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Slowbeef posted:I was gonna start with something good, but gently caress that, because there's one guy I wanted to talk about for awhile. ZiloanOP is - or was - a twitch.tv gamer, paralyzed from the waist down. He got about $20,000 in donations from people watching his livestreams. It's scarecam LP type of stuff, but for a good cause, right? I had always assumed that poo poo happened, but now I have evidence. Breaking away from terrible people and getting into terrible trends, I wanted to talk about YouTube custom Thumbnails. Look up any popular YouTube person and you get a custom thumbnail on their videos that generally feature the name of the game, the number of the episode and...their face. If you happen to be this guy you may end up dressing like Ash from Pokemon for your videos of a Pokemon game that for some bizarre reason all feature a face cam It goes beyond popular people, though. For some reason it's a trope that spreads from the top guys to people with ten views on six videos released in the span of two days a year ago. What I can't understand is why this is a thing, it doesn't serve any purpose besides letting me know what the inside of your mouth looks like and to avoid you at all costs.
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Oct 10, 2013 17:49
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Slowbeef posted:Do custom thumbnails actually... do anything for anyone? I don't ever really regard them when I go to watch videos - I usually find what I'm looking for via search and the title. The ones people use for LPs? probably not. I've seen a ton of Vine compilations ("Wackiest Vine Videos, March-April 2013!) advertised with thumbnails showing a woman with her back to you wearing yoga pants and the like, or Reply Girls who use thumbnails of themselves from the chest up for the thumbnail and I'm sure there are plenty of 12 year olds who click the gently caress out of those videos. Custom Thumbnails are, as you said, sort of redundant if you are searching and have the title in front of you. I think they would be helpful to someone looking for the next episode in a series from the recommended lists on the side or in the video space after the video is over. Too bad the utility of that is sort of negated by the fact people will put their faces over the text that would otherwise be helpful.
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Oct 10, 2013 18:08
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As much as I dislike a lot of their content, the one thing the MindCrack guys seem to do is make decent thumbnails. Outside of that they are almost all practitioners of some really bad YouTube LP habits, like posting videos within hours of the game coming out, reading everything out loud and then forgetting the instructions seconds later and of course, constant personality over content videos.
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Oct 10, 2013 18:59
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You know, before the DSP subject gets hammered on too much, I wanted to point something out. His YouTube Wiki (Yes, that's a real thing) continuously insists he was fired from a desk job at Sikorsky Aircraft in 2010 "Most likely due to the bad economy at the time." I worked for a United Technologies company until last year, desk job layoffs were always super rare, especially in the US. Usually it was factory floor type people from across the company. In October of 2010 they fired 200 salaried people out of 20,000 Phil was apparently one. You have to work incredibly hard to get fired from a UTC desk job. However, if he brings the personality from his videos into that job he would be gone at the first opportunity available.
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Oct 10, 2013 21:36
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There is a good chance they put more time into those than into editing their videos.
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Oct 11, 2013 00:57
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Super Asia posted:thumbnails generally consist of my persona cosplaying as a character from the game, Speaking of livestreams, there's a guy who tracks down Battlefield 3 livestreamers and uses what is supposed to be a remote controlled airplane thing to kill them, which provokes some interesting reactions. 69Zelmarked69 has said he's pretty much done with Battlefield 3, but it really is worth going through his videos and watching just how upset people get at him over this. If that sounds too daunting, just watch this one. It's easily the most viewed video on his channel and for good reason. Lazyfire fucked around with this message at 03:34 on Oct 11, 2013 |
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Oct 11, 2013 03:29
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suicideprinny posted:I think the thumbnails go a ways into making the channel more professional looking. I may not have a ton of subs, but I play ball the same either way, whether I have 50 or 50 thousand. I think it's important to act and look like you put some work into what you do, and not just slapped some poo poo up there. That's the thing that gets me the most about custom thumbnails, they can be or are a helpful thing in finding more content quickly. My issue is that for everyone uses them so people can find more content from that series there are 12 YouTubers who paste their face into the thumbnail so you can find more of their other content based on what they look like.  If you're not already watching every video as it comes out (If not; what's wrong with you?) these thumbnails tell you everything you need to know about the video while letting you know it is the same person due to the overlays and filters and text style and whatnot. This is a good thing.  Then you have this poo poo. Some of these don't even have the name of the game or episode number or anything in the thumbnail, just the face of the person playing.  Oh, look, he's dressed like Ash, this surely speaks to the quality contained therein. This guy also facecams every game he plays for no apparent reason  WE'RE EVEN TEACHING BAD HABITS TO OUR CHILDREN! WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN! By the way, this just took ten seconds searching for "Slender" to find. Not even "Slender Facecam"
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Oct 11, 2013 11:48
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Sundowner posted:His "descriptions" are "astounding"... Wait, is this that idiot that messaged Slowbeef about how he was the first person to do a video Let's Play a while back? Actually, don't answer that, I went and checked my post history in the Sandcastle and it is. Read this poo poo: Burton posted:In the spring of 2005, lifelong gamer Burton Finch and his friends launched Ownage Inc., a website dedicated to documenting their adventures in cyberspace. The first series, Burton VS FEAR (inspired by 'Mesh does Doom 3') premiered on GameFront to critical acclaim. In 2006, with the rise of YouTube and FEAR's expansion on the horizon, Burton migrated the entire series and more to his director account - OwnageIncBFinch.
