6 ways indie games have done well on YouTube and Twitch
Video game marketing used to be getting attention — especially reviews — from respected publications. The attention added up to sales; your Metacritic score forecast potential success. But no more.
YouTube and Twitch are more popular with today’s game players than magazines or blogs ever were. Publishers today still do traditional PR, but in a market that’s unbearably crowded with new games, whether it’s IGN or Rock Paper Shotgun that tosses off a review hardly matters. It’s the video audience that does.
So the new question is: what attracts the attention of content creators and streamers? Our database of over 10,000 games at Harpeview helped pick out trends that are especially applicable to indie games.
Of course, any given trend has a game that did it first, or did it best. Each of the six trends includes a specific game, plus its cumulative views (as of June, 2018) to date.
Multiplayer: Golf It! (480 million views)
Games like Golf It! don’t get blog and magazine PR at all, for the most part. Critics aren’t very interested in a competitive mini-golf game. But multiplayer plays really well with video audiences. The important lesson offered up by Golf It! is that viewers like cute or funny themes for multiplayer as much as — maybe more than — the more traditional genre of gory war games.
Golf It! Has cute and funny in equal measure. It’s basically the same formula that makes Fortnite a hit:
- High dexterity or mastery (leading to a hole in one or head shot) is rewarded by the game, and thus interesting to watch
- Luck can achieve the same impressive moments, but extreme luck (good or bad) remains uncommon enough to be interesting in compilation videos
- “Weird” stage design with plenty of secrets and discoverable details
- Bright, colorful art in a friendly, humorous style — which helps players have the same attitude
Strategic depth: Slay the Spire (50 million views)
Single-player games can do well on Twitch and YouTube, too. But when they do, it’s usually because of strategic depth. Just look at Slay the Spire, an indie card game that’s still in Early Access on Steam.
Slay the Spire is a deckbuilding, roguelike dungeon crawler that creates strategy on a lot of levels: enemies random, maps are procedurally generated, and tougher monsters tend to require specific decks. In case players win, they’re rewarded with a score that shows off achievements like killing bosses without losing any health.
Slay the Spire that helps encourage video — and also to evangelizing to friends — with a daily leaderboard. The highest scores are impossible to achieve without specific strategies. I’ve personally put over 40 hours into the game, enough to realize that to improve much further, I need to watch more skilled players show and explain how they play.
The community discussion takes place in a lot of places, of course: on Steam discussion boards, forums, and Reddit, for instance. But when you want to see actual examples, YouTube works best. Deck building and tactics videos are the most popular content for the game.
Humor & schadenfreude: Getting Over It (330 million views)
Over six million people tuned in to watch a handful of streamers — PewDiePie, Markiplier, and jacksepticeye — join together in a single video to scream over Bennett Foddy’s Getting Over It. In China, a streamer shrieks as the “No Leg Hammer” guy (one of the nicknames local Chinese players have fondly given the game) falls off a wall he has been trying to traverse for hours. Schadenfreude transcends cultural and language barriers.
Foddy posits that his success on YouTube harkens back to a simpler time in games. “There’s nothing particularly interesting about getting to the end of Galaga. But once people started having games you would finish, there frequently becomes a set of expectations about needing to finish them. And when you’ve got that, there’s a guilt people feel, or a sense of dissatisfaction, if they stop playing halfway through. That’s a type of pressure I feel myself when I’m playing single-player games, and that’s part of what’s sort of objectionable about really, really difficult single-player games. You’ve invested in getting to the end, and when you reach a point where you can’t continue, there’s something sort of abortive about that. And I do think my games avoid that, for the most part,” he said in an interview with Games Industry.
Ten years before Getting Over It, the indie darling Super Meat Boy followed a similar formula: the game never lets the player take a break, and they get rewarded for surpassing certain thresholds. Foddy’s often humorous metacommentary about the game is its own prize, while Super Meat Boy has a replay system that becomes a highlight reel of all the player’s valiant attempts before ultimately succeeding over a level. SMB’s devs, like Foddy, also had the penchant for self-marketing — both doing numerous video interviews on YouTube about the game’s development, as well as going on interviews with publications ranging from The Atlantic to smaller, more niche outlets like IndieGames.com. This self-promotion helps video creators get interested in the game and create more content.
