't want to put down you're just going to do that and not think twice about it versus if if you're like not looking forward to playing a video game which is a entertaining medium i feel like you don't really need to play more than that to kind of have your whole opinion on it and i know some people argue well you know after 100 hours it gets really good but it's like well maybe it should get good 100 hours earlier i think that's a flawed argument unfortunately you you run into the the issue where older games first and foremost require a lot more investment in terms of time in terms of resources to actually learn to actually get through the content i went back into rapples and went back into rf online getting from level one to level 20 took i don't know 15 20 hours and rapples as an example the the level cap is over 300 and they tell you that it takes about a thousand hours to even get the end game to to put in a hundred hours into raffles is the tutorial so these old games it doesn't matter if you put 100 hours into them you are not going to please the people that that are still actively playing them i get i'm glad that you make the distinction because it probably is much easier for someone who's just only focused on one to then expect them to have like the super deep dive like a content creator i follow on guild wars 2 is mighty teapot and mighty teapot pretty much only does guild wars 2 maybe some new world but like only guild wars 2 and so you can pretty much guarantee that mighty teapot knows everything about guild wars 2. so like you're never going to miss anything but it's going to take mighty teapot some time to come up with all of this stuff because they primarily stream they don't make as many youtube videos the guides take more time and so on so forth so i would say that with them you would expect them to put as much time as possible and then the kind of when it's ready approach for starters your point is the exact point that usually i make to people which is like i use kotor 1 or kotor 2 as an example which at most those games take 15 20 hours so like these games are considered like people's favorite games and it's like these games do not take very long to beat at all and so when you compare them to just wow classic which on average took players anywhere between 200 and 400 hours to reach max level which is honestly like not that much if you think about it in an mmo grinder context but in a large gaming context it's an insane amount i mean it's like that's like the amount of hours you put in a shooter you know that you play for a year or two or so on so forth and so 100 hours is just incredibly unrealistic i do understand where general viewers would come from to expect a content creator to put a hundred hours into a game but realistically that's just that's not gonna happen and i think that specifically mmorpgs are supposed to replicate different people's lives and so have so many different paths to take that it's almost impossible to cover that just looking at character creation a lot of games have multiple different starting paths and for a viewer to expect a reviewer to experience multiple different class paths before even playing the game in order to give a valid opinion is just completely unrealistic um depend on the creator and what type of review that you want to create um for example i don't think every mmo review needs to talk about raiding i don't think every mmo needs to talk review needs to talk about pvp right i think you could uh bring that up right you can say oh yeah this you know this is a game mode you can kind of give a brief overview but i don't think you necessarily need to go into a deep dive about this but i think there are certainly different different types of review that may not require as much of this extreme time investment to get a proper grip on i'd say i mean yeah i'll stand by that i don't think that's viable okay and i think as well um as long as you have that communication as a creator between you and your audience to be realistic so they are they understand that there has to be a certain amount of yeah there has to be a limit 100 hours until it gets good or until you can really do a full review okay great i guarantee that if you were to if you were to compare that as well to let's say you spend 20 hours now personally i've spent uh what was it buyer mutant was about 20 hours and even then i wasn't completely finished but i made it quite clear that i spent a certain amount of time in this game right i was just very transparent about it if somebody wants to say well you know it gets better after 100 hours i'll be like fine okay maybe it does but then then the question is does everybody have a hundred hours i mean maybe in the mmo space but when it comes to more general games do people really have that time within a week to or even a month most of the people that watch my videos are most likely working full-time jobs taking on the mmorpg this is a lot closer to trying to review a television show or a podcast series or like critical role or an anime something that isn't is episodic by that very nature that also means that these it's a living document so i think it's about context and so if you are trying to get into final fantasy 14 and you go ask 10 people that play it what's the biggest parts of final fantasy 14 they say the story the story the story of the story then i think you need to clear the story and i don't really care if it takes you 100 hours or 300 hours or 60 hours i don't care you need to finish the reason you're there these are the things i'm looking for there have been people that have reviewed mmos in the past and been yelled at i think you're even talking to some of those people and i think it's because they've come into them and said are they good or are they bad and those people i didn't actually have a problem with their opinion if they had made their opinion very contextually clear for example in feminine super 14 it's well known that it can take you hundreds of hours to reach in the game as a new person who is uh wanting to review confidence routine provided you're not using a skip or anything which is by the way illegal then you would only be able to review the story really and maybe a little bit of the limited low level content here i mean at low levels your job is not going to feel anything like it would at max level so basically uh if someone wants to review final fantasy 14 they can't until they've gone through hundreds of hours of story and and not done any skips and read all of the dialogue and watched all the cut scenes and only after they finish all of it all the main story and they maybe do their first uh dungeon or trial then they're allowed to give a review on folly sorting but what if you could put hundreds or thousands of hours and lots of money into a video well then you'd hope it would be a video which remains relevant for a long time what we call evergreen content on youtube unfortunately because mmos are being constantly updated very little content created for them can be evergreen especially if that content is a build or a guide video which can change when the