Why I don't like other gamedev YouTubers

before we begin ask yourself should I really be watching this video right now or am I actually procrastinating working on my own game and making that a reality if that letter part is true for you and you don't really need to watch this video right now don't worry about it go and work on your game maybe leave us a like just to the algorithm doesn't hate us but if you have to work on your game I would much rather have it that you do that instead of watching YouTube videos like these you still State okay I assume you're not procrastinating and you're actually just taking a little break from game development and you want to learn a bit more about it so welcome to my YouTube video where I'm going to complain about the platform that I use to make my money basically so this is going to be a bit of a different video maybe I don't know I'm just going to go on some old man ramblings about why I think that YouTube and watching gamee YouTube is not productive at all and is actually setting back your game Development Career now the first thing I don't really like about YouTube in general this is not just a game the specific problem is how almost nobody is transparent about their numbers so there are two ways this manifests the first one is just people don't tell the full story so for example you have people who make the videos of how they made $100,000 in one year with their game sales but they don't talk about how it actually took 5 years and 25 filed projects to get to that state because that's not cool that's not sexy they know that you the viewer just want to know how do I make as much money as fast as possible because that's all you care about this is something you see basically in every industry not just game development and I like to pra myself there I like to think that we're doing it different here because we're very open and that is because when I was a young lad I wanted to know those numbers and I was always annoyed that nobody shares the truth everyone shares their beautiful version of how rich they are but it's all fake on the Internet it's something you have to realize I think we're pretty genuine we've made videos like for example how our launch for Forge industry wasn't that good and on our patreon we also make monthly videos where we go into depth like every single sales stat everything we've earned everything we spent completely open there and I think those are great things because there's not enough people doing this because I can guarantee you that there's like a 99.99% chance that your first game is not going to sell that well and that's fine that's normal but because the only content you watch is from other YouTubers who have made a game and it made like a million dollars or so they say you get a very Twisted View and it's not just sales numbers but even things like wish lists can be very skewed because if you see like games like oh un reccord just uploads a trailer and they get hundreds of thousands of wish lists whereas when I coach people and they come to me and they're like hey I launched my store page but I have only 40 wish lists what happened well reality happened but most people aren't aware of that reality our launch for Forge industry at 2500 wish lists was already really good honestly looking back because it was our first game and we made so many mistakes but we also had that twist Vision because everyone is like 7,000 wish list at least 7,000 wish lists but there's none enough people who don't get those 7,000 wish lists and still talk about game development because they just get lost in the void really and then one other annoyance on this topic that I hate as well that honestly I don't know if the guy watches this he's a YouTuber I think he knows who we are but I watched like a video recently of a guy who said he had doubled his sales numbers of his game like a one simple trick and he shows the steam graph but he deliberately cropped out the exact Revenue numbers those are not under NDA the only reason you're not showing those to your viewers is because you're scared of them roasting you and I understand it you guys are mean sometimes but I don't mind I would rather have the world know the truth then try and sell this fake vision of oh I went from $1,000 a month to 2,000 trust me bro I will just show you numbers and I'm going to be like honest like hey look we're not doing too hot right now maybe but we can can get through it because I believe that is much better in the long term that you guys believe that this channel is authentic and I'm not just going to use this channel to Pedal a course where in one month you can make a million dollars with your first game no coding required or whatever because that's not real and then what's also not real is the development process you see a lot on these devlogs so I know you guys like to watch devlogs honestly I never fully got the appeal of it but maybe it's because I'm not as hardcore of a programmer but devlogs show a very tainted way of how should you be programming because you have to remember honestly people on YouTube that make videos about their game development I would call them more of a YouTuber than game developers that's also what I feel I am more of a YouTuber than a game developer Thomas and William in our team they're game developers they don't worry about it but my job is just making videos and getting people to click and to watch these videos I'm in a bunch of game def YouTube discords and you need to know these thumbnails these Styles they are not just random screenshots they are AB tested like a bunch of game devs they get into a call and they start talking about the different ways to optimize a thumbnail so that you will click on it and they don't care about showing the truth they look into storytelling yeah sure they say it's about you know making sure people stay engaged for longer but why should they care about that because they're YouTubers they're not just sharing their games progress they want to get as much of your attention as possible to maybe do a sponsorship at a later point because that's going going to be earning them more money than their game sales and because of that because they have this Twisted goal of not making a game but just showing a game they have their priorities completely reversed so normally you program a lot you guys are mainly programmers as well you start by programming your game trying out the mechanics but you don't start with the art whereas if you want to have a successful devlog series you start with the art and only then later on do you add the actual code Parts because it's the art that's important if your first devlog is ugly nobody will watch it so we tried that with songs of ever Jade we really wanted to focus as much as possible on making the game beautiful first and then playable second but about a week ago now I realized that this is dumb this is not how it's being done we try to do it for our own devlogs but honestly our devlogs have been performing all right but it's not worth it to have that cost of having the weird development because we have a team that's very strong in programming and suddenly they have to focus on Art and I'm just sitting there like what am I doing this is not genuine this is not real we should focus on our strengths focus on that first find the fun find the mechanics actually and only then focus on how do we make this game pretty so don't stress it if your game doesn't look great yet first see if your game is fun and only then later on look at how am I going to make this