Lessons learned from creating Let’s Play videos

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about some of the lessons I have learned during my career as a creator of Let’s Play videos.

Creating Let’s Play (LP) videos is a special way of playing a computer game as the player commentates and records the own gameplay. The resulting LP is a coverage of the gameplay that is enhanced with an additional story arc due to the player’s commentary. This article reports on my own experiences of creating LPs and uploading them to YouTube. Most of my experiences might be obvious and already well known. Furthermore, some of my experiences are caused by the functionality of YouTube and are not directly connected with the creation of LPs.

Learning how to create LPs takes time. It might be possible to extract the most important elements of creating an LP by watching already existing LPs, but actually recording a video and comming up with an exciting commentary is challenging as all of this happens just in front of the own computer screen without any audience. As a result of this, the player just talks into the microphone without getting an immediate feedback on the own performance. Additionally, it takes time to get used to play a game and to commentate on the own actions at the same time. Some games are really demanding and thus it is not that easy to simultaneously focus on both tasks.

Building a loyal audience takes time. One of the biggest challenges of creating LPs is probably to build a loyal audience that enjoys the videos and even interacts with the content creator by commenting on them. This can be explained with the high amount of other Let’s Players that are competing around the attention of the viewers and the functionality of the YouTube search algorithm that favors YouTubers who already have a high amount of viewers. In the end, a new content creator has a very hard time to reach other people as the uploaded LPs are only found by a few viewers.

It is all about the game and not about the player. The majority of the viewers is mostly interested in the gameplay of a particular game and does not follow the player’s progress through a different game. As a result of this, only a particular LP series gets a high amount of views whereas all the other series are only watched by a few users who are really interested in the player’s playstyle. This behavior has surprised me the most as I have selected my favorite YouTubers by their playstyles and not by the games they are playing.

Announcements, offers and requests only have a limited effect. Creating special announcments or requesting some feedback has a very low response rate. This observation aligns with the previous observation that the majority of the users only follows one video series. Even if a less popular video series is announced in a popular video series, the amount of views of the less popular series remains the same.

Although my observations revealed some curious aspects of uploading LPs to YouTube, creating LPs can be still very entertaining and can become a great hobby.