- Recently, I did a video
about starting a gaming channel in 2020,
and in that video, I discussed playing just one game.
What I probably didn't do a good enough job of
was discussing that that's just one strategy,
but what if you don't know what game to play?
What if you don't know which is the one game for you?
This method could help you find out
exactly what that could be.
- [Male Voice] VidIQ.
- [Female Voice] VidIQ!
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- Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
I just spent all that time telling you to play one game,
and now I'm telling you maybe, maybe there's another way.
Just hold on.
Playing one game, again, I still think is a good strategy,
but what if you play lots of different games?
What if you play games that have to be kinda similar?
Let's first discuss why it's important
to play one game in a lot of cases.
And, mainly it's because YouTube is going to
kind of identify what your channel is,
and then start start suggesting your videos
among creators who make kind of the same stuff,
and among search results for people
who are looking for that content.
So, if you play Stardew Valley,
then you kind of want YouTube to recommend your videos
when someone types in "Stardew Valley."
But if you play Stardew Valley and a hundred other games,
YouTube doesn't really know where you're at,
and it's gonna be a little bit harder for the service
to kind of put your videos out there
for people searching for Stardew Valley.
Now if that sounds like you,
if that sounds like something you're doing right now,
let's talk about narrowing down your content a little bit.
Let's not dive right into one game so fast.
What if we at least dive into a genre?
What is Stardew Valley?
Stardew Valley is a couple things.
I consider it a farming game, or an RPG.
Well, for just hypothetical purposes,
let's -- let's kind of focus on farming.
I like farming games!
I like Stardew Valley, I like Farming Simulator,
I like games that feature farming.
So let's just say that my channel --
I'm gonna pivot --
my channel is going to be a farming game channel.
Now, that's pretty specific, right?
There's probably not a lot of channels
that just focus on that one type of game.
As you're watching this, what I'm hoping is that,
even if you don't play Stardew Valley,
you're thinking to yourself,
"Okay, okay, I don't like farming games at all,
"but I do like to play a lot of Call of Duty,
"so what does that look like for me?"
Be thinking about that!
That looks like first-person shooters.
You like playing first-person shooters,
and you don't just like Call of Duty,
perhaps you like all kinds, which is great.
So, now that we know that, now that you have your genre,
here's what I suggest doing:
Take that game that you like, take that genre that you like,
pick one of the games out of it,
and go in, and make five videos on it.
Make ten videos. Make as many as you're comfortable making.
After you publish ten videos on one game,
you're probably going to come away
with some pretty decent stats, which is good.
Data is always good for testing purposes
like we're about to, you know, theoretically do.
So for me, that game happened to be Stardew Valley.
So I'm gonna say... let's say I make
ten Stardew Valley videos, and I'm like
"Okay, I finished the Community Center,
"and I got a bunch of money,
"and I'm pretty happy with my progress in Stardew,
"I'm kind of tired of it right now.
"I'm going to swap over.
"I'm going to make ten videos on Farming Simulator."
And I might not know ahead of time it's going to be ten,
I'm going to make however many that I feel like making.
Now, after every Farming Simulator video I post,
I'm going to be looking to see what my numbers are doing,
and how my audience is responding to that content.
In the comments, are they saying,
"Aw man, I really miss Stardew Valley"?
Hey, it's still good that they showed up, right?
They like you, they're watching your Farming Simulator video
and they came in to say,
"Yeah, I kinda liked Stardew better,"
but at least they came in!
Maybe they'll stick around,
maybe they enjoy the farming games as much as you do.
Or maybe you notice a whole bunch of people
commenting on your video that, weren't, you know,
weren't there before!
Hey, okay!
People really like this Farming Simulator game.
I know I'm just using two games as an example,
I'd probably recommend trying this with a wider spread
of farming games in this case,
but I just happen to really like these two farming games,
and if I'm being honest,
there's not a lot of farming games that I really play.
So, maybe not a perfect example.
But, play as many games as you need to play in your genre.
If it's MMORPGs, then play the various MMOs
that you like to play.
If it happens to be first-person shooters, play those.
If it happens to be games like Minecraft,
survival games, building games,
play as many as you can get your hands on that you'll like,
of course, always play things you enjoy.
The most important thing for these examples, though,
is that what I'm going to be doing
is uploading these videos regularly.
So, I wanna stick to a schedule,
and I wanna upload games
that are at least similar to one another.
So I've hypothetically made my videos about Stardew Valley,
I got tired of it, I made my videos about Farming Simulator,
and I'm noticing some trends.
Let's -- let's take a look at this.
Now obviously I didn't record any Stardew Valley
or Farming Simulator videos,
these are all kind of hypotheticals to get you thinking.
But let's just say I did.
What I want to know is --
Farming Simulator... just Farming Simulator,
it doesn't matter what version.
