YouTube Vs. Blogging As A Game Developer
After clocking the 17th hour of working on my first YouTube video, I decided to take a step back and began to question its value.
I want to talk about my thoughts on YouTube and content creation in general, exploring my reasons for doing it in the first place, and why I ultimately settled on blogging.
Why I Want To Do YouTube
As a game developer, YouTube fascinates me.
It could become a career in itself, just a hobby for fun, a marketing device to sell a product or service, a self-improvement or feedback tool, a plain video storage and sharing platform, a social medium and networking tool, or a combination of these.
First, I need to understand what I even want to get out of a YouTube channel, and how much I want to put in. This drives all the other decisions.
Right away, I want to state that I don't want to pursue it for any monetary or marketing reasons.
There seems to exist some sort of common misconception that devlogs would only appeal to other developers, but I don't agree with this. A devlog can appeal to whomever it should appeal. Nothing prevents you from targeting a "normal" viewer with high level devlogs. A demand comparable to all the crafting, building and engineering channels, just about game development instead, likely exists. Heck, I once watched a video about some dudes forging a sword. People just like watching experienced people creating things, at least from a high level perspective, avoiding potentially boring technical details.
That said, it requires naivety to think that I could succeed on YouTube or in game development, when splitting my focus between them, given the competitive nature of those fields. Even the people who focus on a single thing full-time struggle to turn it into a viable business. I want to primarily focus on making my own games, which leaves not enough room for another bottomless time-sink.
It reminded me of the wisdom of everyone's favorite human grumpy cat:
It makes no sense for me to do YouTube for any reason that requires many views, because it highly correlates with the amount of time I have to put in, time that I would rather directly put into the game. Maybe once my games become profitable, I might consider spreading out, when I reach a state where I could hire someone to do this for me, but I remain somewhat doubtful about this.
At least for now, it makes more sense to make my game as good as possible, to increase the odds of proper influencers picking it up. Even if I could magically pull off a channel that gets one million views on their devlogs, this view count should only amount to a fraction of the total views among all other influencers in the best case. Getting a channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers to showcase my game feels far easier than building a channel with a hundred thousand subscribers myself. Although the audience of my own channel might display greater loyalty and convert better, one big influencer picking up my game could create a snowball effect, leading to even more exposure.
This realization comes with a sense of liberation: If I don't need views, I don't have to please the almighty, ever-changing algorithm. I can focus solely on the content, without any padding for mid-roll ads, spending dozens of hours on overly edited videos to increase retention, resorting to clickbait or selling out to sponsors. I can also talk about whatever I want, without having to appeal to a broad audience.
Doing YouTube As A Hobby
It makes more sense for me, to treat YouTube as a hobby, just for fun. The urge to share opinions, to seek validation and to belong to a community, makes people post on social media in the first place. YouTube as a medium has the potential to make the content timeless, compared to an almost ephemeral tweet, which no one will see again once it leaves the timeline. Well, at least if we ignore the platform ownership issue, but more about that later.
It already seemed impossible to find people in "real life" who share a common interest in tech or other nerd stuff, but since I started working from home, the opportunities became even rarer. Posting about my interests scratches this itch somewhat. I can share my passion and potentially connect with like-minded people.
Running a YouTube channel also makes you learn useful skills, that can apply outside the platform:
- gaining confidence in front of a camera
- improving script writing and storytelling
- getting valuable constructive feedback from others
This sounds fun!
YouTube As Creative Outlet
YouTube can also feel cathartic, helping me with exploring my feelings and thoughts. I already write down all my thoughts in local Markdown documents, but YouTube videos could turn them into something more organized. Audio and visuals can enrich the content as well.
Presenting a topic to someone else ensures that you understand the topic in the first place. If my topic covers my personal thoughts and opinions, YouTube becomes a great tool to reflect on them, and I might even gain new insights from this process. For example, helping me decide whether creating YouTube devlogs make sense for me ;)
Documenting the journey of my attempt to make my own game allows me to essentially travel back in time later. I can remind myself of why and how I decided to do certain things, get into the headspace at the time and to keep track of the challenges and solutions along the way.
Opportunities Through YouTube
YouTube can also help to open up many opportunities. You can connect with your fellow content creators or even collaborate with them. Your viewers might also want to support you, either by contributing to the projects in different ways or by supporting you financially via Patreon.
Even with a low subscriber count, a loyal following can provide early feedback on a demo, or help to reach the 10-reviews threshold on Steam to get a rating, which in turn helps to kick off the organic traffic.
I could also just use my YouTube channel as an excuse to slide into the direct messages of a developer to ask them questions that interest me personally. "Hey, I run MyCoolChannel, and want to make a video about you and your game. Could you help me with some questions that I have?" will make them more likely to respond than a tweet by a random bloke, bothering them with a bunch of questions. It might even turn into a full interview.
Why I DON'T Want To Do YouTube
To fully realize whether YouTube makes sense for me, I must also take a look at the reasons against it. As mentioned above, time does not really concern me, since I don't aim to get many views, I can invest as little time as I want. Talking directly to the camera with minimal editing appears as the current trend among developers who release their own games consistently and treat YouTube as a hobby. Managing this with 1-2 hours a week feels achievable.