next patch or expansion comes out and this causes a strange feedback loop where the most efficient type of content to make as a creator is also seen as the lowest effort by the audience and this is part 5 the time-sensitive nature of mmorpg content pushing creators to release content before it is ready or to make repetitive videos if you spend 100 hours making a thorough in-depth review of an mmo it will remain at the top of the youtube results until an update or patch comes out and someone else makes another video with that update or patch number in the title because that's what people are now searching for and that's what the algorithm will now serve up this links back to the viability of making one mmo video in the same time that you could make 10 older game reviews the mmo will change and your video will become obsolete but the older games will not it is almost impossible to make evergreen content on any mmo because any living mmo is itself not evergreen ironically the only way to create evergreen content for an mmo is to make a video about a dead or dying one because they are the only ones which don't get updated and don't have huge competitions for video search results and then when your review or guide becomes old which can happen in months on youtube it will fall down the video search results so you'll need to remake it and if you're putting in hundreds of hours for every video you simply won't be able to put out enough guides for enough games within the time frame you have this means mmo content creators know that the best type of content for audience engagement and search engine optimization are not videos locked to a specific build or version of any given game but instead are videos which are being searched for right now titles which people will google titles like best mmo in current year top 10 mmos to play in current year should you play game name here best class build fastest experience fastest gold and these types of videos are quick to make because you don't even need to be an expert on the game to know the method you can usually find it on the wiki and you can easily remake these videos every few months to remain relevant within the search results you could of course be a general mmo creator and make content for the lesser known games guides for games with very few players and very little competition but the time investment is still the same and you now know that the views will be abysmal because the player base simply isn't there ten percent of a million person player base is still more than one hundred percent of a hundred person player base players want content for their mmo and the vast majority of the mmo player base is centralized on the big ones such as world of warcraft final fantasy 14 elder scrolls online guild wars 2 and runescape this means you want to make content for those games but you don't want to invest your time in content you know will become irrelevant this is also why i've had to include some newer higher quality mmos in my worst mmo ever series from a purely analytical standpoint there are simply more people searching for those games and as a full-time content creator i need to balance the truly awful games which get viewed less with the rage bait of including actually quite good games which get viewed a lot more beyond this there is another major factor being the first to report on a game or an update within a game often brings the most views even if you're not the highest quality because interest is at its maximum right then in the gaming world a week is a lifetime a month is ancient history if an event is newsworthy it's being searched for right now this means as a content creator you are caught in a balancing act the longer you work on a video the higher quality it will be but the subject itself is becoming less and less relevant by the hour meaning even if it's high quality it won't get as many views when a new raid or a new dungeon is released into an mmo people want a guide video instantly and if you make the first guide video you'll get views if you make the best guide video a month later you'll now be fighting an uphill battle against the youtube algorithm because it already has that search result covered and that video already exists the only way your video would have any value is if there is new information in your video that's not contained in the old one in which case your video might become popular and it will stay popular right up until there is another patch or another expansion and someone else puts 100 hours in and makes their video which overtakes yours it is impossible to know how long your video will remain relevant for which means it's impossible to know how much time is worth putting into it the solution for a creator is to be both the first person to release a video and then the person releasing constant updates to always be at the top from an audience point of view however this means they get a flood of very similar videos that's the same thing it's like everybody complains on youtube they're like man i hate these uh these pog faces every time everybody's got this surprised face for every youtube thumbnail oh my god right and everybody complains about it but they just keep clicking on them so you just keep having more of these videos what it's the it's the the feedback loop is there and so it just keeps happening i think this is kind of what i was saying before with like whenever i would make these wow guide videos i would put in a tremendous amount of effort how to min max and figure out the most optimized way of farming some material and wow and it would get 20 000 views and it's like okay but then if i made a video about how a burning crusade is way better than the current expansion that would have 250 000 views and it would be on the top of reddit everybody would be saying true i'd get way more subscribers it would just be better for me in every single way and i think that again the way that you reconcile those two things is that you have to look at what being a content creator means for you does this mean that you are just creating uh content that you feel is good for the algorithm or are you creating something that you think is a creative endeavor in itself a really interesting balance between these two things because ideally you're making a video that really is both and for games that run long enough which is a thing that i've seen with warframe you'll make a video that was you know a really long experience to make and that was you know very popular because a lot of work was put into it at the time and because a lot of work was put into it people see that and it gets shared around you can see that with some of my old full warframe roster reviews i talk about every single class in the game why they're good why they're bad give them a grade people love those videos uh and i continue to make those the original well all of them at this point are completely obsolete as for just making like the shorter content that like gets more views you should be making that it's a balance between trying to do both i very recently went through and i did every single warframe individually in