I started a game development blog which will contain opinion pieces, tips on development, free assets and all the latest news in our industry! It is a ‘generic’ game dev blog but 90% of the content will be aimed at unity.
Your blog has some interesting reading on it. If you stay with this angle of sort of curating the most interesting news pertaining to Indies and Hobbyists I think it just might find an audience!
Regarding the article on the YT Lets Play video creators selling their coverage… I see this is as basically just what should be expected from a business perspective. When you routinely get millions of views of your videos you have power. Marketing power. These folks have put in a lot of effort and time to create an advertising property whether intentionally or not.
The fact that AAA (and probably AA and A) developers are purchasing coverage of their games is reasonable. I get the morality OMG they sold their souls for money etc thing. But another way to look at it is these YTers are finally being compensated for all of their years of work.
People don’t do things purely from the goodness of their hearts. At least not forever or even for long. Reason being that does nothing to pay the light bill. These big YTers see this as a business whether they come right out and say so or not. Anytime someone has built a marketing channel whether video, website or whatever that reaches millions of fairly targeted people… that is just an incredibly valuable asset and they can set the prices they want.
One day if you keep working on your blog and reach millions of visitors per month you may just be offered $20k per link you put up to a YT channel. And you might just think all of the years of effort and work finally paid off and accept it.
Thanks, unfortunately it won’t let me delete the thread so I guess ill continue this one and just post in the right place next time
Thank you for the kind words!
Haha I get what you mean, I was more frustrated by the lack of disclosures telling us it was paid advertisement but I guess in modern days it should be expected rather than illustrated.
If there’s one thing in game development that leaves a sour taste in my mouth, it’s all this moralizing about money and asset flipping. I’ve never seen a community of such hamstrung do-gooders as the game development one. In no other arena in life does the outrageous concept of making money from your hard work, or using pre-built components to build something new come under so much fire. I wonder if it keeps anyone up at night that their computer uses electronic components, or (god forbid) whole parts that the company didn’t make themselves?
/rant
I’m an open minded guy and I like seeing a well-constructed point of view, so here’s some of my 2c:
Don’t treat issues as one-sided. If you have a definite point of view that’s fine but present both sides of the argument before you pass your verdict. It makes the content readable and interesting even for people who don’t share your point of view.
Avoid excessively dramatic writing that injects too much of your personal drama into the article. “Honesty. Integrity and compassion are now, non-existent in my mind.” is going overboard and comes across as petulant. Since when did compassion have anything to do with game development?
Give clear examples of your argument. Telling people to go to Steam and that they will then “probably see 20” examples of what you’re talking about is not a great way to present a point of view.
Try to give at least a hint of some resolution to the problem. For example, you say “Until recently game development was a pretty expensive and complicated venture with most independent projects having to be self-funded” and then you rip into the asset store, kickstarter and greenlight. How should we deal with these contradictory issues? Or should people continue to engage in expensive and complicated ventures with little chance of success, for moral reasons?
There are real issues to deal with with the asset store, youtube business and so on, but you have to present the facts from both sides and make a coherent, rational argument for one particular side, preferably with a possible solution as well. Otherwise your blog will look like an excerpt from the General Discussion forums!
Lol. A lot of complaining, and not much substance.
Your YouTube post was particularly off. Nowhere did you mention the actual revenue gained from ads, or the cost of production. YouTube ads don’t provide enough revenue to cover costs. All full time YouTubers have other sources of revenue.
@Billy4184 Thank you for the structured reply it’s very helpful! I will definitely try and balance my articles in the future, I’m probably going to go back and re-edit the previous 3 over the coming days.
@neginfinity Technical articles are coming soon, I’m not sure why I have left the ‘development’ tab till last but I have there should be a good 4-5 articles by the end of the week.
@Kiwasi I may be confused about which article you are referring to but the YouTube $22,000 article was about YouTubers being paid to positively review games and the moral effects of such actions, not the relevance ad revenue.
Thank you for the replies. You are all very helpful.
Well I’ve certainly noticed the huge focus on money in game dev and commented on it many times. Mainly it just stood out to me so much because I was used to people in game dev / programming communities talking more about making a great game or showing off their game. For a while here we had a mass of posts all focusing on money. Like someone showed up and their first posts were along the lines of what game should I make… to make money, which ad network is best for money, where should I market / sell my game for money. And these were cases where there was basically nothing in the post about the game, wanting to make a good game or anything. They hadn’t even made a game and were (of course) pointed to the learn section.
So I kind of get the disgust with the focus on the money. If someone is actually making games or building websites or creating videos… already doing and done the work to actually create something that is different. I can understand that. But the folks putting the cart before the horse those kind of drove me a bit batty.
So @GraphicStacks I can understand what you are saying about the money and the videos. But in these cases I feel like they put in a lot of time and work and built up a huge following. It’d be nice if they gave deep discounts to one man Indie shops but in the end its their property they built so can do whatever they want with it.
