I don’t understand it but my son wants to do it.
He kind of knows what he needs to do to get started but if anybody around here has any info that can help get him set up.
He’s especially concerned with not breaking any YouTube rules or violating Copywrite laws.
Thanks in advance for any and all help.
::wondering if I’ll need to bring popcorn and beer to this thread::
You mean creating a “Let’s Play <insert video game title>” videos?
If so, I know Senorbeef posts game footage to his channel, so he might be able to help. In general, what he should be concerned with is what, if any, music he puts on his videos. I follow some YouTube commentators who’ve had videos pulled because of copyright issues with the music.
Things you need to make a Let’s Play series:
a game
a way of recording the game as you play it.
a youtube channel to upload it to.
an interesting and engaging method of play.
Record yourself playing the game with voiceover, edit into nice 15 minute chunks and upload. I don’t know of any way to create a Let’s Play that doesn’t break copyright (it’s the right to make copies, not the act of copying through writing) but he certainly wouldn’t be the only person in that boat were EA or whomever to come down on violators. Youtube has not seemed to care about it and almost every single ‘popular’ youtube channel has an associated gaming channel so it’s not exactly unusual.
A good microphone.
Audio quality will make or break you.
From what I understand, game companies vary in their tolerance in Let’s Plays of their games–some don’t care at all and are happy for the publicity, others don’t want their entire game to be available for watching on the internet. I don’t exactly know how to find out which is which, but it might be something to search for and keep in mind.
There are companies that can be partnered with (IGN, Gamespot) and people who do so seem to have much fewer problems with those types of permissions, but I suspect you can’t just sign up with them fresh with no experience, and contracts with them I believe would involve them taking a healthy cut of ad revenue.
Fraps is the recording program that I hear about most often, I think Sony Vegas (or something like that) as the editor.
Even if he’s producing good stuff, it will probably be a very slow process to get any sort of decent viewership going. Resist the urge to try and advertise by posting links to your channel in other people’s videos, they tend to hate that.
If he does become successful, remember that a lot of the people who will comment on his YouTube videos are teenage male gamers behind a cloak of anonymity. If he plays a game, self-professed experts on the game will be more than happy to tell him everything he does wrong or non-ideal. Miss a chest somewhere? They’ll tell him about it. Use the pistol instead of the machine gun? They’ll tell him how much better the machine gun is. Use the machine gun instead of the pistol? They’ll tell him he sucks for not using the pistol.
Thank y’all.
I told him I will sit down with him over the weekend when we have lots of time and help him get set up.
Like I am going to be much help :rolleyes:
I can’t believe people want to watch other people play video games, the whole idea is weird to me.
I hope he doesn’t get discouraged.
Sometimes you do it because you’re interested in the game and want to see a “live” demonstration of how it plays. Are the graphics good, what do the weapon mechanics look like, do the bad guys act really buggy and cause problems, etc. You don’t necessarily sit and watch someone play an adventure game for fifteen solid hours until they complete it but you do watch enough to see if the wizard shoots really awesome fireballs that set the environment ablaze with great physics effects or really lame ones that look like tennis balls and bounce off rocks.
For a real life example, SenorBeef posted a video of him playing a game where you can buy a hovercraft. Watching him tool around made me realize that I would have assumed the hovercraft was weak and sort of dumb but actually it was a lot of fun so I bought the same hovercraft in game.
Other times it’s because the guy doing the playing is legitimately entertaining and provides commentary that makes it worth watching. So you’re not entirely watching for the game, you’re watching to listen to the guy talk about the game as he plays. This is a lot harder to pull off.
Finally, sometimes it’s to show specific achievements such as “speed runs” (Look, I can beat the game in 3 hours!) but that’s less “Let’s Play” and more “Let me Brag…”
Let’s Plays help me find strategies for navigating tricky puzzles or battles or sometimes reveal that the ineffectual and slow method I was using is not the intended solving method.
There’s a lot more to this than I understand.
I’m not much into video games - can you tell?
My son is.
I guess I’m going to learn.
One thing to keep in mind too–all of the Let’s Players I watch, many of which actually make enough off of ad revenue that they can live off the income, have pretty well emphasized that making videos is a job.
Yeah, we see the final product of 20 minutes of someone playing a game, and it sounds easy, just hit record and play for a little while. But if he’s serious, there’s often a lot of prep work, setting things up, deciding what to talk about that episode, etc. Sometimes footage has to be scrapped and re-recorded for whatever reason. Editing often has to be done–if he’s playing Skyrim, for example, nobody really wants to watch him organize his inventory because he’s encumbered, or make a hundred iron daggers to grind up his smithing.
From what I understand, rendering the videos from the raw recording format into a format suitable for uploading to Youtube can pretty much tie up a PC for hours as well, and the upload process itself is often not all that fast.
So all in all, that one 20-minute gameplay video may well eat up 3-4 hours of time.
Moving thread from IMHO to the Game Room.
I never would have finished Portal if it weren’t for YouTube.
I’m not sure what “Let’s play” videos are specifically (seems like a specific series by a guy named RoosterTeeth), but if you just mean gameplay videos with commentary, you just need a decent computer, a microphone, and a recording program. I use fraps but there are free alternatives like msi afterburner. These things dump a whole lot of barely compressed video to your hard drive, so you’ll require a lot of hard drive space. At 1080p and 30fps (the max quality on youtube) you’re looking at roughly 1.75gb per minute of recorded footage. You’ll want to re-encode the footage to a more compressed format before uploading it to youtube, or the upload would take forever. I use virtualdub and the xvid codec, both free, to do this. Windows movie maker is also a half decent editor, but I don’t like the WMV codec’s quality.