Lack Of Ownership
Building something on land that you don't own means that you never truly own it. This also applies to YouTube, where not just my channel, but the whole platform could disappear overnight.
This poses less of a problem for preservation, as I would probably create backups for my videos, but the loss of subscribers would hurt me. Years of work cultivating a following that would just evaporate.
You can see this on Twitter: Many people tried to move to alternatives like Mastodon or Bluesky, but only ended up with a fraction of the original engagement.
You also have no control over changes to the algorithm, the UI, or video content and format guidelines.
Influence Of Analytics
Basic human psychology makes us repeat things that get positive feedback, and avoid the things that bring us negative feedback. This means that YouTube could easily influence the creation of the videos and even my games.
Polished visuals will result in better views than placeholder programmer art, but the natural order in game development defers polishing for as long as possible. Polishing stuff that might get thrown out will mean that I wasted my time in the worst case.
This applies not just to the visuals, but also to the actual video topics, and even code of the game. A "cool" algorithm makes a better video than just me talking about how I refactored my code. I might even end up focusing on shipping features instead of writing maintainable code, just to get the content for the video out on time.
YouTube's algorithm disfavors technical niche content. A video about how I quit my life as a vegan butcher to become a C++ programmer would get way more views than a video on how to implement the Sutherland-Hodgman algorithm.
I don't care about views right now, but because of the feedback through analytics, I worry that my focus will shift towards views over time, even if it happens subconsciously. Even worse than that, I could easily see myself getting stressed out during the later stages of development, and having YouTube tell me that people also started to "hate" my videos might break the final straw for me, affecting my mental health in unforeseeable ways.
I could just not look at the analytics at all, but when I tried to do exactly that earlier this year, when I streamed game dev on Twitch for 2 weeks, I realized that I still occasionally took a peek in a moment of weakness. YouTube gets even more in-your-face with the metrics, and places them all over the creator dashboard.
YouTube actually feels like an analytics trap, even when consuming content. Before I watch a video, I look at the view count and subscribers. These metrics give a false sense of authority. Given 2 tutorial videos, the one with a 100k views will appear as more legit than the one with just 100.
I keep telling myself that I don't care about the monetary aspects of devlogs, but I often use Socialblade to see their view count over the past months and check whether the channels have a Patreon, to estimate their earnings. I often can catch myself thinking "This channel makes $X with only Y views! Hey, I could to that!". This line of thinking ignores the years of growth to reach that point, the opportunity costs, and won't get me closer to releasing my games.
Immutability Of Videos
Once you upload a video, you can't change it anymore. Well, in theory you could take it down, do the changes, and then re-upload it, but not only will you annoy subscribers, re-editing, rendering and uploading the video also takes hours, which makes it unsuitable for quick edits.
This means that factual errors would keep spreading. It also means I can't update the content with new data, let's say adding the first week's sales data to the postmortem of my game. Maybe a few viewers add great points that I would want to highlight in the video as an addendum, etc.
This also affects educational videos the most: Instead of updating the video when a programming library API changes, I would need to upload an entirely new video.
The Alternatives To YouTube
Alternatives to YouTube, that can mitigate some disadvantages, exist in the form of streaming and blogging.
Streaming
I already briefly mentioned streaming. While it doesn't really scratch the creative itch, it also doesn't take any extra time to do. When I streamed earlier this year, I did it while programming on my game. It didn't take long to have my first regulars, with whom I talked about our shared interests. Whenever I got a new follower, I used that opportunity to ask them about their projects, which often resulted in some nice conversations.
The option to return to streaming has opened up again, but currently, I feel not sure anymore. Getting into the zone seems impossible while streaming. Talking through the current work at hand on didn't distract me directly, as I typically just verbalized my inner thoughts. Unfortunately, smaller distractions, like glancing at the chat or thoughts about the stream itself, asking myself if my current work bores viewers, created enough interruptions to keep me from losing myself in my work. The live aspect surely didn't help, because I focused on not doing anything weird, like picking my nose, browsing social media, turning on a cartoon, leaking anything too private or flashing my bum live on stream.
Having barely any experience with streaming contributed probably to this a lot, and routine and familiarity might avoid this somewhat.
Blogging
Honestly, blogging didn't cross my mind at all at first. Blogging as a whole seems not nearly as popular anymore, compared to 10-20 years ago.
When I visited r/NewTubers, to read up on the whole How-To YouTube stuff, one post in particular stood out to me: YouTube isn't the only way, by Chris Zukowski, who has one of the most popular game development blogs: How To Market A Game, where he talks about the marketing side of indie game development.
While he aims his advice towards people who struggled with YouTube for years, encouraging them to give blogging a try, it got me thinking: My reasons for doing YouTube also apply to a classic blog. Blogs also don't have any of the mentioned drawbacks, unless I pick any of the proprietary blogging platforms.
At first, I thought that the debate would shift to video vs. text content, but I don't think that this makes a lot of sense. I can just pick the medium that fits best and just self-host it on my blog. I can easily embed a video on my website, if I really wanted to, if it fits the content I want to create.