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Oct 11, 2013 16:42
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^^^^Well, gently caress.Slowbeef posted:The weird thing is he actually messaged baldurk. Ah, that's right, because the average person has no idea baldurk and anyone else involved with Let's Plays could possibly be a different person.
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Oct 11, 2013 17:09
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baldurk posted:I have honest to god received emails that only make sense if the person thinks I wrote every single LP on the archive. The LP Archive is a strange and wonderful place where I can see stuff I missed and people can assume that everything is the collected works of a single person with some form of multiple personality disorder.
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Oct 11, 2013 17:52
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Slowbeef's internet best friend TotalBiscuit did/does a Terraria series with Jesse. From that I learned that Jesse relies on complete randomness to be funny, which really doesn't work for me personally.
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Oct 11, 2013 17:59
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Help Im Alive posted:Do many of these people make a living from doing LPs? Or is it only possible if you're one of the super popular ones like PDP? PDP has made something like a million dollars off YouTube. From what I understand, people with smaller subscriber and view counts can make a reasonable living off YouTube, but if you are working a mid tier desk job you are probably making more than the average full time YouTube person and you get benefits that they would have to pay for (in the US anyways. Thanks, Obama etc.). WoodysGamerTag is one of those high level guys who quit his job in IT to do games full time. He's probably best known outside of the Call of Duty community for Livestreaming his family watching Netflix. Within the Call of Duty community where he started he's best known for "Mailbag Mondays" where he gives increasingly terrible advice to people with real problems. It isn't a joke, he thinks he is helping. The more interesting thing is that every now and again you get people who just get so popular they assume that they'll never fall, like WingsOfRedemption. He was/is a Call of Duty player who charged fans to get into games with him and for slots on his XboxLive friends list. He was an early partner with Machinima and made decent enough money he bought a double wide and a truck that was promptly stolen (no, not making that up). A few months ago he decided to break from Machinima and found another partner network that promptly fired him because he is rapidly bleeding subs and getting fewer and fewer views. Now he alternates between Let's Play videos and updates about how bad his life is and how he is basically radioactive to YouTube networks and makes so little that he is losing money by playing video games for a living.
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Oct 11, 2013 18:59
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TotalBiscuit posted:I still have no idea why people watch this, but it's the only series I do where the primary demographic is 13-17 year olds. Everything else on the channel is 25-34 primary, followed by 18-24. It's also one of those games that has no story of its own so it's only really watchable if the people playing it are making something entertaining out of it. Well, skewing younger never hurt anyone on YouTube. I've watched a fair amount of the first series and only made it two episodes in when it returned. Jesse is just not the kind of YouTube person my fiancee or I really watch any of so we pretty quickly lose interest in what's happening.