each different video and that's been going on over the course this year obviously i've made videos about pretty much all of those warframes before but those videos became outdated and this was me updating all of them some of those videos already have minor things that i would change about them even though i just made them this year due to new content being released as a content creator it is impossible to fully re-review a game from scratch because as you said everything's got a shelf life if you're putting like three 400 hours into a full review of the game every year by time you've done that review it's dead on arrival i feel for content creators doing that it is definitely much easier to make the initial long review where you've put 10 20 30 hours in depending on what your kind of time frame budget is for that and then when there's an update adds your own update as a sort of addendum to your original review as long as you're kind of referencing that initial review and saying here's kind of like my patch notes for the game since the new patch notes i feel that's the best way to do it the people that are watching those videos are most often going to be people who play the game anyway they're aware of what the current situation on that game is or at least i feel that that's the way people view these videos the more time you spend on a video the less views it will get uh and that's just like and i always would say like well if i want to put that time into this video because it's important to me then i will it's not low effort content it's the content that people are asking for and the content creator can sit down and say like oh i want to make something i see people do this all the time like i and it's important i'll make videos that i want to make that i know aren't going to do well on purpose because i wanted to make that video i wanted that video to exist this the smart thing is to create stuff that people want you know because i mean especially if you wanted to be viewed it's the concept when people are like oh you just posting that for the views who hits anything on a public space and hopes that no one sees it it depends really what you're chasing are you trying to grow your channel as quickly as possible or you're doing videos that you think has value because personally i've never seen should you do x in y year or should you you know top 10 mmos of 2022 when they're the same for the last five years i've i don't see that being valuable so i don't personally chase that but i don't look down on people who do i think just make the content you want to make and if you know people do want to watch those videos so if you want to serve that market that's totally fine people have a perception about you and they're going to stick with that regardless you can spend like i did hundreds thousands of hours looking into a game like new world for example and people who disagree with you will still just vehemently disagree with you anyway on the basis you don't know what you're talking about despite being proven right you know time and time again so i don't really look it that way i just do whatever i think's gonna make sense gonna be fun for me gonna you know get views if that's what i'm going for and then that's that's it i don't really think more about it i think the should you play x game in x year approach is good because people often youtube search and click on the latest videos for each mmo due to them all being constantly updated i would i think i would try and find the sort of heavy medium that someone like you or lazy peon does because i look up these guys you know i look up oh should you still play this game in this year what's the best class you know but it's very transactional and i usually don't stick around on that person's channel i guess finding that medium of i mean it's never gonna be evergreen but to give it the longest shelf life possible and i think so with your uh worst demo ever series that's again unless they somehow pull some crazy [ __ ] out of the hat and completely change the game that you review and it's all of a sudden now a cart racer i feel like that review is gonna stay relevant for quite a quite a long time at least a year or two well i guess at the end of the day you have to ask yourself are you doing it for profit or as a passion uh if you're doing it for a profit you're going to target whatever has the highest volume of searches both on youtube and on google as a passion then you're going to focus on covering whatever is most important to you content creators to do is x game worth playing in x year are doing that because they know people are searching for his black desert uh fun in 2021 is it fun in 2022 it might have been fun in 2021 but you know next year in is it still gonna be relevant but then you run into the issue of you're just making the same videos because as like black desert as an example they just released a new class maybe a new region but it's the same game so yeah you can push out is black desert worth playing every year but you're you're stifling your own creativity in doing so sometimes you get stuck in just making one versus the other and like uh for example i have made guide content and shorter type stuff before but it never never really resonated with me so um the evergreen style content was what i was most interested in but you are right in that trying to make that about like current content um ends up being incredibly difficult for example i made a video that talks about the successes and like tribulations and history of um final fantasy 14 but that is two expansions old already and it feels completely outdated part of the difficulty i find with that just in general and uh making evergreen content that isn't based on a historical timeline is difficult in the sense that people don't as much as you might think want to be educated and especially don't want to be educated in a heavy-handed way that's kind of why some content creators like myself don't make as much evergreen content in a modern day context because a lot of it relies on recognizing what's happening in the space and paying attention to the market and while those are cool things and very interesting to me to youtube i'm sure a lot of people watching are listening um it's not always the most popular and attractive thing to a general populace i've created a lot of short term content that exists for a certain period of time and then immediately becomes obsolete within a couple of weeks things like mount guide videos for amount that's just released or a raid guide video for a raid that's just been released those videos do exceptionally well within the first week but then after that it drops off significantly i think so long as you are able to create a video that's entertaining tells a story keeps the viewer engaged and almost doesn't matter what the shelf life of the video is because it will continue to draw people in just on the the way that you make the video really hard to do this particularly if you're a newer creator it's really hard to make mmo content because you know before you're in that position where you can start to talk about