You won’t get “in trouble” with youtube for any copyright claims, but sometimes game companies will file copyright claims on your videos. EA put these claims on some of my battlefield 3 footage - I’m still allowed to show the videos, but the videos now have ads and the revenue goes to them. I’m pretty miffed about it but what can I do.
Youtube has automatic programs to search for copyrighted music in videos, though, and I think if you get caught with that your video will become more restricted. I’m not sure how that works exactly.
You can either record the commentary while you’re playing or record the footage, edit it together, and then record the commentary track seperately with something like audacity and merge it into the video.
I don’t really do commentary videos or anything, I just post clips to my youtube channel either demonstrating something specific or in general just funny or awesome things that the SDMB gaming group does together. Stuff like this or this
Here’s some stuff on the “philosophy” side of Let’s Play.
Are you violating copyright laws?
It’s not clear whether or not LPs actually constitute “Fair Use” or not, since you bought the game for your private consumption. Some companies are more chill about it than others, since you are basically advertising the game for free when you create an LP. However, even on youtube, some straight LPs have been pulled for violating copyright; off the top of my head, I remember that an LP of Final Fantasy XIII-2 edited the cutscenes to look scrambled because Squaresoft didn’t want the endings spoiled (or something like that). Just be aware that your content may be pulled, even if you take precautions to not use copyrighted material or edit things out.
What medium will you be using?
[ol]
[li]Screenshot[/li][li]Video[/li][li]Mix[/li][/ol]
Capturing screenshots may end up being less effort than recording video and then editing out the boring bits–and, of course, if you can emulate the console on a PC, then you don’t even need recording hardware/software. Of course, if you are going to do a screenshot/mixed LP then you will need a website and be able to write HTML.
How much editing will you have?
[ol]
[li]No editing, everything happens “live”.[/li][li]Gameplay recording first, adding post-play commentary (voiced or subtitled), but no other editing.[/li][li]In addition to post-play commentary, the gameplay is heavily edited–skipping the boring bits, freeze frames for important segments, etc…[/li][/ol]
Obviously, choice #1 is the easiest to do on a technical level, but not everybody can play and commentate at the same time. On some games, you also have segments where nothing really “important” happens–for example, do you really want the audience to suffer through 5 hours of repetitive level grinding?
How familiar with the game will you be going into it?
[ol]
[li]Never played it before, this will be a “blind” LP.[/li][li]Has played it before, but doesn’t know all of the secret stuff.[/li][li]Knows everything to know about the game.[/li][/ol]
In general, the more your intended audience knows about a game, the less you have to know about it (since part of the “fun” is them watching you screw up and knowing that you did), but knowledge about the game saves you from a lot of failure, backtracking, and tedium. Also, some games are better suited for blind runs than others: horror games, for example, lose a lot of their punch once you know where the scares are.
How in depth will you go into the game?
[ol]
[li]Just make it through once from beginning to end.[/li][li]Get all the endings, if multiple ones exist.[/li][li]Pick up all of the optional characters, if they exist.[/li][li]Show off exploits for speed running or power leveling, if those exist.[/li][li]Explore alternate routes, side quests, or optional content in general, if it exists.[/li][li]Some or all of the above.[/li][li]Other.[/li][/ol]
Some of this will depend on the type of game you’re playing and how well you know it, and then after that, it’s a matter of how informative you want to be.
What sort of presentation style are you going for?
[ol]
[li]Schadenfreude: The audience is laughing at your suffering. (Pro - Even your failures are entertaining. Con - If you fail too often and too badly, or if you can’t come up with new reactions other than “F*CK!”, it stops being funny.)[/li][li]Performance: The audience is watching you play around or show off your skills. (Pro - You don’t have to have a particular gameplay goal in mind. Con - You have to be very knowledgeable and skilled at the game.)[/li][li]Challenge/Restriction: The audience gets to determine what sort of handicaps you give yourself. (Pro - This puts a new spin on what might otherwise be a well-known game. Con - The challenge/restrictions might get too ridiculous, and you end up with the same issues as a Schadenfreude run.)[/li][li]Audience Participation: The audience gets to direct where you go next or what choices you make. (Pro - The audience becomes more engaged in what you’re doing, since they have a stake in it. Con - You can’t move forward in the game until they make a choice unless you want to record multiple runs.)[/li][li]Informative/Walkthrough: The audience is learning new things about the game or being shown how to play through the game. (Pro - The information you give will always be relevant, so you might get views from people wanting to know more about the game, and you might also get repeat hits. Cons - Same as Performance, and you may need to do more post-production editing.)[/li][li]Combination: Some or all or the above.[/li][/ol]
Some final thoughts:
[ul]
[li]It’s not possible to please everyone.[/li][li]Practice makes perfect.[/li][li]Unless you can get a sponsor to pay you to do this full time, you’re doing this for fun; so if you yourself aren’t having fun, then maybe it’s time to stop.[/li][/ul]
Oh, and here’s a link…
This is a collection of Lets Plays by people on the “Something Awful” forum. The average production value of LPs here tend to be higher, but there are also entertainment/challenge runs as well.