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Oct 11, 2013 20:09
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TotalBiscuit posted:I don't watch his content personally, it's not my thing, but I enjoy the straight-man/comedy-relief routine and he adds a dynamic to the podcast that we wouldn't get elsewhere. Yeah, you can tell the series is supposed to have that sort of dynamic, which I think was successful at first, but as the Terraria series continued on it sort of lost that sense and more felt like you were trying to keep a child with ADD on task. I've actually watched other stuff you and Jesse separately and had no real issue with it (aside from Jesse trying to force humor sometimes), but when you do this together it just doesn't come out great. Lazyfire fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Oct 11, 2013 |
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Oct 11, 2013 20:21
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MooCowlian posted:Looking at a couple of playlists from Jesse Cox, it looks like that effect more or less stops after the first few videos. His War in the North videos dropped pretty quickly and then pretty much hold at about a third of the views for the first video from episode 5 onward. In my experience you get a huge surge of interest in the beginning of any series and then either two things happen: 1)People who like the game/commentary will stick around, but you'll lose viewers who were just showing a casual interest. Generally you'll end up leveling out in your view numbers eventually 2)You'll keep losing views after the initial wave of interest ends by a noticeable margin. The bleed never really stops and by the end you have 10 people watching where there were once 1000. A while back I did a Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter LP that shows some 1000 views on the first video and ended with less than 100 by the last video. By contrast, my Tomb Raider LP started with 1400 views and evened out around 400 by the end. The difference between the first and second episode in view count was nearly 400, and then another 100 every few episodes after that. The Ghost Recon one I can understand, I was having a miserable time with that game and it shows. Tomb Raider is the LP I'm most proud of thus far not only because of the overall quality, but because people's interest in the game remained high throughout.
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Oct 11, 2013 20:51
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Cangelosi posted:Have you ever considered taking the best of those letters and having other people do dramatic readings of them? I would do this.
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Oct 12, 2013 23:05
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The second lesson is that if people will gladly suffer through low effort poo poo once they'll probably keep coming back. Look for my celebratory 1000th episode of Happy Wheels tomorrow. It is subtitled "Rape the bitch's fat oval office!" and I'll tell you now, some crrraaazy stuff happens. Did you enjoy this post? Make sure to like and subscribe. Follow me on Twitter and like me on Facebook.
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Oct 13, 2013 00:01
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Where are you guys finding some of these people? Everyone I've ever had recommended to me by YouTube has been a terrible mix of the worst LPer qualities instead of interesting or informative.
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Oct 14, 2013 15:13
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BgRdMchne posted:You may enjoy PewDiePie. Everything I see is him, GamingLemon, Markplier and TobyGames now. It's like a list of pointless people every time I finish a video.
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Oct 14, 2013 15:35
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Sundowner posted:I used to find some decent LPers by using search strings like this, and I'm not exaggerating: Yeah, that method is a great way to find about a million videos that you don't want to see ever at the same time. It reminds me of how people will simply spam their Tags section with poo poo like "-New Release-" (similar to the method above) even if the video is four hours of Minecraft just to get some people looking for video of a different game. Which reminds me of someone I think everyone should avoid at all costs: DJ Keemstar. It shouldn't be too hard because he constantly has his channels shut down. The guy basically bottom feeds on Call of Duty YouTube Superstars and "Trolls" them by posting YouTube comments and stirring up comment drama, then he makes videos documenting the drama he started with one of his other profiles. He does the same thing, just listing out tons of unrelated stuff with each video and getting hits by people confused on what he is doing.
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Oct 14, 2013 16:19
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SuccinctAndPunchy posted:Is YouTube's searching algorithm just that insistent on showing you people who tag their stuff "newrelease" that you have to exclude it from the search three times before it'll take? Yeah, it's bad. Part of that is because people absolutely spam their tags with poo poo. A Beyond: Two Souls LP may get tagged with "Beyond Two Souls, Beyond: 2 Souls, Beyond, B:2S, Beyond: TS, Beyond: Two Souls, Beyond: Two Souls (Video Game)" and so on. And then add "Let's Play, LP, Walkthrough, Playthrough, PewDiePie plays" in front of each of those.
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Oct 14, 2013 19:26
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I just had a chance to listen to the latest Retsutalk and I just need to reiterate how incredibly creepy that YouTube Wikia is. If you haven't listened, Slowbeef and 'Beetus had NorthernLion on and were reading selections from his YouTube Wikia page that had things like his height, number and names of pets and well, just look at it: http://youtube.wikia.com/wiki/Northernlion These things are all cited from hundreds of episodes of his Binding of Isaac series and other videos, but it doesn't make it less creepy that people essentially scoured hundreds of hours of content to come up with this stuff that may have been mentioned once or twice.