the more evergreen stuff you need your 100 hours right you've got to have your 100 hours so what do you make what are you making in your content creation in the first 100 hours you could almost broaden this to almost a critique of content creation in general i wouldn't say this is actually unique to emma mo's as such um but yeah it certainly becomes more extreme because the fact it's not like oh yeah this this video is going to be here forever no it you're going to have to make it again right good luck right uh and you know every time even if you make something like a guide well the guide might change right there's gonna be something new there's gonna be a new gold farming method there's gonna be a new balance patch there's gonna be a new this that and whatever right uh i think that uh you know a lot of stuff that is going to be more popular isn't necessarily going to be the highest effort right because you know in general you want to try and create well you know as much content as possible right on the hottest stuff right now and if you try and make something that's like super well crafted like super high effort you're gonna kind of miss the boat right um a lot of the time my video is only gonna be good for three months my my stream is only gonna appeal to six people but there's a beauty in that there is a beauty in realizing the world doesn't revolve around me and so that thing can be just that thing and so i get to make that video and yes it expires in a year and you know what else happens in a year i hopefully get better and so that video expiring is a chance to redo it how many times do you do something right back to warhammer how many times do you paint a model only to realize i wish that i could paint my model that from before as well as i can paint my model now you do need to be aware of what the algorithm demands you have to feed the beast whatever we are guessing that it wants at a particular time and so a lot of times youtubers just you know they create content that will please the algorithm but of course i have been in a situation where i have made videos giant videos knowing that they would become outdated like i made a mount guide showing every amount in the game a couple years ago and uh now there are obviously more amounts in the game and i just i made it thinking well i'll just put it out and after enough time has passed well i'll make another one i guess it's probably due for that fairly soon we have something involved with routine called the live letter and the live letter is where yoship talks about all the upcoming features that are going to be in the next major patch and this is like a big newsy piece of content that is very important it's very time sensitive usually these things happen on a friday and there was a time when i would be like well i'll just take my time on it and release it on monday and that was not really working out that well i mean hell there were times when i would release that video on a tuesday or a wednesday eventually after some trial and error i realized uh that is not the way to go so now usually after during the live letter i'm taking notes and i am immediately working as fast as i can to get it done as quickly as possible and but i do also you know i have a quality standard and every youtuber is going to have to set that standard for themselves right even if it means after something like that happened if i need to work 12 hours 14 hours to get it done quickly i will in that particular case now you can't do that all the time you will burn yourself out doing that all the time but there's another aspect to consider as useful as maxed level end game guides are they don't actually serve the majority of the player base most new players don't become maxed level end game players this brings us to problem 6 in mmorpg content creation the extreme switch in player experience from the very start to the very end of the game the vast majority of any mmo's player base will experience the opening and the middle bit but not the hardcore end bit many new players especially casuals aren't even thinking about the ending and if the beginning isn't good no amount of telling them it gets better will make them stay so it can be wise to make content aimed at the new player such as beginner's guides and first impressions but this is again another major issue with the mmorpg content creation process many long time players will tell you that their mmorpg game gets better at endgame some will tell you that it completely changes the experience and while i'm sure that's true it's also incredibly frustrating to approach mmos knowing this as a reviewer because it's one of the few mediums that prides itself on being so vastly different from its opening to its ending experience imagine watching the first 90 of the tv show only for the final 10 to have a different cast and style imagine the final few chapters of a romance book suddenly changing to a choose your own adventure picture book imagine the first 100 hours of a first person shooter game being slow paced and cover based only to switch to a third person hack and slash once you hit maximum level it sounds absurd to advertise the extreme gameplay switch as a positive but the mmo does just that the opening of the mmo game the part the majority of players will experience is often nothing like the end game and this makes the reviewing of mmos extremely difficult if a content creator plays a brand new mmo they've never played before and gives it a decent amount of time let's say 20 or 30 hours and then makes a review based on the experience they had in that 20 or 30 hours that is a valid first impression it was what they experienced if however those 20 or 30 hours are not a good representation of what the game actually is that's not an issue with the creator's experience that's an issue with the pacing and design of the game of course no one is expecting a player to become all powerful within 20 or 30 hours no one is saying you can experience all the content you will likely barely scratch the surface but if the opening 20 to 30 of your game is not an accurate representation of your game's strengths or the type of fun and gameplay a player can expect to be working toward why are they there there is no other form of entertainment media so self-indulgent as to demand the user slog through an inferior version of itself before rewarding them with the superior version it's strange to a non-mmo player to see that we as a community have come to not only accept but almost expect the genre to treat its best content as a reward for enduring its worst unfortunately this design trope of it gets better at end game is so ingrained in the mmo community's mindset that as an mmo creator you are often left thinking i know this opening section is going to be irrelevant later but i also know it's the only section a massive amount of players will ever experience so do i review this as a relevant bit of the game and risk angering the established player base who will tell me this isn't the good bit why are you focusing on this or do i ignore this bit and rush to the good bit and risk alienating the new