Having "plain text" as a viable option opens up many advantages. Since text works nicely with version control systems, preservation becomes really simple. Updating and storing text files requires minimal effort, and they offer greater portability, allowing me to create them almost anywhere. I can sit down and write without dressing up, anywhere where I want, even in a noisy environment.
I appreciate this flexibility, given that my little 25-years old buddy can make a lot of noise.
Another advantage comes from the fact that only a small part of game developers seem to blog. While a large part of the audience moved towards video content, I reckon that the demand for written articles still exists. In fact, I prefer consuming written content over videos, as it allows for easier skimming, extracting and copying of relevant information.
YouTube vs Blogging
I established that I want to log, but should I do YouTube or traditional blogging? Maybe even a hybrid approach to get the best of both worlds?
YouTube offers reach, and the ability to bring organic traffic through the algorithm.
Blogs kinda sit on the opposite end and have basically almost no discoverability. Readers have to go out of their way to actively seek out the content. No "front page" or recommendations will guide them to me. Well, unless I write on a third party blogging platform, but YouTube would still have orders of magnitudes more viewers.
I mentioned that a large follower count does not matter to me, but writing posts that no one will read, nullifies some of my goals. A blog requires some extra effort to bring new readers to it, for example by using other social media, including YouTube. Many bloggers go for a hybrid approach, where they publish supplementary YouTube videos for their blog posts.
Text also feels less personal compared to a video because personality often takes center stage on YouTube, especially in vlogs. While this dynamic does not inherently create a problem, a less personal approach offers an added layer of protection, not just in real-life, but also for my mental health. I can detach myself from criticism of my content, but receiving judgments about personal traits, such as appearance, voice, or style could impact my mental well-being, especially when it just piles up. This also creates a bias towards agreeableness. A contrarian opinion can often cause heated arguments, where people become quick to throw around ad hominems. This can still happen on a blog, especially when it allows users to comment, but to a much lesser extent.
With a blog, I also maintain the freedom to just nuke everything and start fresh without leaving a trace to my previous attempts, while it takes only a single viewer of my failed vlog to expose my previous identity. I don't plan on doing this, but it feels reassuring that this nuclear option exists. I can just voice what comes to my mind, and if the heat gets too much, I can "reset" it.
This allows YouTubers to create a more personal connection with their audience, even if it remains mainly a one-sided, parasocial one. This comes with trade-offs: The audience often demonstrates strong loyalty and a willingness to go out of their way to support their favorite creators, some even going so far that it might share the same characteristics of a little cult. It also means that it doesn't take much to turn their feelings into something destructive, because they take this relationship too seriously. This dynamic can not only cause the cultivation of yes-men who will create echo chambers and can lead to poor decision making, but also can cause all kinds of drama. You can often see someone disagreeing with the content creators point in the comments, providing a valid and constructive argument, just to get buried in a stream of followers jumping in to "defend" their favorite YouTuber.
As mentioned in the beginning, YouTube comes with a flexibility, that allows it to take any desired shape. Nothing would prevent me from hiding my face, and use AI voices. The possibility for text-only videos exists as well. In that case, I don't see any value over a traditional blog, though.
The final consideration lies in the enjoyment of the content creation for the chosen medium. Do I enjoy writing or video editing? Thinking about that 17-hours in the making video, I can confidently say that while I enjoy thinking about titles and creating thumbnails, I loath actual video editing. I also kept putting off recording as well, because it feels like a drag. Setting up the lights, trying to set up an environment where I can record without any distractions, potentially take a fresh shower to not look like a mess, and all the other things, become just hurdles.
Conclusion
I would like to conclude this post with a thought experiment: Let's imagine I would beat the odds and my games became successful. Would I still want to share my progress and thoughts? I can confidently say that I would, just to still my urge to share my stuff and sort out my thoughts.
Thinking about an alternative timeline where my games fail, but the devlogs for either medium gained traction, and with that I mean something like 10k followers, or netting me $1000 a month, would I still ask myself if I wanted to do the other medium?
If I did YouTube and it gained traction, I would definitely say yes, I would still think about blogging. Partly because of the ownership reasons, so my blog could grow slowly over time, but also because the low barrier for creating and updating posts. Even with a successful YouTube I would probably refer to a blog post to share my sales data, because I could constantly update it when desired.
With a successful Blog, I don't think I would care about YouTube at all, aside from a handy way to upload and share videos files that I would embed into my blog, or trailers for my game. But I might as well self-host them, or use any other hosting platform. Using YouTube for vlogs, would just create extra work, for no benefits.
Following this line of thought makes me realize that the things that make me gravitate towards YouTube fall purely into external motivators, like "fame" and money, not the creation of the content itself. As it stands, I feel like I enjoy the idea of becoming a YouTuber, but not the actual craft.
Turns out that no compelling reasons push me to use YouTube, as a simple blog can achieve the same goals, while offering some advantages. Owning the platform fully, avoiding the trap of status-seeking, and maintaining complete flexibility and independence, provide strong incentives.