User-generated content: Raft (58 million views)
Game developers have always loved the idea of user-generated content in their games. Yet only a handful of players actually follow through. Roblox, for instance, has 60 million players, yet only 2 million creators. In other words, UGC is similar to in-app purchases, with only 1–5 percent of the playerbase participating.
So before the advent of streaming, few UGC-based games survived. Metaplace, for example, was a big deal around its 2009 launch. The game was essentially a UGC massively-multiplayer game, which seemed like the thing to be at the time. A year later, it shut down, having realized that few players outside of a dedicated core actually wanted to create content. Minecraft, also released in 2009 and featuring more traditional gameplay, only truly took off once YouTube grew large enough.
But pure UGC games have become more powerful with the advent of video. Today, Minecraft perpetually ranks in YouTube’s top five games, and gets watched by an average of 200,000 people at any given time. Even major developers like Nintendo have ventured back into UGC. Super Mario Maker, which was released in 2015, got many more views than other Mario games.
UGC is particularly good for indies these days because of game creation platforms like Unity. Most devs are now creating better tools for themselves to use — which translates well to tools for modders and content creators.
The current standout is Raft, an open-world, survival game. In Raft, players build a base on a floating hunk of wood using detritus and debris from the ocean. The near limitless customization options are likely too much for casual players to use to the fullest extent — but it’s great for YouTube. The most popular videos revolve around building quirky bases, like a massive fort built around a small island, or a small shrine of shark heads that commemorate skirmishes against the predators.
Conscientious developers: Stardew Valley (240 million views)
Stardew Valley is the best in nostalgic farming simulation available today, to the point that it’s even more popular than legacy franchises in the genre like Harvest Moon.
Indie developer Eric Barone worked 10 hours daily for over four years before Stardew became the highly polished, content rich blockbuster success story it is today. Even after selling millions of copies, Barone is still churning out updates — everything from cutscenes that give the story greater depth, to a new gameplay features like multiplayer mode.
Games in this group don’t necessarily do well because they’re amusing, or strategic, or have multiplayer — they do well because their developers work for years to polish a perfect gem, and work yet again to build a community around it.
Other games follow the same path: Path of Exile, despite being less established than competitor Diablo 3, outranked Blizzard’s RPG in views in April because of an update that introduced 200 new creatures to the game. Terraria, another nostalgic-looking pixel art game, was also smart about doing frequent updates that add new depth to the game. Streamers favor these sorts of games because it makes their job easy, too: when developers release something new, views go up.
eSports: Rocket League (370 million views)
Finally, we come to eSports: a category rarely graced by indies, though not for lack of trying. TowerFall, for instance, was compared to Super Smash Bros. The game had its own tournaments — briefly — and was heavily played at the Indie Olympics in San Francisco two years ago. But today it’s only the 3146th most streamed game on Twitch. What kept TowerFall from fully succeeding? Probably a lack of online play, which not only hampered the eSports aspect, but also kept streamers from being too interested.
If not for Rocket League, we might not believe indies could succeed in eSports at all. It’s still not easy: Rocket League developer Psyonix had previous experience making car-based bash-’em-up games. Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars, which the developer published in 2008, is in many ways the same game, although with less polish.
Indie eSports games can keep from becoming obscure through community buzz. Rocket League did well on on Reddit, which put the game on streamers’ radar. “Reddit was absolutely massive for us. The PS4 subreddit picked our game up during the beta and that’s what blew us really wide, we think. The GIFs took over,” recalls senior VP of game development, Corey Davis.
This suggests that eSports actually have a complicated relationship with streaming video. Indie eSports games won’t start out, on day 1, with viewership. On the other hand, without people recording gameplay, the great moments won’t get distilled down and shared to platforms like Reddit unless someone is recording video.
Indies don’t need hundreds of millions of views, of course. Most of the games referenced above are already spectacularly successful compared to their direct competitors. But the point isn’t the sheer mass of views; it’s that fans are increasingly finding new favorites through video.