players who wanted a genuine review to show the actual experience they are going to have boring opening included reviewing an mmo often feels like reviewing multiple games because the mmo itself morphs so frequently into multiple different experiences and so i've seen modern mmos actually kind of grow in that level of friction it's not that the end game is different from the start of the game ideally it's all the same it's just new content that exists and then i can then create videos that talk about the content experience rather than the end game experience like you can do the first impressions video and you can do the full-on like end game review and service two different markets with those two videos and it's not like one doesn't have value or devalues the other one because first impressions of what most people are looking for is this game worth my time am i going to enjoy the process before i get to the end game spend all that time because the vast majority people don't have you know 100 hours just put into every game to see whether it's good or not and if they don't enjoy the initial experience they're probably going to go and find something else maybe not an mmo that they will enjoy the initial experience of so i think they both have value people who are already invested in their mmo will not recognize the importance of first impressions when it comes to new player retention even if you have to go through 50 to 100 hours of pure boredom to get to the fun part you could have the most crap leveling experience ever pure suffering and if someone says they quit because the leveling sucks you'll get a comment going well it gets good at the end game people who are already invested in the game no longer care about the new player experience because they're past it even though in the long run their game may have less players as a result of this experience being bad i think you just need to explain why an mmo's first impressions are important during the video you could have the best end game ever but if nobody gets to it what's the point i mean again you're never going to make everyone happy there's just no way to but so reviewing a video game you can do in 20 hours you can do in 40 hours because you can go from start to finish you can complete it you can cover every facet of a game you can experience everything a game has to offer but an mmo for the most part successfully completing it is not realistically achievable in that same 20 hour 40 hour 50 hour period even if you were to invest 100 hours 200 hours into it you're still not gonna see what the the endgame players see now reviewing it from a new player perspective and then reviewing it from an end game perspective are always going to alienate parts of their respective communities it's disingenuous for a person to say that a game is something based off of just that surface level uh experience as opposed to to someone that invests thousands of hours into it and you're never gonna be capable of addressing everything everyone wants what we're known for as a genre we had these widely different experiences early game mid game in the end game and that's not true of like all of the time in fact one of the biggest examples that comes to mind that i believe that you're very familiar with runescape is like a game that i think had so much transferability with the casual audience not just because of browser game free and all that other um stuff that it had as value it feels like you're playing the game from right away and i feel like that's always something that people like about games like runescape is that it doesn't feel like okay when i get 99 fishing then i'm really going to start fishing and it's like no okay like i can start fishing now and i can fish until i get to whatever you know rank and fishing i want to get my stance can probably be assumed to be that i kind of dislike how so many games have basically become glorified tutorials that then come into an actual game i i find the difficulty with that is that basically if you want to cover the game in its entirety which is always what i'm interested in doing when i do a review which i don't do very many of them for that reason and they're not very profitable which is another point it's like the amount of work and effort to get like destroyed over something that you're just like you know what i don't really know if everyone wants this as much as i think they do you eliminate a large portion of the game when you don't hit end game because raids dungeons pvp that massive core feature of an mmo is always our end game or at least the best experience is always our end game i actually think that the way that mmos are constructed are very clever because it prolongs their shelf life for each player if you think of um a single player game let's say dying light for example right it took 70 hours to 100 complete that game and so many people were really angry about it because 70 hours is such an incredible amount of time well not with mmo players that's how they've always been and that's why they're different to any other game that's out there any other game media type that's out there they've always been like this they've always rewarded users for putting in hours and hours of their time into a game i think you can actually find some really important critiques as a very new player and you know it's funny there's no better game to demonstrate this than guild wars 2. guild wars 2 is kind of complicated um for newer players actually this is one of the biggest complaints by new players it's like i don't know what i'm doing i don't know what the hell is going on what am i supposed to do i think you can similarly see that in in other games you know like i think final fantasy is criticized for having a very slow starting out leveling experience for example um world of warcraft can be critiqued for having slightly confusing progression systems and particularly as you get towards the end game i think these are actually really important um i think the reviewer needs to does need to keep this in mind that things might change but i think it is actually important to say yeah the new player experience could use a little bit of work right that ain't so hot it's in the interest of an mmo's community and fan base that these issues would be addressed because then you're going to get more players right then your community is bigger then your game company gets more money and you get more content i would say that what i've learned from that is a don't do the view video at 10 hours do it once you know you have some context and especially that you have something positive to say even if you have 10 negative things to say hold on to those they are valid and the veteran players need to understand that those are the things stopping that community from growing so if you don't have if you don't put those in there you're never going to grow like you're you're because because every new player is going to watch that video they're going to try the game based on that video and then because you didn't tell them about any of the bad things they're going to go it must just not be for me because