Let's Read! A Talk on Let's Play

Most of you reading this blog are more than familiar with GameGrumps. For those not in the know, two semi-famous internet personalities (JonTron and Egoraptor) have a joint channel where they play through games while commenting over them.

Oh, FYI? Never google image search Game Grumps. The shit people draw, man.

Though neither participant of the channel is willing to admit it, GameGrumps is an entry in the growing subcategory of gaming entertainment known as “Let’s Play”. The craft of Let’s Play (LP for short) is a fusion of attention-grabbing gameplay and entertaining commentary. It emulates the sensation of discovering and discussing a video game with a friend, while enticing you to play some video games yourself.

LPs have gotten quite popular over the years, for better and for worse. However, the success of the LP might prove to be its undoing. Let’s take a look at how LPs have achieved their current status, while speculating about where they may go next.

Humble Beginnings

LPs started on the SomethingAwful forums in 2006, and began pulling together a community of Let’s Play enthusiasts in 2007. The first LP to be recorded was with the game Super Metroid, by a user who goes by the online handle of slowbeef. That name will be important later, don't worry.

For those unfamiliar, SomethingAwful has a very heavy emphasis on quality control. There's a $10 fee just to make an account. Your first reaction might be shock, but it quickly turns to admiration when you realize that this system basically filters out any prospective user under the age of 16. Moderation isn't lax, either. The lengths that these people go for standards on their forums are rivaled by few other online communities.

Let's Plays met the same level of scrutiny as did anything else on the SA forums. Rules and guidelines were put in place for those interested in participating in an LP thread. For those interested in making LPs, standards and resource lists were concocted by those with greater experience. The users expected appreciable effort to put into LPs. They expected LPs to be graceful showcases of games, with the player guiding you, the viewer, through the facets of the game. LPs could be informative, LPs could be comedic, LPs could be competitive. Above all, LPers were encouraged to make full use of their play time and the viewer's time.

The library of LPed games grew over time. The concept of Let's Play was gaining in popularity, and soon spread beyond SomethingAwful.

Let's Play goes to YouTube

Later in 2007 and in 2008, people on YouTube started making their own LPs, and a community formed from it. As anyone who's spent an appreciable time watching cat videos on YouTube knows, there aren't too many measures for quality control on the video-hosting website. This meant that the quality of the uploaded videos from some YouTube LPers was...dubious at best.

Play a game with yourself. How long can you sit through this terrible video?

SomethingAwful developed a paradigm for Let's Plays that wasn't present among the less organized YouTube community. Sometimes the narration of the game didn't actually add anything to enhance the gameplay experience. Sometimes the player was irritatingly bad at the game. Sometimes the player thought it appropriate to skip software altogether and try and capture television footage from a camcorder.

Production value took a back seat to the novelty of playing video games, talking over it, and posting it on YouTube. And YouTubers were mostly content with this. Presumably because they didn't know any better.

Then, the folks in SomethingAwful did something interesting. They reacted.

The Rise of Retsupurae

See, the nice thing about this part of blog post is that I can just string a bunch of YouTube videos together, and it'll tell this story for me.

A primer. With a voice that soothes the soul.

Slowbeef - the same one mentioned earlier - decided to make a YouTube account with some other SAers dedicated to commenting over bad Let's Plays.

You've honestly got to wonder why some of the original video-makers uploaded their videos in the first place.

And, of course, the YouTube LPers reacted in a way appropriate for their collective age.

And retsupurae was sure to re-upload the better reactions onto their own channel.

Other SAers chimed in (within and without the retsupurae moniker), for maximum hilarity.

2008 was a funny time on YouTube.

In some aspects, the phrase "shooting fish in a barrel" comes to mind. The people posting LPs on YouTube were younger and not previously exposed to the kind of scrutiny that SAers regularly impose on each other. Retsupurae was an exercise in imposing the SA-brewed quality control on an unsuspecting community, primarily done for humor. It delivered a clear message: If your video sucks, they're going to make fun of it. There's also something poetic about the creator of Let's Play being the one to dish the criticism.

Retsupurae's incursion on YouTube delivered some shock to the system, but (like most things) the collective YouTube community got over it. Although YouTube LPs were still generally a lower tier of quality than the SomethingAwful LPs, a lot of them heard the retsupurae message loud and clear. Some of retsupurae's targets even went on to step up their production value on future LPs.

So, progress was made. Tiny progress, but YouTube was left better for it nonetheless.

YouTube Economics

These squabbles over Let's Play were fueled by personal ego and the desire to add more credibility to LP. However, it was around this same time, in 2008, that YouTube was in the middle of its transformation into a self-sustaining website.

As explained by this rather dashing blog, YouTube began getting its financial footing around 2008. The website gets ad money based on hits, and gets hits based on content. So, YouTube starts paying content creators a tiny portion of its ad revenue, which encourages them to make more content, which gives YouTubes more hits and more ad money.

The legality of Let's Play is a bit of a gray area, but there's been a lack of legal action on them from game companies. A core feature of Let's Play is the fact that it features original commentary over video games, which might save it from the brutal hammer of copyright violation. This, coupled with some other workarounds that I probably don't know about, opened the way to monetizing Let's Play.

