YouTube versus gaming?

Symbiosis in peril?

After watching a video by the YouTuber MatPat entitled "Game Theory: Is YouTube ruining gaming?", I found myself invested in the topic. (Feel free to look it up to see what I'm talking about.) Therefore I have decided to cover something a little bit different today, still related to the world of gaming but a little bit more meta: I wanted to write about the influence of Media on the gaming industry. Or more specifically, the relationship between YouTube and the games industry, and whether that relationship is in peril.

For some people, like me, I'd imagine that your introduction into the gaming world might have been through a family member or friend. Playing Mario with your father or hitting up the arcade to play 'Time Crisis'/'House of the Dead' with your friends, or having your grandfather leave you with Metal Gear Solid for an afternoon at age 5. (Can't imagine who that last one might refer to.) Children of the today, however, might have a different inlet into gaming, through watching a stranger play games on the Internet. (I'm starting to sound like a clueless BBC reporter.)

Gaming has been huge part of me all my life, or since I was 5 but let's not split hairs. In the world I grew up in, there was not as many ready available tailor-made sources of information to sort through. Yes, the Internet did exist but it was no nearly as omniscient as it is today. (If it was, I wouldn't have had to spend three years trying to find the lyrics to 'Gangsta's Paradise'.) And when you had a hobby as niche as a predilection towards gaming, you were really out of luck. Luckily, where new media hadn't yet caught up, print had our back, and people like me would turn to gaming magazine to get our news about the unreachable world of gaming. It was how we learnt about the games of the future, the impending rise of VR, the space-age 2k TV's that would be hitting shelves next year, et cetera. It was how us gamers discovered out new obsessions for the coming year.

Now, during this time I wasn't a fan of fantasy; that's a whole other story in and of itself, but that particular detail is necessary to establish right away. When reading a copy of The Official Xbox Magazine, (Guess what my console was!) I came across a several page spread dedicated to a brand new huge fantasy RPG. A little-known game called: 'Skyrim'. I read all around that article and avoided it like the plague; fantasy games were, afterall, just not my cup of tea. Of course a kid that was as introverted as I was, has little to fill his spare time with, so eventually I read through every other article 5 times and was left with this spread. Long story short, I was now excited for a game I never would have been usually, but I had a problem. I had never played a fantasy game before, I had no idea what they looked like or felt like, and no idea how I could rectify that. How could I be excited for a game based on wind and promises? Luckily, another OXM magazine came with an interesting article concerning the burgeoning world of YouTube and online Media: "How to make a Let's play." It was how I learnt of the term and the world of strangers playing the games they love online for others to see.

That was my introduction to the power that YouTube and enthusiast media can hold. Through YouTube, I devoured hours of content dedicated to Oblivion, and then a 200 episode, interactive let's play of Morrowind. I became hooked to the passionate personalities who played and presented a game that they genuinely held affection for. This wasn't some tired presenter on one of those awkward gaming TV shows, (Which always held the worst time-slots, by the by.) trying to sell us on games through synthetic line reads and thinly veiled ads. On YouTube, we had access to videos created by the greatest salesmen that any company could hope to have represent them: Fans of the product. There is no equivalent or substitute for genuine passion, enthusiasm and positive word of mouth; and with the rise of the Internet, positive word of mouth could reach anyone around the entire globe. What I have described for you so far is my personal experience of the birth between the close relationship of gaming companies and YouTube.

I have bought both Morrowind and Oblivion twice since then. Skyrim thrice. Mine is not the only story of the power of passionate fans. One term that MatPat used to describe this phenomenon is 'Earned Media', referring an incredibly desirable effect when people are so enamoured by your product that they do the marketing for you; like I described, it is genuine, it is honest and it is convincing. YouTube has been rife with that kind of marketing ever since it's rise to prominence in the early 2010's. Look online and you'll find dozens of YouTube channels dedicated to this type of game or that genre of game, or channels dedicated to the entirety of gaming itself. And, of course, channels who specialize in video game analysis.

This rise of 'Earned Media' reached a point wherein it began to shape much of the gaming world around it. MatPat mentioned the 'PewDiePie' effect, coined when Felix Kjellberg played a lesser known game on his channel; Surgeon Simulator and thus drove huge sales to the game, making it a thunderous success. From my experience, I still remember the effect that YouTube had on Metal Gear Survive. Now of course Konami had a lot of bad press on them before they announced Metal Gear Survive: Their firing of Hideo Kojima, removing of his credit from all his box art, accusations of mistreatment of staff and Metal Gear Pachinko. Never shall we forget Metal Gear Pachinko. But the absolute, unreserved disgust that fans threw at Metal Gear Survive was largely driven by the online community of dedicated Metal Gear fans who saw the cheap cash grab from a mile away. Everything that Konami went through in regards to public relations; the controversy, the ridicule and the abject failure-of-a-game that was Metal Gear Survive, all of that was magnified by the public spotlight thrust on them by the YouTuber gaming community. The kind of coverage that a gaming magazine or show just wouldn't be capable of, for fear of withdrawn advertisers.