i must just be totally insane for running into these negatives no we all ran into them we're just not talking go in there find the compliment open with that so the veteran players understand okay he at least got to the good thing and then you can say my issue is that i had to go through these five things to get there and now we come to one of the strangest differences playing an mmo for fun can be completely different to playing it to analyze or critique many players have watched my videos and said there's no way you played for 8 to 10 hours you only got to that bit i got there in 4 hours and while it's probably true they did get there in four hours the difference in progress lies in the fundamental way your gaming time can change when you're playing to evaluate and analyze instead of just your own enjoyment imagine the difference in speed reading a book simply to get through the story versus slowly analyzing each paragraph for the themes and structure so you can write a report on it one of them takes a lot longer now you could always speed read the book and then try to write a report on it but i promise you you will forget the specifics or miss the hidden meanings it's the same when playing to critique when i play a game for content i have a notepad and a pen and i make extensive notes on every single thing in the game i'll play for five minutes right for five minutes play for five minutes write for five minutes i'll take notes on anything and everything because i have to mine the experience to find the minutia which makes entertaining content stopping to take notes of course staggers the flow of gameplay but even without the note taking when playing to critique you don't play in the most efficient way it's not about speed running the quests or power leveling you'll click every button in the menu you'll equip every item you'll talk to every npc if someone was watching you in the game you'd look like you were lost because you'd be doing everything a completely fresh player would for example in my rift video i made a joke about how the opening area has an item in the shop called mudder's milk this is a reference to the sci-fi tv show firefly but the only way i was able to make that 10-second throw-away joke and find that item was by talking to every single npc and then opening every shop and reading every item name and description which is something a veteran player of this game wouldn't do because they know this area is a pointless early game tutorial and a new player wouldn't do it because you've not been encouraged to do that as a reviewer you're going to watch all of the in-game cutscenes read all the subtitles and then spend some time trying to boundary break because the scenery looks precarious and it may end up being 20 wasted minutes just running at a wall or it'll be the funny bit where you manage to find a gap in the floor and fly under the city you'll complete the opening quest in slower ways because you don't know the optimal route yet and if you get given boosting items in your inventory you won't use them because if you do you'll completely break the narrative flow playing to critique isn't just enjoying the surface level experience and hoping you'll remember it all later because you won't it's playing sub-optimally and interrogating the experience while making notes this often means in a single hour of gameplay you'll only actually advance 30 to 40 minutes worth into the game this also means that if you did play for 100 hours as suggested earlier it's not 100 hours of casually chilling on the sofa just playing the game it's 100 hours of asking why to every experience and then cross-referencing it with every other mmo you've ever played so you can compare and contrast the experiences while playing in a more analytical way changes your experience while gathering footage for youtube or writing a script live streaming an mmo on twitch is also substantially different but in another way live streaming an mmo to an audience is not playing the game efficiently and it's definitely not stopping in silence to take notes every five minutes it's using the game as background ambience while entertaining sometimes it's doing strange things in the game which are terrible gameplay but great content a streamer puts entertaining the audience first and while high level effective gameplay can be entertaining such as watching a world first or a solo boss kill those streams appeal to high skilled experienced players who understand the complexity of what they're watching and they can appreciate the gameplay alone if you're trying to entertain the majority of an mmo's player base or even a broader gaming demographic using gameplay within an mmo your gameplay will not be hyper efficient it might be deliberately inefficient silly or deliberately annoying the way that i look at things is that generally i kind of do like i'll always try to break the game it's like whenever the alpha for a new wow expansion will come out everybody will watch my stream not to see me test out the new abilities but to see what the new abilities can you know can you go through that wall in sun well with this ability or you know what happens if you use this at the top of mount hyjal and you fly down with it or like you know with dragon riding or something like that and fundamentally whenever you're playing a game if the game is fulfilling if it's fun if it's rewarding that's really what matters the most and i think that you see this a lot with like different types of especially like professional reviews is that they will grade a game on criteria that is not valuable to what an average audience player would want and i think that's a really big problem honestly because there's a massive disconnect between what the audience wants to see and what the audience cares about and what reviewers care about so i try to play the game in a way that the review is going to reflect to a certain degree what an average player is going to experience but that's also very hard to do because you know i've got a bunch of people playing with me you know i'll have people give me gold and so whenever i'm playing a game i have to contextualize all that and say like well listen you know this was not a big deal for me but for an average person it's like new world crafting yeah i got furnishing to 200 in a day but there are people that spent months on it and they still didn't get it to 200 because it [ __ ] sucked so i think it's important to take those things in consideration whenever you're reviewing a game but the most important thing is to review a game in a way that's true to your audience and i think that's one way that professional reviews have fallen short a lot recently but the different thing that i do is i try and interact with it like a totally regular player and look at it from a regular player's perspective what does the player who's interacting with this at this point in the game where it becomes available what do they know do they know enough things that this is properly tutorialized will they be able to do this does that content interact with them well does it work with a regular person's