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Oct 16, 2013 14:14
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Idran posted:Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but: that wasn't emphasis, a minus sign before a term in a search means "don't show anything that includes this search term". That second minus sign was a copy/paste/cut mistake.
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Oct 16, 2013 18:09
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tiistai posted:All this speedrunner and facecam talk reminds me of werster's blindfolded Pokemon Stadium 2 runs. Dunno if you could call it a facecam when he's under a blanket for over an hour. In the same vein: Vicas including a footcam to prove that he was playing Mario 64 with his feet.
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Oct 17, 2013 15:38
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I can't explain the depths of my hatred for people reading on screen text out loud. I guess it is a strange thing to hate, but among bad LP habits it ranks up there with never editing out boring video and playing games on day one (which leads to a lot of the former). It's not necessary and it is rarely funny. The one thing I've noticed fairly often with people who read out every bit of text is that they forget the thing they read out loud moments before. I was watching someone play Guacamelee when I wasn't sure what it was and the game tells them the technique they need to use to beat an enemy. Four minutes of trial and error later they stumbled upon it by accident and expressed disbelief that the game didn't tell them what to do.
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Oct 17, 2013 18:35
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frozentreasure posted:No, I mean why people who read text out loud will often not actually process what it says. I get why they read it out loud. There is a really good chance that they don't so much read the text so much as they say it like it is part of their insightful commentary. One of those things that annoys me that is related to this is people who start playing blind who forget basic game mechanics. The best example I can think of was back when Sips from the Yogscast started his Don't Starve series and in an early episode started to...starve. Instead of looking through the various meters to see why he was taking damage all of the sudden while he wasn't under attack he started fake crying and complaining the game was killing him. It took him 30 seconds or so to realize he hadn't eaten in like 2 in game days. How is it possible to not understand such a basic thing?
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Oct 18, 2013 11:32
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Who wants to talk about YouTube randomly putting 3rd party content acknowledgement requests against videos? thepostgame, for those of you who have lives and don't know every random YouTube Networks is a YouTube Let's Player network that apparently claimed part of Batman: Arkham City for themselves. How they got to do that is beyond me.
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Oct 20, 2013 07:31
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Admiral H. Curtiss posted:I'd had a similar thing happen once, mail the guy and explain the situation. I have a few other videos like that and at the end of the day, I really don't care enough to worry about it. I don't own the copyright to the game, so when this comes up I generally just acknowledge the claim and move on. However, I think there is a discussion to be had about claims like this and the fact you can get into internet-trouble if the wrong person throws down a claim.
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Oct 20, 2013 14:38
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Ok, yeah, I spent a while laughing at that. Apparently after less than 40 videos the channel was abandoned in favor of something that may or may not be My Little Pony related.
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Oct 20, 2013 17:05
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IceAgeComing posted:Why am I not surprised! Ok, I now feel bad about making fun of this person because it is an actual child who is attempting to do a pony focused channel. Getting that intro for what the LP video was is still overkill, though.
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Oct 20, 2013 18:20
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I subscribed to them just to unsubscribe. No, wait, I'm an adult and I didn't do that.
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Oct 21, 2013 03:33
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SelenicMartian posted:Even his N64 controllers tried to stop him from recording, through heroic suicide ad malfunctions. Gotta love when hardware tries to kill your LP. On another note, his Youtube Wikia page is really poorly formatted and has a collection of his "best lines" and "quotes." Read those if you are pretty ok with hating yourself and everyone around you. http://youtube.wikia.com/wiki/NintendoCapriSun
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Oct 21, 2013 20:41
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Slowbeef posted:That was him putting on the voice. He solicited "talent" for later episodes, but I don't know if anyone took him up for it. Imagine that IMDB credit. LP of Final Fantasy VII by MageKnight404 Cast (in order of appearance) Cloud................xX420DarkAssassinXx
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Oct 22, 2013 20:27
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I'm now wondering if this video ever came to Slowbeef's attention. Or this one. So weird to see Retsupurae best of videos.
