Free Publicity


Opinion

Youtubers and Twitch streamers make the best video game advertisers.

By Josiah Sapp



    The best advertisements are the ones where you believe the people trying to sell you something. You can always tell something is off when someone doesn’t believe in the product that they’re selling. This is why I think old infomercials and door to door salesmen are so easy to dismiss. They lack passion and belief in a product or service. Video game commercials have typically been very vivid and over the top. Created by older generations trying to appeal to what they think kids like. You can see this in the early ads for systems like the Playstation and Nintendo 64. Today’s advertisers are more subvert and more entertaining to watch. You’re probably already subscribed to them.

    Gaming on YouTube and Twitch has taken off in the past few years. People have made a full time living off of making videos about games and playing games live. Millions of people tune in every day to their favorite streamer or content creator just to be advertised to. Each video and each stream is free exposure for the game that they’re playing. They’re showing it off, giving their impressions, unearthing secrets and just having fun with the product. For the most part, these content creators are playing games that they really want to play and that passion comes through in their content. Bungie’s latest title Destiny 2 was just released and to get fans hyped for it, they invited video game journalists, streamers and youtubers to the promotion events. Why? In a game developer’s mind, they all do the same job. At these events, early builds of the game were made available to the press and they allowed Youtubers to actually capture game footage so that they could upload videos in the following days. There were a few hundred people at the reveal event with a sizable chunk of them being Youtubers. Say there were 100 YouTube channels present and each has a subscriber base of 500,000 people. That means there were millions of people that were exposed to Destiny 2 and that’s lowballing the numbers if you account for duplicated subscribers. Most Youtubers and Twitch streamers present have a subscriber base well over a million. What about games that are on a lower budget than Destiny? How can they tap into this publicity?

    Ever heard the phrase “Any press is good press”? Some game developers take this to heart. They don’t care if what you have to say is good or bad as long as you’re talking about the game. A studio by the name of Destructive Creations released their controversial title Hatred in June of 2015. They didn’t have a huge advertising budget but their game spoke for itself. This game is so violent and so horrifying that the internet (and major news outlets) did all the advertising for them. Reaction videos, labeling it the most gruesome video game ever made, and just the act of talking about it spread the word and inadvertently advertised for it. (Even now as I write this, I know that I’m giving this game publicity but that’s the paradox I’m trying to explain!) All this negative press worked. It topped Steam sales charts beating out multimillion dollar games like The Witcher 3 and Grand Theft Auto. It got reactions and reactions brought sales and that’s the beauty of free publicity.

    A lot of game developers have put millions of dollars into ad campaigns hoping to reach the highest amount of people possible. This takes marketing managers, strategies, teams of creatives, focus testing, and graphic design teams making up the visual ads. Not to say all these things are done away with today but there has been a massive shift and heavy investment in popular YouTubers and Twitch streamers. Companies like Bungie and SledgeHammer are starting to see the value of these communities. It’s not just a hobbie and shouldn’t be dismissed as such. Some of these people are setting aside other life opportunities and putting in 60+ hour work weeks just to create videos for people like me to watch. If I’m already invested in these personalities, I’m more likely to buy whatever it is their selling. Youtube and Twitch have become major players in the entertainment business and stats have shown that more people are tuning into these platforms than cable TV. That’s something to be proud of and shows that these people are gaining communities rapidly and have figured out how to keep them around.


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