schedule if you're a person that is logging on for one hour every every day does it work for that a lot of players when they first jump in to play an mmo their first goal is the end game right world of warcraft get to max level do raiding and whatever but as we've got like a limited time budget on this we are trying to extensively review the the in the time frame that we've got and doing so means we have to extensively evaluate the start of the game which as you said is not something that a player would do they they will rush through to the end game i find it quite hard to review mmos in that way because i realized that it seems like a very odd review to a lot of people but it also kind of works in our favor because there are things here that like i say players will never see and other game reviews from the specialized channels they may not even include any of that i think it's going to vary by content creator to content creator because me saying that i think i should always be playing for fun even in the analysis is that the it comes through the natural discovery deeper dives are when the game then requires it of me and so i get frustrated when i hear people say oh you're you're not efficient and go the game's not requiring me to be efficient there's not there's no push back there's no feedback mechanism that says i'm doing anything wrong i don't i don't play any differently because i think i'm a critical person in general pretty much everything in my life i do i critique while i'm doing it so i don't really play the games any differently i just play it as if a normal person would play the game and then if i missed something or or whatever i think most people would miss that and if not somebody's going to point you out and and that's calling everything but i'm just going to play the game to try and enjoy it because i think that's the best way to do it in terms of like how the average person would would experience it playing for fun would be an mmo that's good enough for me to play in my spare time not making content for it just play the game with headphones in with something on the second monitor relaxing you take a break from moaning about the game and just enjoy it for what it is playing to critique you're analyzing everything and vocalizing your thoughts things that aren't a big deal when you're playing for fun or chilling become a bigger deal because your intentions are different you're making a video to highlight problems with the game with the hopes that the developers see the video take your feedback and improve the game i'm quite a slow player to begin with unless it's something i've played 10 times already i'm very much sort of person who likes to absorb the world and and even like role play a little bit in some very mild ways you know do with the old rp walking that sort of thing so i guess if if i had a deadline maybe i actually would be more efficient than how i normally play a game because how i don't play a game is very much immersing myself deeply it's the same as when streaming cause uh i don't know if you know about xenoblade chronicles 3 that's launching in just a few days but uh i love just kind of like becoming absorbed into them if you're approaching it with the the sole purpose of critiquing criticizing or praising specific aspects of it you're sitting there like okay so this person is saying that that isn't translated correctly these textures don't fit okay this combat's actually kind of slow and boring why do i need to kill 15 boars you go from just having fun experiencing something new to immediately having to find faults with as many things as possible and that is especially true when you realize that the majority of people that watch videos are purely because they want you to talk smack about everything that they don't like about the video game the difference between when i became like a career critic and so on so forth and did qa work and qa testing like it does kind of offer this different perspective where now fun for my individual sense and entitlement isn't the only thing that i'm searching for so i find that it's a large part of like that concept is basically being able to divorce yourself from yourself and your personal enjoyment but to be able to look at the game and say okay well how does the game actually function on kind of like a base level outside of myself so like and and to your point i actually think that that's um fairly true uh for me as well but in a different way where because i have a lot of history testing games that is to your point you mentioned like trying to break a boundary i actually spend so much time in early mmo experiences just trying to bug the game out in glitch i actually feel kind of self-conscious about this but i don't like streaming my gameplay as much when i when i have like impressions on something or when i'm forming my early thoughts for that reason because i feel like people are so focused and i know you've probably experienced this sometimes too of telling me what to do they'll do it religiously they'll say you need to go do this and you need to go do that not like okay guys like i've already said please like understand that i am weird and i'm doing weird things and sometimes i'll spend an hour just on my keybinds like that's how i play an experience and do all the stuff that we're talking about be critical you spent hours doing the minute little things that everyone else breezes over hours making notes of the most minor things because that's what a review is some people might take certain things for granted like a wiggle of an icon or a circle on a mini map because the average player doesn't really notice those things but as a reviewer it's your responsibility to point those out to make a statement on it and explain exactly what it is you don't get to play an mmo the same way as the average person gets to play an mmo which sounds bizarre right because you're creating a review for the average mmo player or someone who's never played them before but your experience when you're playing an mmo full content is completely different the average player can get through the world of warcraft stein area in about 20 minutes if they play efficiently but if you actually went and you critiqued every single experience within the tutorial zone of wow you would literally be there for four and a half hours i've done it i know for sure yeah it definitely is a different mindset i would say though that i think with reviews what you'll find is is that it's actually a combination of both of these things it's not like oh the only stuff that goes into the review is my hardcore analysis i think the analysis is important you know as a reviewer you want to say okay i want how does this actually work what is this system how you know there's a cool reference there i love the attention to detail here so you are going to be analytical because those are the things that can really you can characterize again you can see the the care and the love that the developers put into crafting this video game so i think that that analysis is super important but i think in a review you're also going to be talking about