Enough of you watch Game Grumps to know that they upload videos twice a day, and each average about a hundred thousand views. With current estimates on YouTube rates for content creators, JonTron and Egoraptor can be estimated to be making about $250.00 per video.

That means that the folks at Game Grumps are being paid $3500/week to play video games for the internet.

This is probably Jon's reaction to your efforts at an engineering degree.

The video game aggregate channel Machinima hosts Two Best Friends Play, which are ten minute mash-ups of two dudes playing through a video game and commenting on it. 

They post a video a week on-season, and get anywhere between five hundred thousand and one million views. This comes to anywhere between $1250 to $2500 a week. It's less than Game Grumps, but bear in mind that these guys only post one video a week.

But, these two examples don't compare to the most prominent modern-day YouTube LPer of them all: Pewdiepie.

As of my writing this blog post, Pewdiepie's YouTube profile says that he has had 955 million total video views. That means that this guy makes somewhere between 1 and 9 million dollars a year.

"Wow," you might think, "what's his secret? He must have some really interesting commentary. He must be very skilled at playing games. He must make some really witty jokes."

No, no, not quite. He just screams into the camera like an incoherent baboon.

The free market, ladies and gentlemen.

What happened to the notion of showcasing the game? The idea of using every precious moment of the viewer's time to make something worth watching? Those ideas aren't gone, they're just unnecessary in the YouTube environment.

Such is the paradox of the modern day LP. Quality is only a factor insofar as it gets you views. This basically means that your video capture footage should be good...and not much beyond that. The commentary and gameplay only needs to be good enough to suit your audience. Seeing as the 10-15 year old demographic has a heavy showing in the YouTube audience, it's easy to see how someone like Pewdiepie can live off this nonsense.

Some of you might be thinking, "Man, retsupurae would have a field day with this guy." Hey, sure enough, they did!

Fast cash! Make lots of incoherent jokes about rape and put it on a YouTube video!

And then pewdiepie responded to them with this gem:

Funny story, PewDiePie's fans got so mad at the idea of his only playing games for money, that he had to redact this.

The Future of Let's Play


As you probably gathered by the video just above this sentence, retsupurae is still active on YouTube. Their YouTube trolling has, hilariously enough, earned them a YouTube following. Nowadays they do videos that aren't just making fun of LPs. Among their videos are podcasts, primarily for their SA community but also open to any YouTuber interested in listening.

In a semi-recent podcast, slowbeef talks about what he thinks Let's Play has become, and where it's going to be.

"Basically the state of let's play." (40:14)

The paradigm of the YouTube Let's Play has become more about the player than the game itself. Pewdiepie's fans want to see PewDiePie's reactions to things more than they want to see the games themselves. Since money comes easy to someone like PewDiePie, he can continue making minimal-effort videos, dragging out games so that he can repeat his same jokes in different voices.

Since people like PewDiePie are demonstrating that Let's Plays can be big money, what's stopping game companies from making their own Let's Plays?

It's still ambiguous as to what would happen if a game company were to crack down on its games being LPed. It's thought that no action has been taken thus far because LPs offer free press, and because of general apathy on the company's end. Hypothetically, this is a battle that game companies can fight. Seeing as the games are their intellectual property (and considering the precedent legal battles between YouTube and Viacom), it's not hard to imagine the companies winning that fight.

Once that happens, companies can pay actors and comedians to do Let's Plays of games for them. What if Robin Williams was hired to do a Let's Play for Skyward Sword? Matthew Perry doing a Let's Play for Skyrim? Felicia Day playing Amnesia?

The actors/actresses are better-trained at humor than people like PewDiePie. They could do what he does, but better. And all of the earned YouTube money would find its way back into the game company's hands.

Suddenly, the Let's Play is just another commercial outlet for companies to earn revenue. No more PewDiePie. No more Tobuscus, Chuggaconroy, and whomever else. And of course, no more GameGrumps. Just NintendoLetsPlay, LetsPlayEA, and other example hypothetical channels.

Good night, sweet princes.

The question, then, becomes what the Let's Player can offer to the Let's Play that game companies could not. Generally, the old, SA-carved philosophy of making the LP about the game tends to make for longer-lasting LPs. A person can go watch an old SA-bred LP on a game like Battletoads, and it still holds up spectacularly well.

In fact, hell, let's talk Sonic '06 for a moment. Most of you know about Game Grumps' Sonic '06. It's worth bringing up that a Sonic '06 LP has already been done by some folks at SomethingAwful. Take a look for yourself and see how it compares:

Spoilers: The game is still terrible.

They don't have the same over-the-top dynamic that JonTron and Egoraptor have in their conversations, but they showcase the game just as well. They focus more on pushing the flow of the game forward instead of wasting your time with footage of them wandering around being lost. They make commentary relevant to the game, citing internet reviews along with in-game experiences. This is all while creating the same atmosphere of "togetherness" that you get with Game Grumps. It's still as though you're peering into the lives of some dudes hanging out and playing video games.

If you value this kind of entertainment, then it's worth thinking about the direction that it's taking. Whether you've been following LPs for a while, whether you just like watching Game Grumps, take this all as food for thought.

And, if you've ever been interested in making Let's Play, then be sure to look into how to do it right - the resources are there, you just need to look.  And, don't be afraid of getting a little criticism.