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Oct 23, 2013 02:44
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frozentreasure posted:I've seen it a couple of times in the sandcastle, but are there examples of LPers who got popular (to some degree) on YouTube then came here, received criticism and actually took it onboard to improve their LPs, instead of just saying "gently caress those guys"? Aside from the two people I am thinking of, not really. Actually, one of the MindCrack podcasts featured a segment where the guys on that podcast voiced their displeasure with the LP Subforum rules/Slowbeef when someone sent them the rules here like Slowbeef had set those as rules for LPs across the internet. "Know the game" and "Don't play on release day" are sort of direct attacks on those guys' incomes, so I don't know what other reactions they would generate. That said, every few weeks someone tries to do a YouTube style LP here and get laughed at or told to redo it and come back. Those usually create some hilarious entitlement posts ("I just thought you guys would like a GOOD LP for once!").
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Oct 24, 2013 23:16
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Friends Are Evil posted:I feel like I'm missing some vital context to this game. Like, how does this exist? "Hey, Jerry, we blew like a million dollars trying to make this tech demo, how did it turn out?" "Terrible, everything looks bad and we can't get the camera to ever sit in a good spot to tell what is happening." "Well, we need to make that money back. Give it a name and push it to retail!"
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Oct 26, 2013 22:02
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This isn't strictly a LP thing, but many of the people I'm about to generalize do LPs now as well and they are generally the embodiment of bad LP habits: Looking at the pre-release hype for Battlefield 4 and Call of Duty: Ghosts, I'm noticing that more and more "exclusive" information is being disseminated through the top ranked YouTube guys for that franchise. Battlefield 4 has a press event going on right now and a few videos have come out of it, mostly showing places like Game Informer, Gamespot and PC Gamer in the games, but you also have people known for making Battlefield videos for YouTube in the mix. I can see why a company would do it, you basically get free advertising for the game as this person gushes about it to thousands of followers, Reddit and the like pick it up and spread it around and pretty soon you have other people talking about the game. I just think it is bizarre that this is a viable marketing tactic, and the fact that some of the names you associate the most with major video game franchises are things like "JackFrags" and "WoodysGamerTag" and they are considered by the developers to be trustworthy sources of information for their audience.
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Oct 28, 2013 19:55
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Redeye Flight posted:Well, people who have prestiged six times or done other insane amounts of things in the game certainly know what aspects of the game work and which ones don't. They've been putting in huge chunks of time to become the best at the game and understand how it operates inside and out, so it makes sense to get their reactions and opinions. See, this is a misconception as well. When COD Elite came out you could check the stats of any player so long as you had their GamerTag. The top YouTube guys had stats that were lower than, say, mine and I'm just kind-of-OK. I think their popularity comes from personality rather than content as it stands, but seeing companies use them as free advertising makes it seem like they've run out of ways to show off the game or got lazy and decided that it is easier to give these guys a few hours of footage to post up rather than producing it yourself.
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Oct 28, 2013 20:16
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Kytrarewn posted:I missed the discussion here (which was really about the creepy youtube wiki) but Northernlion is a clear example of someone who can be either perfectly acceptable or horrible depending on the game. There are some people who are totally fine doing one game or even a genre of game, but then the second they step out of their niche they are clearly not prepared for how different it will be. I think it's more apparent in people who do a ton of Minecraft content, they have to go from a game where commentary is "We're going to mine this, we're going to place a block here" stuff to "HOW DO I OPEN THE DOOR! I'VE BEEN TRYING FOR FIVE MINUTES!" the second they start another game. Case in point, when the new Tomb Raider came out I saw a well known Minecraft LPer try to figure out the first puzzle where you have to burn a cloth, fill a thing with boxes, set those on fire and then set off a mine with the fire boxes. It isn't a difficult puzzle as the game makes what it wants you to do really obvious, but it still took him 10 minutes to figure it out, and he cut out none of it.
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Nov 1, 2013 17:50
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Has anyone ever wanted to see 3 hour sessions of combat-focused Minecraft at a time? YouTube Superstar Woody's GamerTag has you covered There's a lot to say about Woody, none of it very good. In more recent months he's been focusing on diversifying his gaming portfolio to include YouTube's favorite thing: Minecraft, an lots of it. Don't watch that video I linked by the way, it is not interesting at all. Woody started his own Minecraft server and it is basically a session focused PVP thing where he and a bunch of other idiots hit each other with swords that seem to do no damage for five minutes until they are all dead and then they start over again. They then repeat that for three hours.
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Nov 6, 2013 16:29
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