yeah i was playing the game and this happened and it was cool right i was doing this with my friends and it was really fun and we really loved that that was an amazing memorable experience um so i think that there is a different mode when you go into analysis analysis critique mode but there's always going to be in my opinion that underlying component of i played the game and it was fun knowing that this is a game you're going to be playing for a video i mean i do the same thing apart from i don't have a pen and paper my handwriting is like a five-year-old what i do and what my goal is every time is again is kind of going back to the to the question beforehand is i'm trying to play as if i was a player the key word there is trying so it there is that issue of you've got to go check everything out you've got to see what the mechanics are it's really important because if you don't check the mechanic the mechanics out you know you're just going to have like a very general experience and you don't have that much to review on so of course you do have that push but also at the same time if i'm getting bored of something if i find that this is tedious i'm like you know what i can't even really do anything with this as well i might even just mention that in the video if it's quite bad but you do have in the back of your head you need to check everything out compared to when you're playing when you've just downloaded a game and you just want to play it for fun you might not check everything out my wife makes fun of me because our most successful streams some of my most successful videos have all been when i'm doing something that would buy a typical gameplay experience not be considered playing the game uh i clicked on a sign in final fantasy 14 for 78 hours we did it every monday for like two months we just clicked on a sign for six to eight hours and then called it a day and we did that it was a total of 78 hours and then there's a rare chance you get a house and i got the house uh and then and brian asked me i mean these streams were literally a hundred times more successful than anything else we've done at the time and brian brian asked me offline he goes what's the worst thing that could happen on streaming right now you know like could your microphone go bad and i said honestly the worst thing that could happen is i get the house like the content is the not content like i'm wanting it but like the worst thing that can happen is i get what i want so we did a spreadsheet stream like uh two weeks ago and i just did spreadsheets if you are sitting down to do something for work even if it is work that you enjoy you're gonna have a little bit of a different mindset than when you sit down just to chill out and just to get the feel of things get the vibe of things you know that's that's different but maybe a little bit of both is good to do you know because obviously you need the analytical method like you said checking every npc and checking every little shop and all that checking every item this helps you see uh what many players may have seen already but you also need to have your own unique perspective like your own natural and unique perspective that is the way that the game was designed to be enjoyed it's like the difference between analyzing all of the ingredients that go into a meal and being a judge on top chef or something and like thinking about the plating and the presentation and all that and like and this difference between that and like sitting down at your friend's house to enjoy food that they cooked for you right like these are two completely different uh mindsets and i think that it might be good to experience both of them while you're looking at a game so why aren't there more mmo content creators it's because it's an extremely niche section of the gaming world with a low audience cap which not that many people have a deep passion about making content for and critical opinions the creators need to have often put those creators at extreme risk of backlash from dangerously enfranchised fans general mmo channels can cover more games and rely more on the personality of the content creator at the cost of missing the finer details of the games themselves but specialized channels risk linking their channel's success and the creator's success to that chosen game's lifespan it takes an extreme amount of time to play any single game to the point where making content on it is viable to the end game players and when you do make the content you know it's got a pre-destined shelf life so you're encouraged to make easier more vapid content because it simply makes more sense considering time invested versus views gained when you know the videos go obsolete so quickly but that easy content is at odds with the design nature of mmos to change the gameplay experience from patch to patch from opening to ending meaning you now need to make the choice between artistically fulfilling deep content destined to die or cheap easy content destined to become useless and you'll be doing all this while playing a very deep demanding time intensive game in a draining analytical way taking notes as you do and then trying to make your experience entertaining when the majority of your experience was probably quite repetitive so what makes a good review well it depends do you want a general overview with a detached objective look at the opening of the game and then the mid game or do you want a long time specialist to look at the end game because both reviews are completely valid and both are extremely different the takeaway seems to be that we as content creators and you as audience members need to have realistic expectations of the other who the specific video is aimed at and to be honest about the level of depth you can expect from our content given the balance we need to find between quality and quantity if you don't put out quality videos people won't like your channel and if you don't put out quantity you won't make a living on youtube if you've watched this whole video and you're still thinking that you want to make mmorpg content then good we want you to this video wasn't designed to scare you away it was designed to welcome you into a strange career with a bit of look at the truth behind what you're actually going to experience if you're a passionate mmorpg player make mmorpg content we need you i need you there's only so many crap games left until i have to play world of warcraft a huge shout out to all the fantastic creators who keep creating amazing mmorpg content and for freely giving me their time to make this video possible all of their channels are linked in the description below another massive thank you to all the supporters on patreon and twitch who keep this channel alive you can support from only one pound a month check the video description for links to the patreon twitch twitter and discord and as always have a great day you

Channel: Josh Strife Hayes

Views: 863,604

Keywords: mmo podcast, mmo discussion, mmo design, mmorpg youtuber, mmo news

Id: u2uFaKMl5Zc

Length: 107min 1sec (6421 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 31 2022