It's undeniable, then, that YouTube had become a formidable force in the gaming community. Sure forums existed, both private and public, and Discords have become a thing in recent years; but YouTube is where the PR battleground is held, and if you win there then you've gone a long way for your product. Therefore it was no surprise when companies started picking up YouTubers as spokespeople for their video games. It isn't uncommon now for publishers to ship early copies of upcoming games to YouTubers as well as reviewers. At this point, securing the respect of the Youtuber is much more important then securing high review scores, as a good, personality-lead campaign can drive more sales than a passionless number on a review website. Companies who play the YouTube game well reap the benefits in their reputation; just look at CD Projeckt Red. Now, I'm not going to downplay the quality of their products nor the way the they load the consumer with goodies and benefits merely for the act of buying their game. But I believe the real genius in CDPR's public relation strategy is in their candidness with their audience; a candidness shared by no other popular games company in the world. And how does CDPR communicate that candidness? Through secret messages embedded in one second frames of their YouTube videos. CDPR know that their most staunch supporters are on YouTube and so they speak directly to them; as a result, Cyberpunk 2077 is the single most anticipated game of next year. That's the power of 'Earned Media' for you.

Now, if you've watched MatPat's video on "YouTube is ruining gaming!", Mr Patrick points to this as the way things are, whilst providing foreboding thoughts on the way things may, and have, become. This is because of the symbiotic relationship between YouTubers and game company marketers. Yes, Games companies benefit when YouTubers cover their product favourably but that YouTuber benefits also as their views generate them a profit through the magic of ad revenue. The problem is that YouTube has recently been making it harder and harder to make a living on YouTube by instituting, frankly draconic, restrictions on uploaded content. No depictions of simulated violence, there goes all violent games; No excessive use of profanity, there goes Cyberpunk 2077 and it's ilk; No suggestive images, bye bye Japanese anime games. Breaking any of these rules can cripple earnings off a video, seriously hurting the viability of YouTubers covering these types of games. So what happens to all that 'Earned Media'? It is being actively hampered by the policies of YouTube. Full time YouTubers won't want to risk their livelihoods just to cover something that they love. As a consequence, game coverage suffers and companies who have grown to rely on the 'Earned Media' that YouTube provided, will feel the brunt in the coming years.

The unpredictable element is the effect that this will have on the gaming industry going forward. Matpat believes, whether is seriousness or jest, that this will have an effect on the fundamental development on gaming going forward. And perhaps he is right. YouTube is the most viewed video sharing platform on the Internet and if publishers need to twist their developers work in order to fully take advantage of the platform YouTube provides, then why wouldn't they? Now us consumers have to wonder if this will have an effect on out favourite franchises going forwards. The upcoming 'DOOM Eternal 'will be released in a time when YouTube's new policies are in full swing, whereas the 2016 'DOOM' revival came in the golden age where YouTube was a lot more accepting. 2016's DOOM benefited tremendously from the huge coverage that big YouTubers like Markiplier afforded Id software's game. Will DOOM Eternal suffer without that widespread coverage? I would imagine that Markiplier would likely still cover the game, but what about all those smaller channels who can't afford to take the risk? Will this make DOOM Eternal a failure? Mortal Kombat 11 suffered drastically in sales this year despite critical acclaim, likely due to the fact that most people were discouraged from showing off the game due to it's violent content. Those that did faced the crippling wrath of YouTube in a way that will likely teach them to ignore future Mortal Kombat titles.

So the question arises: Is YouTube ruining gaming? From examples and figures and everything we can see so far the answer appears to be yes. So much of the gaming industry has become dependant on the world of YouTube to further it's brand and now YouTube is threatening that dependence, is it so hard to imagine that companies won't bend over backward to play their tune. A pessimist may assume that this means the end of all rated 18 games or rather their slinking back into the obscurity they came from in the 90's. I'm usually more of a 'wait-and-see' kind of guy but it seems that we have already started to see what is happening and it isn't promising. With the reveal of the next gen, likely at E3 2020, we will see the direction of gaming and then we will know what kind of world gaming pride has wrought.