pretty this next part is like two points kind of combined but part of these devlogs is also that it oversimplifies things there's this genre of devlogs as well that performs really well where it's like I recreated certain mechanic or certain game in 48 hours or 24 hours or 7 days or 1 hour or whatever where they make it seem like they do something very complex like making breath of the wild all over again and they do it in like a week and sure certain things are there but there is so much that you're not see because of editing magic when they are struggling with stupid bugs when they are just figuring out how does something work that bug instead gets turned into maybe like a 5c joke about how they were running into a wall but they broke through it eventually but if you're actually going through that wall if you have a bug that you just can't seem to fix you're going to be feeling stupid because everyone else on the internet knows apparently what to do it's only you who has that problem and everyone else who's sharing their stuff is only sharing their highlights you need to remember that and there's a lot of things you can hide with editing magic also remember even things like you know the game's not even being finished yet you can just cut out all of the ugly Parts but if you actually ask for a full playable demo often it's not possible because there's just too much broken stuff that is like right outside the camera's field of view and this also feeds your perfectionism what I mean by this is that honestly not that many gamee YouTubers have actually released a game have you thought about that because once again they're YouTubers first and Game Dev second the moment they release their game they lose part of their content if you're working on a game and it's getting very good views Dev loock wise you don't want to actually release that game it's much more beneficial to just keep making more devlogs keep making more videos about it because I'm going to be honest with you right now these devlogs that anyone makes converts horribly to wish lists not just me but many other games there's like a few sides that you can like get wish list estimations that are pretty correct you'll see that games that have a like devlogs with hundreds of thousands of views only have like a, wish lists often and there's nothing wrong with it once again they're just hiding the truth they're not telling you that I'm telling you now to go and look at that because you probably don't think about it that conversion rates are that low so it's more beneficial to just make a few more Dev locks they get a few 100,000 views more and just live off the AdSense instead of working on finishing the game but because you don't have a finished game you don't have that much to tell that's also why I was very adamant that during Forge Industries launch I wanted to release a game because then only did I have some credibility and I didn't feel like an imposter with what I'm telling you I know for a fact that everything that I've done I know all of the mistakes and I know how I can help you with them but I also see developers talk about things that honestly they've never experienced because they've never released the game they've only gone through the development part but they never finish it and this feeds your perfectionism as well because these people because they just keep working on their same game for 5 years they're making a really beautiful game or a really deep game but I don't believe that is what your focus should be if you're trying to get into game development you should focus on smaller games like 3 to six months making a lot of them and just figuring out what sticks what are my talents and how am I going to learn from my mistakes and make sure that my fifth game or my however my need game is going to be a great one and then this one I don't really mind that much honestly but people over complicate tools sometimes this is very obvious for example with Engine videos like we made a tier list engine video there's plenty of videos out there as well comparing unreal with unity with gdau or whatever or there's videos talking about how Bevy is the ultimate engine and the problem with watching these videos is that you probably have shiny object syndrome there's a very high amount of Developers that I've talked to once again through our Discord or through coaching or whatever and they're still stuck on the engine which is something that you shouldn't over complicate you just take one you make a project in it if it turns out it's not really that great you just move on and try another engine there's this whole Market I mean it's one of our most popular videos as well just talking about tools whether it's engines or maybe it's like should I use aprite or cret or what drawing software should I use what IDE should I use should I use ride or should I use Visual Studio it doesn't need to be this complicated you just need to do something but once again they need to make content they need to talk about stuff so that's what they go for and they create a lot of fear and uncertainty with you so you don't really know what should I do if you come to me and you're like I don't know what engine to use sorry but just pick an engine and get started there's no wrong choice really you can work with game maker Studio I don't care everything works you just need to find the it out for yourself so if you're still doubting what engine you should use stop that and just do a coin toss for all I care and go with it and stick with it and make one short project with it and then re-evaluate so honestly this video may sound very negative but this is something that I need you to know because often you guys come to me and you ask for my advice and all of the problems you have stem from watching too much YouTube I know it's very weird because I'm saying to watch my videos maybe but I believe believe truly that we are somewhat different that we try to be as genuine as possible and to really help you every video I make I want to help you our goal isn't to be entertaining that much but it's more to be educational sure maybe I say funny words now and then or some of our videos aren't as serious but you should know these things there's nothing wrong with watching devlogs for entertainment but what there is something wrong with is if you let those devlogs influence how you feel about your own development process so so if you're new here we're what I would call a genuine development channel so we are developers we've released our own game we're actively working on our second game and I'm not even going to ask you to wish list it because I know it doesn't really convert that well and we just talk about our own experiences when we go to events when we launch games for example or mistakes we make things I learn along the way and I just want you to know them so you don't make the same mistakes that I've done and we can all just become better developers in the end if that's something you're interested in be sure to head down below and subscribe and maybe also leave us a like as it really helps us out because I know that you want to become a great developer as well that's all I really had to say thanks for watching and I'll see you guys in the next one bye

Channel: BiteMe Games

Views: 58,130

Keywords: gamedev, indie, indie developer, game development, unity, c#, blender, game design, game studio, devlog, development, startup, forge industry, flega, steam

Id: XXXazQPuU0w

Length: 13min 41sec (821 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 19 2023