From Bartending to YouTube: Interview with Force Gaming
Learning from his ten years of success
A couple of weeks ago on the podcast, I brought on content creator Force Gaming. If you’re not familiar with him, he creates comedic and informative videos on YouTube about video games.
Force started off in the summer of 2010 creating Starcraft videos. He was inspired by other gaming YouTubers at the time and decided to give it a shot for himself. He refers to his early videos as garbage but that really isn’t the case. In fact, his loyal, early viewers would disagree with that statement a lot.
In his early video making days, he got a contract from Machinima, as signing on with someone like them was the only way you could make money off of videos back then. If you’re not familiar with Machinima, they are an entertainment company owned by WarnerMedia.
During this time, Force was working as a bartender and going to school part-time. He was even considering joining the Airfoce — hence his online name, Force Gaming. After about nine months as a bartender, he quit because he didn’t love it, and he received his first check from YouTube just six months after he had started releasing videos.
Everyone gets sick of stuff they’re overexposed too. This happened to Force too. He created a lot of videos about Blizzard’s hit game, Overwatch, and continued to cover the game despite his gradual lack of interest. Force tells me in our interview that every game has about a lifespan of about a year, then, he begins to get very bored with it. This would get so bad that he would still play games he was already bored with just for content on his YouTube channel. Essentially, this took the joy from his gaming and content creation experience.
After his Overwatch phase, he had a realization. Force wanted to find a new game that he loved and genuinely enjoyed but, at the same time, he did not want that game to be his only source of content because it would only make his interest burn out faster.
“My goal, I guess, is to try to build my channel where the focus is not the individual game but, the content… or me. “
By taking this approach, Forcecan be more creative and have more freedom in terms of videos. Also, it helps protect him from a drop of views when switching games. There are a lot of gaming YouTubers out there currently that rely solely on one game for their platform. Think about all the Fortnite YouTubers. How often do you seem them playing any other game? Force, however, saw something he wanted to change and went out and did it, improving both his quality of life and channel in the long run.
Be sure to check out Force Gaming on YouTube and Twitter.
To hear more about his origin story and his experience streaming on Facebook for a while before switching back to Twitch, check out the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and online.