Let's see what's going on in Farming Simulator.
All right, so if you were to record farming simulator videos
you'll see that your volume and competition
look pretty good.
This is actually a pretty decent search term here.
But is it though?
There's a lot of games here -- I mean, a lot of videos here.
There's a lot of people playing Farming Simulator.
So what if it's not Farming Simulator
that's getting me discovered?
I wanna try something real quick.
What if it's the word "simulator"?
As somebody who plays a lot of games,
I know that the simulator genre,
if that is a genre, is actually really popular.
And as you can see, your competition is pretty high,
but there's a pretty high search volume here
for people looking for the word "simulator".
What's popping up?
Well, it would seem that Farming Simulator
is actually second and third to truck simulator.
So, Truck Simulator, let's take a look at this.
Competition's a little bit better here,
and the volume is pretty satisfactory for me.
Now, what have I just discovered about my content?
So far as I can tell, this is not a bad idea!
What if people like simulator games
as much as they like farming games?
What I've just done is given myself an opportunity
to explore a whole genre of games
that I didn't even think of at first.
Now don't get me wrong,
I know this is a very specific example.
We're talking about farming games,
now we're talking about simulator games,
and if this isn't anywhere near your genre,
just know that there's a lot of different ways
we can categorize games.
Games are cool because they have more than one genre,
they're more than one thing a lot of times.
Take Fallout, for example.
Fallout 4, you could argue it's a first-person shooter game,
but you could also argue,
because it has a currency system built in it, and quests,
it's actually an RPG.
So as you're playing Fallout 4 on your channel
and you're starting to get kinda tired of it,
what if you played another RPG?
What if you were tired
of first-person shooters at that point,
but you thought, "Man, I could really go for some
"Stardew Valley!"
Well, Stardew Valley isn't just a farming game,
it's an RPG.
It has a currency system, it has quests you can do,
and in some ways, Stardew Valley is similar to Fallout 4,
believe it or not.
So by now I assume you kinda get it, right?
You don't have to play just one game on your channel,
you could be playing all these random games.
And people might ask you,
"Why do you play so many random games?"
And you can go, "I don't play random games.
"I play simulator games!
"I play Farming Simulator, I play Truck Simulator,
"I play Thief Simulator."
These are now your genre.
Now you are the authority on simulator games.
But for those of you sitting there going,
"Okay, but I actually kind of like playing just one game,
"I was on board with your last plan,
"what are you doing to me, you're driving me crazy!"
And to those of you who are thinking that, I wanna say,
There is always an opportunity to niche down your content
and be just the Truck Simulator person, as it were.
If you are playing a lot of one style of game,
like a simulator kind of channel, for example,
but you get tired of it or you pick your favorite one,
let's say you just feel like Farming Simulator
has so much more depth than all the other simulator games,
and that's all you want to play from now on,
that's probably, you know, a smart move,
if your audience has really been taking to it very well.
Maybe, if you're lucky,
Farming Simulator has some of the best views on your channel
and that's more of a reason to just stick to that one game.
The point is, there's no wrong way to do this,
and every channel is going to be different,
and there's never one secret sauce that I can give you
that's going to work for everybody watching.
I just want to get you thinking.
I just want you to think about games in terms of maybe genre
Maybe that is a way for you to play multiple games,
or at the very least test to see which one game
happens to be the best for you.
We talk a lot here on this channel about getting discovered,
a lot of our videos and advice is, you know, for that end.
You want people, especially newer channels, you want --
You want to be discovered by people out there
on YouTube, looking for things.
But when we're talking about video games,
it's even more important to stress this one thing:
Please play games you actually enjoy.
If you make that simulator channel, for example,
and you have a lot of different games you play
and you're having a lot of fun,
but you see a new simulator game come out
that's kind of trending really hard,
and you're like, "Oh, man, that's trending,
"I should probably play it."
And you watch the trailer, and you're like,
"Ah, no, I don't think I wanna play this cooking simulator,
"I'm not sure I want to simulate being a chef
"in a video game -- I barely want to cook in real life.
"I'm dropping stuff on the floor,
"the things aren't getting cooked really at all,
"This probably isn't my thing."
I want to stress that it's okay
if you don't want to be a chef in Cooking Simulator.
The most important thing that you can do on a gaming channel
is to play games that you enjoy,
because your audience is going to sense
when you're not invested in the game,
and in turn they won't be invested in your video.
So to those of you out there playing games
and trying to kind of find yourselves on YouTube,
I hope this was helpful.
I hope I managed to kind of enlighten you
to a new strategy or two for finding
not only your game but your audience.
If you enjoyed this video, if you found it helpful,
hit that Like button,
don't forget to subscribe for more videos here on VidIQ,
and we'll see you next time.